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?)

Now in better quality...

Hi everyone,

For those interested, here some locations were you can get the full-sized full quality videos I made a few days ago:
Niels v Mourik was nice enough to provide me with some diskspace and bandwith. Kudos!

Plasma video (22 mb)
KWin video (32 mb)
Dolphin video (27 mb)
Gwenview video (11 mb)
video with other applications (40 mb)

And another (clearly very) nice person, Mel Mazzone, put them here.

Further, here the videos on Youtube in much better quality (thanks to Quintesse:

Plasma


If video does not work try this link

KWin


If video does not work try this link

Dolphin


If video does not work try this link

Gwenview


If video does not work try this link

Other applications like Konsole, systemsettings, Dragonplayer, Skanlite, KSysguard and more.


If video does not work try this link

New screencasts

Next week will be the Dutch Ubuntu Release Party. Not sure where that link points too - it shows the dutch release party page for me, but being a rather generic URL - www.releaseparty.eu - I guess one could expect to get a local page served or something. If that's true it would be both neath and annoying.

Anyway. I also gave a talk about KDE 4.1 at Guademy in Valencia (Spain) a couple of weeks ago. It went relatively well, except for the live preview. Shouldn't have done that - not only didn't it work very well, it also destroyed the whole 'flow'. Got lost, so to say. That's why for the Ubuntu Release Party I've spend the last 2 days making screencasts of what I want to show. Took a lot of time so I began uploading them to Youtube. They were made in 1024x768 resolution (My little laptop uses that res natively, and I hope to encounter beamers with the same resolution) for a sharp image.

Guess what Youtube did to them... Yeah, they look horrible.

Now I want to put them online somewhere. But they are - well, what is big? 100 mb together. So, first I decided to create a torrent. Which can be found HERE. Please seed, and ehm - I have a horribly slow upload so it's gonna take a while...

I will also try to find a location to put the files online for faster and easier download, but for now the torrent is all I have.

If you insist on viewing the Youtube videos (or just can't wait a couple of days until the torrent is done downloading :D) just go to my profile on Youtube.

Edit: that was quick - already 4 ppl on torrent. One even KTorrent 3.0.2, I wonder why that person wants to see the videos ;-)
Anyway, if they all share, speed might not be that bad.

Edit2: apparently, it's videos not video's ;-) And screencasts would be even more correct, right?
Downloading the screencasts should be pretty fast now, btw, 25 seeders...

Will's second talk - pimping PIM

Apparently I'm a huge fan of Will, as I also made notes of his second talk about Akonadi and pimping PIM. It's rather unfortunate some guys who were interested in his talk didn't come, but at least I enjoyed it.

Starting with the history of KDE PIM, he explained how the hackers want to go from a very monolithic infrastructure in KDE 3 to a much more modular and flexible system in KDE 4. Akonadi will be that new infrastructure. The way KDE 3 handled data wasn't scalable, and in these days of huge social networks and all kinds of online and offline data you need something which can adapt to any new kind of information easilly. Something which can be used by the whole free desktop - a clean seperation of UI and data, caching, sharing and easy synchronisation. Akonadi will make it easier for application developers to access and combine data, thus allowing new and innovative uses of knowledge and information on the Free Desktop.

Further Will went into some more specific details of the Akonadi design, explaining the choices which were made. For example, they choose to use IMAP as the main protocol for the movement of data instead of DBUS mostly for efficiency reasons - DBUS is used for controlling the Akonadi server, though. Akonadi is entirely type independent, and features a smart cache for remote data with change notification and conflict detection. So, you can store anything you want, work offline with your data, your applications are always up-to-date and Akonadi also ensures the integrity of your data.

And of course - as Akonadi will be here soon, Will gave some pointers about how to use it and the roadmap for the future. There is a developer preview available, so it's time to start having a look now... The Akonadi developers are looking for someone willing to write glib/gtk bindings so the cross-desktop part can get started, and of course there are many other things which could be written. One can clearly see Akonadi fits in the KDE strategy of enabling more innovation and thus serving the Future of the Free Desktop. I can only say 'great job' to the KDE PIM developers!

Valencia

So, it's time for a blog. I'm in Valencia (Spain) right now, lying in the grass, enjoying the last rays of sunshine.

Me outside. Ignore the kind-of agressive look, it's just the sun in my face. I'm really a nice guy, really...

I can say Valencia is one heck of a city. Beautiful women (yeah, what's on a man's mind?), beautiful weather. The people are very nice, and they have some pretty amazing buildings out here. I'll go and make a few pictures tonight, but they won't really capture the sheer size and beauty anyway, so I won't bother posting them here. I can and will bore my parents with them, though ;-)

Meanwhile, Guademy also rocks. They've put me with a Gnomie in a hotelroom, a very nice one I must add. The conference is also interesting, even though many talks are in Spanish (Saturday was better in that regard).

This was good food...

