Principles

We recently did a post about the Nextcloud Mission and Principles we discussed at the previous Contributor Week. I guess it is mostly the easy-to-agree on stuff, so let me ruin the conversation a bit with the harder stuff. Warning: black and white don't exist beyond this point.

Open Source

In an internal conversation about some community pushback on something we did, I linked to islinuxaboutchoice.com - people often think that 'just' because a product is open source, it can't advertise to them, it has to be chock full of options, it has to be made by volunteers, it can't cost money and so on...

But if you want to build a successful product and change the world, you have to be different. You have to keep an eye on usability. You have to promote what you do - nobody sees the great work that isn't talked about. You have to try and build a business so you can pay people for their work and speed up development. Or at least make sure that people can build businesses around your project to push it forward.

I personally think this is a major difference between KDE and GNOME, with the former being far less friendly to 'business' and thus most entrepreneurial folks and the resources they bring go into GNOME. And I've had beers with people discussing SUSE's business and its relationship with openSUSE - just like Fedora folks must think about how they work with Red Hat, all the time. I think the openSUSE foundation is a good idea (I've pushed for it when I was community manager), but going forward I think the board should have a keen eye on how they can enable and support commercial efforts around openSUSE. In my humble opinion the KDE board has been far to little focused on that (I've ran for the board on this platform) and you also see the LibreOffice's Document Foundation having trouble in this area. To help the projects be successful, the boards on these organizations need to have people on them who understand business and its needs, just like they need to have community members who understand the needs of open source contributors.

But companies bring lots of complications to open source. When they compete (as in the LibreOffice ecosystem), when they advertise, when they push for changes in release cycles... Remember Mark Shuttleworth arguing KDE should adopt a 6-month release cycle? In hindsight, I think we should have!

Principles

So, going back to the list of Nextcloud's Mission and Principles, I say they are the easy stuff, because they are. They show we want to do the right thing, they show what our core motivation was behind starting this company: building a project that helps people regain control over their privacy. But, in day to day, I see myself focus almost exclusively on the needs of business. And you know what, businesses don't need privacy... That isn't why we do this.

Oh, I'm very proud we put in significant effort in home users when we can - our Simple Signup program has cost us a lot of effort and won't ever make us a dime. The Nextcloud Box was, similarly, purely associated with our goals, not a commercial project. Though you can argue both had marketing benefits - in the end, a bigger Nextcloud ecosystem helps us find customers.

I guess that's what keeps me motivated - customers help us improve Nextcloud, more Nextcloud users help us find more customers and so both benefit.

Pragmatism and the real hard questions

Personally, I'd add an item about 'pragmatism' to the list, though you can say it is inferred from our rather large ambitions. We want to make a difference, a real difference. That means you have to keep focused on the goal, put in the work and be pragmatic.

An example is the conversation about github. Would we prefer a more decentralized solution? Absolutely. Are we going to compromise our goals by moving away from the largest open source collaboration network to a platform which will result in less contributions? No.... As long as github isn't making our work actively harder, does not act unethically and its network provides the biggest benefits to our community by helping us reach our goals, we will stay...

More questions and the rabbit hole

Would you buy a list of email addresses to send them information about Nextcloud? No, because it harms those users' privacy and probably isn't even really legal. Would you work with a large network to reach its members, even if you don't like that network and its practices? Yes - that is why we're on Facebook and Twitter, even though we're not fans of either.

Let's make it even harder. How about the choice of who you sell to. Should we not sell to Company X even if that deal would allow us to hire 10 great developers on making Nextcloud better for the whole world and further our goals? Would you work with a company that builds rockets and bombs to earn money for Nextcloud development? We've decided 'nope' a few times already, we don't want that money. But what about their suppliers? And suppliers of suppliers? A company that makes screws might occasionally sell to Boeing which also makes money from army fighters... Hard choices, right?

And do you work with countries that are less than entirely awesome? Some would argue that would include Russia and China, others would say the USA should be on a black list, too... What about Brazil under its current president? The UK? You can't stop anyone from using an open source product anyway, of course... It gets political quick, we've decided to stick to EU export regulations but it's a tough set of questions. Mother Teresa took money from dictators. Should she have? No?

It might seem easy to say, in a very principled way, no to all the above questions, but then your project won't be successful. And your project wants to make the world better, does it not?

Conclusion?

