COMMUNITY REPORT 1 ST QUARTER, 2012 | ISSUE 21
WELCOME MESSAGE
Dear KDE members, contributors, During the first quarter of 2012, KDE awards, which makes us proud of our users, supporters, patrons, sponsors had major releases (4.8) of KDE achievements and generates positive and friends, Platform, Workspaces and energy to face new challenges. Applications, and a minor stabilization 2012 is turning into a pivotal year for release (4.8.1). These releases brought The KDE Community is working on a KDE in several areas. One of the most improvements in many areas, new approach to strengthen important is the Open Qt Governance, particularly KDE-PIM, Akonadi and relationships with other organizations which is a great opportunity to Nepomuk. through a networking program called improve collaboration between KDE KDE Connect. This new effort will be and Qt. Exciting times are ahead of us People are quickly catching on to the introduced at Akademy 2012. in this area. idea that KDE software is a mature, yet innovative multi-platform and We are looking forward to seeing you Akademy 2012—the KDE Community multi-device solution. Recent at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn on June Summit—will take place in Tallinn, improvements in cloud services 30th! Estonia. It is the first time for our integration and the development of annual event to be in eastern Europe, Vivaldi tablet are examples of KDE's which was a request from our momentum. They also demonstrate Agustín Benito Bethencourt for the contributors. Preparations are in full how successful we are when joining KDE e.V. Board of Directors. swing; this promises to be another forces with other Free Software great event. KDE has also had a projects and organizations. presence at many events around the world promoting our software and The KDE 4 series is attracting a lot of values. press and commercial attention. We have been honored with several
CONTENTS Welcome Message 1 The ALERT Project 2 Supported member activities 3 – 8 New Members 9 Financial Report and KDE e.V. Board 10 THE ALERT PROJECT
Stuart Jarvis
The ALERT Project is a technology research project Two of subprojects of particular interest are bug partly funded by the European Union. ALERT (Active duplicate detection and community member profiles. support and reaL-time coordination based on Event pRocessing in FLOSS developmenT) aims to improve The bug duplicate detection code ranks bugs by their the overall bug resolution process in Open Source likelihood of being a duplicate of an existing report. It developers' collaborative environments. It addresses is currently able to identify 40% of known duplicates the ways Free Software communities track bugs in by looking at the 5% closest related bugs. This raises software, how trends and issues are identified, and the possibility of automatically suggesting potential how problems are fixed through active collaboration. duplicate bugs when a new report is filed, easing the The project brings together partners from seven burden on our developers and bug squashers. countries, from universities and research institutes to large IT consultancies. The partners range from those The community profiler (with the catchy name of that are familiar with free software (a few laptops at STARDOM) identifies key members in each team and meetings are running GNOME or KDE software) to particular strengths of developers. With this those who had never used a free operating system information, it may be possible to automatically before. KDE e.V. is a project partner and will be an end suggest assignees for bugs. In this way, even if a bug user, providing feedback and advice on the software is reported to the wrong team, there may be system during development. To assist with this, Dario suggestions of someone better suited to take over the Freddi and Stuart Jarvis are contracted to the project bug. Conversely, developers would be able to access a as KDE experts. list of bugs that the system believes they could be well suited to solve. The project has had its first annual review; the European Commission assessors were pleased with the The ALERT Project has over a year left to run. We progress. Most of the software components for expect to begin serious testing of the software before extracting data from our bug tracker, forums, mailing the end of 2012. Our chosen pilot project in KDE is lists and git repositories are now at the demo stage Solid. If the trials are a success, we may try and and are working well. The ALERT software will all be integrate ALERT components into our existing released as free software. infrastructure and make them available to all KDE contributors over the coming years. FUTURE CITY Ramon Miranda (& Krita) with permission Amsterdam - Past, Future Mango open movie project concept art - CC-By Blender Foundation, artwork:David Revoy (Krita) SUPPORTED MEMBER ACTIVITIES
Developer Sprints database performance, especially may involve quality loss.) Thanks with SQLite." to this work, digiKam also gained multi-threaded metadata editing to DIGIKAM Projects: go along with multiple-core CPUs. GENOA Work then continued on improving "I figured out a way to distribute January 2012 even a simple operation such as the work—based on inter-thread Qt signals and slots—to multiple Martin Klapetek rotating an image. Until now, the code for rotation was a plugin, threads without having to change and so required different handling. the existing code. The solution
In the middle of cold January, the digiKam team met in Genoa, the sunny old port city in northern Italy. Participants started gathering on a Thursday evening, getting together over dinner to form new friendships and to find out how people's lives were going. The next day, real work started on digiKam, KDE’s award-winning photo management application.