Last night, we went out for food and after quite a walk (more than an hour in total) we got to the most insane restaurant you've ever seen. As my Brittish roommate said - the total randomness of that place is disturbing. It started with the peanuts... A guy game with a bucket of peanuts, throwing them on the table with a large spoon. We were kind'a surprised, but they just got started. The dishes were also thrown careless on the table, and you had to use a mug to get the sangria out of a baby's potty... Everything was silly, complete with penis-shaped bread (with a complementary guide on how to slice it), weird combinations of food and when they threw the spoons for the desert from the bar onto the table (that's at least 5 metres...), we thought we had seen it all. Nope. They finished the dinner with a large bottle of champagne with a penis on it, topped with whipcream (?!?). They made one guy swallow the penis, then made it 'cum'... You should've seen it. Of course they picked one with a beard so he had cream all over his face, and the champagne spat all over the place. Wicked cool. I don't think a place like this would work in the Netherlands, they're taking it pretty far - but it's perfect for a bachelors' party. By the way, despite the fact I said to the organizers I believe them when they say this restaurant isn't typical for Spanish people, I do think the average Spanish person is at least slightly disturbing :D

My slightly disturbing Gnomy roommate on the right, a way more disturbing French Gnome Releasemanager on the left.

Back to the conference - they made me gave my talk twice - so I had a live audience to practice for the first time. Used Will's laptop, which is much faster when crashing KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 ;-) It went pretty well, except for me totally forgetting to do something with the cooperation theme - I only thought about ways of doing that after I gave the talks.

Oh, and for those who so kindly care about me having to use my incredibly slow laptop with the loose battery - I managed to fix the latter issue with some tape. It doesn't shut down randomly anymore, makes it much more enjoyable. It's still slow, of course, but I can live with that until I buy my own EEE PC or whatever equivalent ultra-portable.

As I didn't manage take notes, no real articles from this event. I did take notes of one of the most interesting talks by two Novell employees, Will Stephenson and Rodrigo Moya about their experiences with cooperation between our two desktops. So, here you go, enjoy...

We can do more together - duplicating code wastes time and resources. Besides, it makes it harder for third parties to decide what to support or use, and it makes the linux platform seem fuzzy. When making a choice, you have to take into account many issues, and currently you can't use a best-of-breed policy. Finally but maybe worst, there is also a lot of duplication of data required or used within these applications as well. Concluding, when you've got shared implementations for software, you can develop new features faster, have more stable software and make it easier for 3th party developers while giving users a less hard time as well.

The current situation is that we do share several things, but at the same time still duplicate many others. If you save a password in the Gnome-keyring, you will have to enter it again to ensure it ends up in KWallet. Luckily, icons and MIME types are shared these days, as wel as technologies surrounding fonts, the systemtray and pdf reading. For the future, there are plans to solve some of the still existing issues. A shared keymanager will make life easier for users, and so will a shared sessionmanager which allows restoring the state of applications next time you log into your desktop.

Now Rodrigo went into the specifics of sharing - why would you want or do it? How important is it? There are of course the obvious reasons: developers are spread thin over the huge codebases. Meanwhile, users demand more and more from their software. As the relative number of technical users goes down, users expect more stability. Enterprise users demand very specific features and migrants from proprietary software want their new software to do what their old software did. They aren't used to the perpetual state of development we know in the Free Software world. So things must change somehow.

Currently, the playground for standardisation is far from perfect. Some projects at freedesktop.org are pretty successfull like HAL, DBUS, Telepathy and the XDG-utils. But other projects didn't turn out incredibly successfull - sometimes it's just too much work to share things. Stephen argues sharing should start from the beginning. The right people should be involved from the start - developing something for one desktop, then throwing on freedesktop.org and call it a standard doesn't work.

The biggest limiting factor seems to be lack of awareness of each others technologies. Often, the knowledge is out of date or just too limited. Better documentation and pointers to the right people would make a large difference. Currently, developers' awareness of the technology from they other project is non-existent or outdated, and interaction often happens just by chance. Equivalent peers working on similair projects should strategically be brought together somehow. Meetings like Guademy could be used for that, but also the normal hacking sessions might be a place to start.

Stephen has some ideas where we need to focus on, based on some heuristic questions like wheter the functionality is already implemented (and how) or if it is about UI code or not. Sharing boring stuff like how to talk to flickr is the way to go here. Focus on things you can factor out in a separate library.

Of course, there are different ways and levels of sharing. For example, you can build upon a shared library. On the other hand, you can have a common specification but have codewise totally different implementations. Or just use the same data. Or even only share some policies. It is important here to not go and try to share toolkit-level stuff, but focus on framework functionality.

Currently, there are several bariers to sharing - but most of them are psychological, not technical. Not liking C or C++, thinking bad of glib, (often bogus) licensing issues - these should be pointed out and debunked. Luckily, there are several very successfull projects we can point to as proof sharing works. We can examine them to find out what does and does not work. As mentioned before, the split of UI and the underlying technology is what made Poppler and Webkit popular We need to find the lowest common denominators in terms of functionality to identify what to share - and it works. Of course there ARE technical issues - if you want to share something, it often can't depend on the libraries you are used to work with. That does mean more and more difficult code to maintain, so you should carefully think about what and when to share.