We discuss these things internally and try to be both principled and pragmatic. That is difficult and I would absolutely appreciate thoughts, feedback, maybe links to how other organizations make these choices. Please, post them here, or in the comments section of the original blog. I can totally imagine you'd rather not comment here as this blog is hosted by blogger.com - yes, a Google company. For pragmatic reasons... I haven't had time to set up something else!

There's lots of grey areas in this, it isn't always easy, and sometimes you do something that makes a few people upset. As the Dutch say - **Waar gehakt wordt vallen spaanders**.



PS and if you, despite all the hard questions, still would want to work at a company that tries to make the world better, we're hiring! Personally, I need somebody in marketing to help me organize events like the Nextcloud Conference, design flyers and slide decks for sales and so on... Want to work with me? Shoot me an email!

On Innovation, Free Software, NIH, Geary, Trojita and KDE PIM

I argue that if Free Software wants to get anywhere, it needs a culture of 'collaboration first'. In most areas, we have that. In some, we don't - and that is hurting. The desktop is probably a prime example of that.

Rob Boudreau wrote an opinion piece about Personal Information Management (PIM) and the future. He concludes that 2013 has different requirements from PIM than 1995, and:

"KDE PIM seems to be the only FOSS project working on technology that will eventually go beyond just the PIM itself"

I think reality agrees with him. Mobile devices are cleverly integrating chat, email, social media and phone in one. Contacts have details on all of these and show the latest tweet or Facebook message of that person as status. Why doesn't the desktop do this? Well, it does, but only by putting your data on corporate servers, accessible though web browsers: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, ...

The Linux Desktop has a mission here: help keep user data out of the greedy hands of Google, Facebook and Microsofts! That can only be done by building on the shoulders of giants, not by re-inventing the wheel out of sheer arrogance. Let me explain what I mean.

Collaboration

10 years ago I often presented to people new to Free Software and how we work. I would explain the benefits of Open Source so:

"Imagine you thought of the best New Idea for word processing. From now on, documents will almost write themselves. But you first have to embark on the huge journey to write a full word processor. Three years later, your amazing application does not get anywhere as it can't open MS Word files."

"Imagine instead you added your amazing feature to an existing word processor. The discussion with the experienced word processor developers even resulted in a better result!"

Being able to stand on the shoulders of giants is an important benefit from collaboration in Free Software. We do have competing projects but note that most successful forks and rewrites were started due to a lack of collaboration! A recent example is LibreOffice. Often people from the 'original' project join or even start the fork or rewrite. Wayland is build by the Xorg team and the MySQL fork MariaDB is led by the founder of MySQL!

The Linux kernel is another great example. Google, for example, is putting in enormous resources in getting their technologies back into the kernel. After a period of forking for the benefit of speed and efficiency, they figured out that in the long run, it actually is more efficient to not fork and put in the extra effort in collaboration.

Collaboration-by-default is not a given. Aaron Seigo said about KDE:

"The open nature of the community has purged the “not invented here” syndrome from our ranks"

Yes, the KDE community has a strong tradition of re-using efforts and building on the shoulders of giants. And questioning those who don't! But such a culture took years to build as there is plenty reason to NOT collaborate.

Reasons for not collaborating

Failing forks or duplicating projects are often based on personal conflicts or a dislike for certain toolkits, languages or technical choices. And there is much starting from scratch because developers just focus on their own problem or want to learn something new.. While I would argue that you probably learn more working with experienced, competent people, and you might get more done, too, it is not hard to understand these reasons.

Then, there is psychology. Most people think they are smarter than average and programmers are no different (sometimes expressed as "what others do is easy")... Given the bell-curve followed by the distribution of intelligence, this clearly is one of the many fallacies our brain saddles us with. Even companies are affected. Google, working to get their features into the upstream kernel, discovered that not all the intelligent people in the world work for them and there is lots of room for improvements in what their team came up with.

More than one mail client

I argue that this last reason leads to more duplication of effort than healthy in the area of mail clients. Recently, Yorba pushed to get funding for Geary, another 'new approach to mail'. And there is Trojita, also providing a great IMAP client. Both projects were started in the last couple of years and seem to be re-inventing the wheel -- twice. As you probably saw many prominent developers giving a hard time to a company insisting upon writing another display server, I hope you understand how misguided I think this is. Yorba said they decided to write a new email client to keep things simple and fast and due to the complexity of other mail clients... I described the rationale and wrongness of this "let's write a new mail client" approach in a comment on LWN a while ago. In short, I'm betting that the reasons behind it boil down to the previously mentioned combination of over-estimating oneself and underestimating the problem. In the case of email probably a lack of ambition and forward-thinking as well. Just email doesn't cut it in 2013, certainly not 5 years from now.

Bringing conversation-view to email is an awesome idea - and can probably be done through a Google Summer of Code project within an existing client. Writing an entirely new email experience needs a bit more effort of course, but writing the entire underlying infrastructure too - that is just a sodding waste of time, pardon my French. Good to see Trojita at least has joined the KDE community and is working with KDE PIM! How about you, Geary?

More than one conference

I've always been a big proponent of the Desktop Summits and I do indeed think that it shows both arrogance and a lack of big-picture thinking that these don't happen anymore. I'm glad that the KDE board, including Agustin (who organized the first Desktop Summit) managed to kick off a "freedesktop summit" at the SUSE offices. I'm also glad that some people who DO see the benefit of collaboration participated there - even if their communities don't (yet) understand that it is worth the investment.

What we need

We need a culture where we are critical of people who don't try to work together or are unwilling to put in effort to collaborate. Free Software depends on collaboration and not working together is just counterproductive. So I'd like to ask all readers to support collaboration: talk about collaboration, share the tales of success. And if somebody decides to write an app from scratch, or is writing an application doing the same thing another does - question them, ask why they go it alone, why not collaborate. It is totally OK to be critical of forks and anti-collaborative behavior. You don't have to beat anyone up, but at least making them think about it is a good thing. And if you're a developer: integrate technologies, build re-usable libraries. And remember that the shoulders YOU are standing on can be made stronger for future generations of Libre developers! Just dumping disconnected code is NOT a contribution to Free Software, contrary to what some folks seem to think.

I'd also like to ask people to support KDE PIM: if we want to have a shot at keeping our data out of greedy corporate hands and if we want to ever get onto the corporate desktop, Akonadi is the only architecture that really has a shot. Instead of writing new wheels, let's improve this one together! Yes, KDE PIM needs UI work. Then why not do that? Writing a new mail client makes total sense - if you build it on a proper infrastructure. The KDE PIM team is greatly looking forward to help people who want to write new mail, RSS, Facebook or contact management applications. Skills required are mostly related to motivation and the willingness to ask questions and get help - otherwise, javascript coding skills will probably get you pretty far as it makes all the sense in the world to write these new UI's in QML.

Concluding

I'm happy to concede that things are not black and white. I'm sure nobody can fully judge neither Geary nor Trojita or all aspects of the Desktop Summit. Mea culpa for any wrongness. But please take the lesson to heart: there is great value in collaboration. And getting these benefits means putting in 'extra' efforts, yes, it can cost you something in the short run - that is the whole point of long-term vs short-term thinking. So, next time somebody argues that 'we can go faster if we do it alone', tell them that most smart people do NOT work for you and problems are always simple when they're not (yet) yours. Or just remind them that once upon a time, people thought volunteers could never write a encyclopedia. It is the 21st century and collaboration is what sets apart winners from losers.

Take care!

Re:Publica

About two weeks ago I went to Re:Publica, a hipster event (can I say that?) in Berlin. It was an interesting event - related to the stuff I usually visit, yet different. I'll go over the differences, then present what I see as the challenge for Free Software events: get those creative, digital and always-online people closer to us!

Audience

The main audience of the event could probably be best described as people interested in the 'digital lifestyle'. People who use smartphones, are always on-line. They find their places-to-go on foursquare, talk to their friends on facebook, share their opinions on twitter, Whatsapp with their love - but they don't hang out on IRC or visit forums very often and they probably have a Macbook Air and a high-end android phone. Yes, not that different from us.

Subjects

The event featured talks on things like the web, new cloud services like on-line music and creativity like music and video tools, open video etcetera. But that was only about 10-20%. Another 20-30% was about the future - social media, social innovation and more. To my surprise, the remaining 50% of the talks was about Freedom - and I use the capital for a reason. The Occupy movement, Digital Restrictions Management, Net Neutrality, Open Data, Digital influence on revolutions, eco-journalism, (internet) governance. Very close to what we, the Free Software community, hold dear (and find interesting!) Yes, not so different from us.