Now Rodrigo went into some specific ideas to make sharing easier. There are some infrastructural things we can do to share more. For example, synchronising desktop release dates would make a big difference. We could of course start by having a shared release/roadmap for the shared projects, and as KDE is also going for 6 month releases now.

A next step would be to improve the sharing of data. We've done icons now, but for example the default locations for music and documents are still defined by distributions. Sharing webbrowser caches and metadata is still far away - but would make life easier for users. Take for example a KDE user who runs firefox. If he opens a textfile from a secure location, he won't just have to identify himself to firefox to access the location, but again when he opens the file in KWrite because Firefox and KDE don't share the authentication. There is something we need to fix!

Despite the fact both desktops are competing with things like the GNOME Online Desktop and Plasma we should respect each others freedom to innovate, and it shouldn't stop us from looking for ways to share.

Will doing his thing

The above talk really captured the spirit of the conference - sharing and cooperating. It was interesting and I believe there might even be a few concrete results. At the very least there will be more Gnomies at the next Akademy...

Tibet II

I would like to add a little to my previous blog about Tibet, if you don't mind.

There were some comments about the Olympics not being about politics. Well, I don't know about that. The Greeks who started that whole thing laid the foundations of our modern society in terms of democracy and freedom. The Ancient Olympics were as much about politics as today - maybe even more.

Another thing the comments were about is how I/the US/the rest of the world are spreading lies about whether Tibet is part of China or not. Well, I couldn't care less. I know it is rather etno-centric of me, but I don't care much about history. Sure, one can learn from it - but whether some area once belonged to some country or not - how does that matter? I believe people should judge and be judged based on NOW, not on what their forefathers did but on what they do and did in their own lives.

Finally, about news and dishonesty of media: I don't believe a government is qualified to dictate what people should know or not know, say or not say, think or not think. How could it? It's, just like everything else in the world, run by humans. Humans are not infallible, and neither is a government - or any other organization for that matter. Psychologists have discovered hundreds of common errors in the way people think and work together (just have a look at Groupthink). In the western society there is a healthy suspicion towards powerful organizations like large companies and governments - and for good reason. That's one true thing History taught us: such organizations inadvertently turn evil somehow. Bureaucracy, the way large organizations keep themselves together, does this by alienating people and by taking away their responsibility. It's hard if possible at all to prevent that from happening. And as far as personal power goes, who doesn't know how 'power corrupts'?

Just like free software leads to better software, freedom leads to a better government. Not perfect - but as there is no guarantee a single, relatively small group of people can always make the right decisions, freedom is your best bet. Despite all its shortcomings.

Besides, the fact the Chinese government, just like any dictatorship before and after it, tries to limit any independent reporter in their country and Tibet in particular imho shows they KNOW what they do is wrong. Or at least the realize people would oppose their actions - and if you are not confident in your own decisions, if you aren't even willing to defend them in the open - how can anyone trust you? Believe me, the American government isn't much better - they try to keep journalists away from what they do in other places in the world as well. I think it's a safe bet they have reasons for that which aren't entirely honest (or just plain evil). In that regard, the Chinese government isn't better or worse (though the scale might differ, and the US government is a lot more limited in what evil they can do thanks to the laws governing their country).

Anyway. Life sucks, that's for sure. At least for many in this world. I'd be the last to say what happens in Tibet is anything special - people are oppressed all over the world. And they have been - for ever. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't care, right?

So on this blog you can find a little script you can use to show your discontent with what the Chinese government is doing. As they took down Tibet.org, we can take down their site. Bad? Illegal? Probably. Not a solution? Sure. Luckily, YOU can exercise your 'evil, western etc' freedom to protest this, so just comment on my blog if you think this is wrong - and I and others will read it. And as most of us here are sensible people, if you make a compelling argument, we can decide NOT to use this script. After all, it's the choice of every individual reading this blog. As long as he/she lives in a free country, that is.


For those KDE-ers who think this topic doesn't belong here: you're right (maybe I should mention our new KDE 4 slogan 'Be Free'? Aaah well....). This will most likely be the last blog about this topic.

Tibet and the Genocide Olympics

I usually only blog about KDE related stuff here, but I think the current situation warrants something else. What is going on in Tibet is horrible, and the Chinese government should be ashamed of themselves - again.

And apparently, the Chinese government took this war digital. Tibet.org is down, and I just read reports about emails with malware being send to known supporters of the Tibetan cause from unknown Chinese origin. Nothing is sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese government had something to do with this. So they started it themselves.

Seeing the atrocities going on, it seems the Chinese really want their 'Genocide Olympics' (hint to the Darfur situation, but equally relevant to the cultural and now growing physical genocide in Tibet). I know KDE isn't into politics, but honestly, is this politics? This has got to stop.

So. What can freedom-loving people like we do now? Not too much, but imho the least we can do is protest, speak up. This is my little thing. Who's with me?