Marketing and artwork

You can imagine - an event organized by hipsters creative people looks good. It does! Team t-shirts were sponsored by spreadshirt and had the title 'actionist'. There was a big wall with the program, using pictures of the speakers, QR codes and more weird stuff. A twitter stream on a screen is old, people. Here, if you tweet a hash-tag you get your face as part of a logo shape or you get a gift if you check in with foursquare. That's more like it. Oh, and they had a 'carry your own chair' program - not unlike we did at the last openSUSE conference at the end of each day, except that it was 'cool', not 'please help us out with moving chairs'!

There were other things, too. Interesting or just plain weird stickers - with just a QR code or a shortened link, or only a slogan. There was stuff like a live steaming camera so you could interact with people on-line (easy to do: a laptop with a webcam connected to a google hangout?!?) and plenty of other good ideas. Surely different from what we usually do!

Challenge for us?

I lately have been feeling that Free Software is loosing the battle for the hearts. Privacy and security are not important, internet is just a tool. We've been trying to educate people about Freedom but they don't care.

I was wrong. Collaboration and Freedom DO matter and people know it. We just don't reach the most of those who care about these things. This is where our challenge lies!

After talking with others and thinking about this, I conclude that there are two things we have to do better:

Positivism. We have a tendency to 'lecture' about the dangers of DRM, closed standards, government control and other things. Wake up! Look around you! Online Collaboration has given us Wikipedia. Online Communication has supported revolutions in the Middle East. Social Media gave us the Occupy Movement. And everyone's using Android phones. Yes, there are challenges, but let's celebrate our successes too! Relevance. We often are perfectionists. Build alternatives instead of interfacing with what's out there. But most people don't care that much for a slightly more secure system if it makes getting the latest stuff harder. People don't care about a perfectly free Cloud solution if it's more difficult or doesn't work with what they have. We must realize that a Can do attitude gets us far further than a Can't do way of thinking. And we have to make sure that what people care about is what we care about. Talking to others, sharing data, working with what's out there and checking if what we do has real-world value!

Concrete

At least at the conference's I'm involved in I'll be trying to broaden the audience a bit and attract people outside of our usual circle. By changes to the program (workshops on Krita, Gimp, Blender, Kdenlive and Inkscape? ownCloud? web stuff? Talks about Wikimedia, the EFF, net neutrality, copyright?) and by advertising/spreading the word in less usual places (maybe an Apple fan magazine or a design paper). Let's see if we can get more people to see what we do, get involved, care!

Awesome images by Renehamburg on flickr

A quick one on Being Free

Just finished editing a dot story on Choqok (will go live sometime next week). Some of you might have noticed the initiative by its main developer Mehrdad Momeny to speed up development by soliciting monetary input. This will allow him to spend more time on making Choqok rock, but also give users a tangible way of influencing development priorities. This can increase commitment from the users, developers and the community - while bringing real benefits (in terms of code).

The KOffice developers recently did a similar thing, calling upon individual sponsors to help make Krita better. Instead of taking a summer job, Lukáš Tvrdý spend time writing a series of improvements. As you can read on the Krita website it was a great success.

It is good to see initiatives like these. With our growing ambitions and plans come growing requirements for resources. Traditionally, the KDE community has relied heavily on volunteer efforts, and this won't change. However, it is important that developers look for ways to be able to spend more time on doing what they want. Some find employment or start up companies, others look to those who want to contribute in other ways than with their own time. I believe diversifying our resources means a more sustainable community, which ultimately benefits our plans for world domination ;-)

Next time I'll blog more about Being Free, continuing from here. I'll also try to touch on the recent discussions about paid vs unpaid contributors where Zonker participated in.

More on Being Free

About 6 weeks ago I wrote a blog about the state of decision making in the KDE community. I stated that generally speaking we are not heavily influenced by any single entity, something many of us cherish. Because of rising corporate interest in open source over the next years this situation might or might not change - it depends entirely on how we approach the challenges before us.

I realize the previous post did NOT have enough pretty pictures and easy bullet points - I will try to do better this time.

Independence

Let me start by trying to expand a bit on the decision making itself. What does it mean to be independent? Not that commercial parties have no say or influence at all - after all, they contribute in various ways. A problem emerges when for example volunteers feel they're being left out due to the large contributions of full-time corporate workers. This was once described by Till Adam (from KDAB) as the freight train effect. This is problematic for both the volunteers (who might walk away) and the company. Companies often work project-based and need the community to solidify and maintain their contributions.

So the question I see when it comes to independence is NOT: "How do we prevent companies from having any influence at all". The question is: "How do we preserve a balance between company and volunteer input to preserve the long-term health of the community".

Choices

Last blog I concluded we're facing a choice between:

• not caring about our independence
• restricting influence of other parties by not working with them, or only to a very limited extend
• figuring out why we're still our own masters and making good use of that knowledge

The first. Yes, I actually added this one, as there is always the option to do nothing. What will happen if we just go on like we're doing right now? Considering the increasing interest of commercial parties in KDE technology, I guess we'd get more corporate contributors. Larger ones, too, which hire many people in the community to work on certain things. Our technology will spread more and more, and will appear on cool devices. Some companies might try and get their stuff upstream, others might not. But. Corporate influence can be at odds with community ideas (money can do that) which may very well lead to loss of passion for an development area or product some company took over. Things might go downhill from there. At some point, we *might* find us in a situation where our general direction is decided upon by an 'advising' or 'consulting' Board with companies like Nokia, Intel, Novell and other major corporations. We will probably be spending a lot of money on a CEO or a similar function, and choices are made top-down. Some developers will have no problem with this and continue hacking on cool things - it's all (L)GPL, after all. Others might dislike what has happened and will leave.

The second option will keep things in our community more as they are now (though we might even want to chase away some companies working with us as they're very influencial in some areas already). We will probably stay on the fringes, with a small marketshare - but we'll have fun. We can continue to invent and work on innovative technology but I reckon without help of big companies and working with them finances will get a bit tighter than they currently are (less coding sprints?) and we will fall behind in some 'corporate feature' areas volunteers don't like to work on.

And the third option - if we decide to go in that direction, we'd need to be consious of our values and freedom and protect them. We will need to know how it came to be that the KDE community, while one of the largest Free Software communities in the world, still makes decisions by itself and is not dominated by (and depending on!) a single entity or just a few. This will help us expand on our ecosystem of different organisations and volunteers working together. Currently, we get input from a variety of sources, be it independent volunteers, universities, companies or NGO's. Diversity is the keyword here - and we will get more of that. I will expand on this third option a bit further.

What's keeping us Free

So what contributes to an diverse and open development process? Below a list of things which I think have kept us 'sane'.

1. Strong focus on technology and cool things.

Most decisions are made on technical grounds or because users are asking for certain features. In companies, decisions on what is needed in the code are often made by non-developers - managers, committees, marketing people. I'm proud to say I don't have any say in development at all ;-) Generally speaking, companies working with us have had to adopt to this way of thinking, similar to how decision making works in the linux kernel development community: technical merits and arguments, not 'my manager said so'.

2. Flat organization, little hierarchy.

We don't have much if any hierarchy and the different teams are mostly independend. This ensures that no one individual, foundation, or corporation can dictate the future direction of KDE development as a whole. As a result the project can grow more organically, and innovate more easily as well.

3. having a diverse ecosystem.

Having 2 or 3 large companies hiring most developers contains a risk for the independent decision making process by the community. If a much larger variety of organisations (both for- and non-profit entities) contribute in a variety of ways, the opportunity for each to push a certain agenda is much smaller.

4. The role of KDE e.V. is strictly supportive.

Companies have no business controlling KDE e.V. - it wouldn't help them as e.V. is not involved with development decisions, only supports us all in doing whatever we want. If we all wanted to move into the beautiful world of bowling, e.V. would probably continue to support us. We might have to vote for a new president, however.

5. Regular developer meetings.

Our regular meetings don't just help development, they also create stronger bonds between developers. Not only among the volunteers but also with non-volunteer developers. This mitigates the effect of 'the freight train': corporate developers are often sitting in one room and thus have a tendency to start discussing things there and make decisions, instead of doing so with the wider community over the web.

6. Meetings are funded by KDE e.V.

Funding by KDE e.V. instead of specific sponsors per meeting allows more independence of corporate sponsors when it comes to goal setting and justifying the results.

7. Having had to deal with Qt licensing.

The Qt licensing issues early on in the KDE history have made the community consious of corporate influence and Freedom in general. We've set up a Free Qt Foundation dealing with this and receive and discuss regular reports about the status. And of course there's our legal dude in the e.V. (ade), who is rumored to sneek into your room at night and steal your underwear if you allow wrongly licensed code into your app.

Conclusion

I think the community, that is all of you reading this - developer or not, should stop for a second and think about what we want. Personally, I would love to bring our 'Be Free' to every device out there - but I would prefer to do it in a way where we don't loose ourselves. This community is big fun. It is open, it is free, everyone can be a part of it and make a difference. Decisions are made by us, talking and doing. And for that, we might have to put some safeguards in place.

I would love comments on the above, input on other factors I missed and practical tips. Next time I will try, with help and inut from others, to make a list of what we can/should do to remain Free.

The treat

Now a picture as reward for reading through (and thinking about!) all this stuff. This kitty stood behind our back door in our new house meeowing until we let it in. After checking out the room it decided it wanted to sit on my lap (while I was working, grrrr) and I can't say no to cuties so I let it. While finishing this blog it's purring beside me. Aaaw... Any suggestions for a proper name?

On Being Free

As I promised on an obscure mailinglist where the evil plans for KDE World Domination are being developed (and consequently rejected), I'd like to solicit some opinions in this blog about Freedom.

I'm not talking about the free-as-in-beer nor the free-as-in-speech, but the relative independence the KDE community enjoys from the influence of one or a few large corporations. Most of you probably realize that it's a rare property for a community of our size - pretty much all other communities with over a 100 developers (KDE has about 2400 active developers!) are basically run by anything from one up to 3-4 large companies with little or no volunteer input. At a recent meeting Frank, Jeff and myself had with a major manufacturer of mobile chipsets it became abundantly clear that the independence the KDE community enjoys is seen as a big plus by companies who might want to work with us.

Of course, talking with volunteers you are not seldomly reminded how they prefer their freedom. While support from a big company is nice, for many the decision making power has to be with the community, even for those employed by companies. Some say it's because it results in better decisions, others argue it is simply more satisfying to be in control. Whatever the reasons, it matters to us.

Now the KDE community certainly DOES work with big companies, and not just a few. I am compiling a list of companies active in our ecosystem, and it is impressive. Of course some are more involved than others. Some work closely with a sub community, providing incentives for specific features, like XXXX does within the Amarok community. Others have so many developers working on a specific piece of technology they almost run the whole thing, like is the case with KDAB and KDE PIM. Of course, especially in the latter case, the question might come up: to what extend is this community still independent? The answer might be a difficult one, however just asking around gives you a decent idea. The companies around KDE PIM (yes, not just one) put serious thought and effort in keeping the community in control, working with and not behind or over them, supporting and attending meetings and sponsoring several developers.

So despite the corporate input we receive, we still are largely independent and in control, and we'd like to keep it that way. Basically, that gives us two ways forward:
- don't work with commercial parties anymore than we already do, and maybe even tone it down here and there. Effecively keeping our community as it is - volunteer based. Of course organical growth is possible, esp considering that we grow by about 300 (mostly volunteer) developers per year...
- figure out what exactly it is which keeps us independent and keep an eye on those factors while proceeding to work with (more) commercial parties.

In my opinion, the community needs to think and decide how comfortable and happy they are with working with (more) companies in the first place. It might surprise you but there are people with vastly different ideas about this than you might have. We need to get those opinions on the table, and decide, as a community (or as sub communities!) where to go from here.

To help with that, I'd like to make the second option a real posibility: proceeding with increasing corporate collaboration to grow and improve our products while staying independent in terms of decision making. For that we need to figure out 'what keeps us sane', about which I'll be writing my next blog. For now, any input, ideas and discussion are welcome!

Keep on marketing!

Today, Casper v Donderen visited me. He wanted to discuss an article he'll be writing for a dutch Linux magazine about Maemo development. We went through the messaging and structure. Of course I'm blogging this to both remind him of the agreed deadline (2nd week of december) and to put on some pressure.

Yes, I'm like that. Very nice when we first meet - makes you wanna join the promo team. From then on, you'll be harassed by me. If I would have the travel budget, I'd actually stalk people - showing up in the middle of the night on their lawn, singing songs to their windows. Stealing underwear and stuff. Unfortunately the e.V. board didn't want to sponsor that particular motivational scheme. Too bad.

I also showed Casper the upcoming rebranding announcement mentioned in this article for the dot. Darn, that's gonna lead to some flamewars I'm afraid. Really. It's a big change which raises many hard-to-answer questions. We did our best, discussed it with the wider community (thread on KDE devel, blogging) and it was all thought out on a public mailing list, but still. At the marketing meeting we had to make some executive decisions to move this forward - every time you discuss it, the argument seems to ends in bikeshedding.

Which can be seen as a good thing. People care about KDE. About what it means, what it stands for. And they each have their own opinions on that. Naturally, these have emerged from these years of cooperation, and it's a very implicit thing. Not unlike the values the KDE community shares - now codified in our code of conduct. That one is worth a read - it is not only about how you SHOULD behave but also gives a nice description of our culture, how we are and how we think.

But shared values aside, we're still individuals, who disagree on things. We're not all here for the same reasons, you know... Some are in it for the money (ok, I actually doubt that's true for many, but I do think it's a valid reason). Others for the fame. Some want to make the world a better place. Others just want to have some fun.

I can go on of course, and for many it's a bunch of reasons, not a single one. I just want to say that when you read the announcement, to be posted in a few days, think about what the most important message is: KDE IS YOU. It is about us all, it is who we are. Yes, fluffy, yes, I sound like a hippy. Or something. And it's far less concrete and clear than KDE as a product. But it IS true.

WE ARE KDE.

All of you. What, you only read the planet, don't do much else? No? You never answer questions on a forum, IRC, mail? You never installed or recommended any KDE application to anyone? You don't care about world domination for Free Software? You don't have to write code to be part of this community, you know... You don't even have to spend >10 hours a week on it. I've never written a single line of code, and sometimes I don't have time for KDE stuff for weeks. But I feel part of this wonderful community. Fluffy feelings, yay! And so can you.

GCDS day whatever

GCDS is continuing. The party Monday night was very quiet for me, and I noticed many other people being rather quiet as well. Guess we should have at least one day between parties so people can gain their strength back.

Anyway. Lots of stuff going on here. We've moved to the university. It's hot here, no airco. But power and a cable for every chair - very good network. I'm now listening to Gokmen who's talking about Pardus and KDE integration. On my left there is Jonathan with a beach pic of him and our BUGSQUAD mistress (we all know who she is...).

Yesterday the two PR ppl (Thomas Keup, GNOME and me) planned a cross-desktop marketing meeting. Well, it was initially planned for Thursday morning, then moved to Tuesday. Me being slightly off on Monday, I failed to notice there was the KDE e.V. meeting. No cross-desktop meeting after all.

We did have some interesting discussions while we planned the bof, and I'll try to put some of the ideas we had here (or rather, MY interpretation, don't go and kick Thomas for what I say).

The goal we have is to get a bottom-up approach in marketing for the Free Desktop. As both KDE and GNOME can do this, we wanted to discuss this together. This is not about technical plans or roadmaps - it is about getting people enthusiastic and get them to spread the word about what they love.

That's basically the point - love. Why do we love KDE or GNOME? Those reasons are different for everyone, but often emotional rather than rational. This is a well known fact - how do you get people to believe you? Focus on emotion rather than ration. So we need to know what emotions we feel and convey them to others.

According to research there are 5 important areas people are sensitive to these days:
- Persionalisation
- Emotionalisation
- Simplicity
- Eco-awareness
- Austerity (less is more)

To keep things simple, I'll group this into three, cuz personally that's how I feel about these:
Personal
Simple
Good

So how does KDE make you happy in these area's?

For me, one of the strongest points of KDE is how personal it is - you can make it look and work any way you want. Especially plasma is very good in this department. It makes me feel like my laptop is really mine - compare it to putting a sticker on something that's yours, or painting your room, or even picking your own clothes. Wouldn't it be boring if we all were wearing the same grey clothes?

And of course a second part of this is the community - all the great people here are so cool. The new Social Desktop initiative is already bringing the KDE community to your desktop - in KDE 4.3 there is the social desktop widget showing KDE users in your neighborhood! You'd be surprised how many people within 5 kilometers of my home already are testing KDE 4.3 and run this applet.

Simplicity is there in many area's - take network management, it is far easier with the networkmanager plasmoid in KDE than on windows or mac. The same goes for many other things, and I like that a lot.

Finally, I truly believe contributing to Free Software (and just USING is contributing already and makes you a real member of the KDE community) is very important to the world. Thanks to what we do, children in Brazil and other countries all over the world have access to good education. Thanks to what we do the reliance of governments around the world on a small number of large corporations is decreased. Thanks to Free Software computers don't need to be replaced as often and use less power, helping our environment. We spread freedom in China and other countries were freedom is limited. We allow computer users around the world to take back control over their own hardware. After all, in a world where speech depends on software, Free Speech depends on Free Software*.

So. Think about this. Why do you love KDE? What is it that makes you happy? Then go and tell people about it. Tell your boyfriend, tell your girlfriend. Tell your friends, family. Boss, colleagues, competitors. The pizza boy, the cleaning lady. Everyone!

I'd love to hear some blogs about what makes you love KDE!

Another piece of Cool Stuff from GCDS:
Will Stephenson just said he was green (SUSE green, of course) with envy about the work Pardus has done on KDE integration, and he said we, as KDE community, should applaud them for it. And so we did ;-)
(their tools are integrated in plasma and systemsettings, they use KDE things like Solid and Phonon etc etc - really makes for a unique and smooth experience).

There is more talk going on about cross-distro collaboration, getting (more) tools upstream and such. I'd love that ;-)

I' working on two articles for those not here to give an impression of this conference and to tell ya'all about the cross-desktop collaboration, sit tight!


* by Don Marti jr.

innovation in KDE

Hi everyone!

As most of you know, I'm pretty interested in innovation. Recently I decided I should go and try to do something for KDE in this area. After all, I've studied this topic in depth, and I might be able to put that knowledge to some use.

This will be done in two ways:
- there will be an innovation BOF at Akademy, tommorrow morning, 10-11.
- I translated and reworked the questionare I developed while doing my internship at TNO for KDE. I am asking all KDE contributors to fill it in (sorry, it's huge) and I will analyze the results, see if I can make some recommendations.

So - everyone who is interested in innovation and in identifying and doing something about the things holding it back in KDE - join me tomorrow in the innovation BOF (room 1).

And to every active KDE contributor: Please take the time to fill in the survey! You can find it at the following link:
http://www.thesistools.com/?qid=58132&ln=eng

It includes a bit of an explanation about the why and what. And it'll probably take 20-30 minutes to fill it in. I'll do whatever I can to make that time worth it, I promise!

Thanks in advance.

Vision X

Last week I gave a talk at the Ubuntu Release Party in Amsterdam (NL, of course). It was fun, just like last year. And again I was surprised how much broader this meeting was than 'just' free software. Free Culture was heavily represented, and there even were talks about digital freedom/privacy projects like Little Sister (Dutch, sorry). And of course we saw Big Buck Bunny, the movie by the Blender project. I can tell you - it's a piece of art. Literally, of course, but also in the sense of 'an stunning piece of work'. Pixar couldn't have done it any better, and if you consider the resources it was done with - amazing.

As usual, my talk focussed more on the vision of the KDE project than on specific details. Of course my own interest in Innovation, both social and open (somehow that sounds funny) have quite an influence on how I see this topic. On the other hand, being in this community of course gives me at least some illusion that what I say about what the project as a whole wants is founded in reality. But a check, now and then, never hurts. I've talked about vision and future before, not too many comments that time, so now I'm gonna ask explicitly for comments.

Of course - I realize we are many. As one of your T-shirts says: different people, different ideas. But it also end with: same vision. Is that true? Do we share a vision? Does something coherent emerge from the fog-of-war surrounding the development of KDE? I believe so. Yet I really wonder what people would say if one asks them: "What is the mission of KDE?" and "What is the vision of KDE?"

So, think about it for a second. What would you say? I've dug up a 'mission statement' from a mayor company to help you think ;-)

Mission:

Improve the quality of people’s lives through timely introduction of meaningful innovations.

Vision:

In a world where complexity increasingly touches every aspect of our daily lives, we will lead in bringing sense and simplicity to people.

(Philips)

Observe:
- they want MEANINGFUL innovations
- And to get there by focusing on sense and simplicity, to help people cope with increasing complexity

Now KDE. Our website states:

It is our hope and continued ambition, that KDE will bring open, reliable, stable and monopoly free computing enjoyed by scientists and computing professionals world-wide to the everyday user.

The above seems to be our mission, that's for sure. Now, how do we get there? That's where the vision comes in. How do we fulfill our mission?

Not everyone will say the same. Actually, I don't think there will be much coherency - so, do we or don't we share a vision?

I will continue this blog next time, as I'm really looking forward to your comments (and maybe even other blogs - one can dream, right?)