Optimization: The main focus of this sprint was on optimization, but lots of new features digiKam Sprint Team found their places as well. Marcel commented, "This had works well.", added Marcel. The two lead developers—Gilles quite a few shortcomings; some Caulier and Marcel Wiesweg—met RAW files simply cannot be rotated. Francesco worked on internal for the first time with the newest For other formats the rotation step digiKam dependencies, mainly core developer, Francesco Riosa. involves lossy editing. Building on porting LCMS to the LCMS version The core team put their heads work which Gilles started, I have 2 library. LCMS is a color together to optimize database integrated the rotation code into management system with a small handling and processes so that digiKam, reusing our existing footprint; the API changed performance can be improved. editing framework. Rotation is significantly between LCMS Gilles said, "We have talked about multithreaded, fully integrated, and versions. The porting task is not separating database information can be customized in the setup. It trivial, but it's important to keep into dedicated files to prevent is now possible to rotate by setting digiKam in sync for the future. bloating files with unrelated a flag in the database, editing the Other library dependencies were information about images. This is metadata, or by rotating the full improved as well. already the case with thumbnails, pixel data; falling back to the best which are hosted in a separate possible solution if an operation is Gilles introduced a new progress database file. I introduced the idea not supported". (RAW metadata manager. It informs the user of to do the same with fingerprints may not be editable; for some background activity, including (the because this info can grow quickly formats, rotation by pixel data new) rotation, scanning directories, and it has an influence on
KDE eV Community Report | Issue 21 | 1st Quarter, 2012 ev.kde.org/reports 5 Martin, both KDE GIF formats) while composing Telepathy images into a layout. developers, gave digiKam some Thank you: Instant Messaging The hacking room was generously love. Daniele wrote provided by a local FLOSS a new kipi plugin awareness group called Alid, which that allows people brings free software to local to share pictures schools, getting kids familiar with with their online libre software starting from age 6. friends directly via While the digiKam team was hard IM file transfer. at work, some members of Alid Martin explored prepared things to eat. Thanks to the possibility of their great care and feeding, we integrating face got to try lots of local Italian recognition with specialties. Nepomuk and displaying None of this would have been semantic data possible if it wasn't for KDE e.V., about the the main sponsor of this coding recognized person, sprint. All the participants send a mainly their online big 'Thank you!' to the supporting status and a members of KDE e.V. for allowing possibility to start us to make a huge leap forward chatting directly with digiKam and to find new from the face friends from all over the world. recognition interface. A Photos courtesy of the digiKam Sprint Team Genoa Plaza working prototype DB processing, batch image was spawned, but processing, thumbnail generation the road to a complete feature is and more. The progress manager still long (including a complete KDE PIM presents running tasks in a rewrite of the digiKam interface OSNABRÜCK readable way and allows users to with Nepomuk). February 2012 cancel any operation easily. Now even kipi-plugins can take Other new features were born in Jos Poortvliet advantage of the new progress Genoa as well. Angelo, a local manager, and other plugins developer, worked on improving The 10th KDE PIM Meeting in already do. Besides the digiKam printing of images from digiKam. Osnabrück took place from 10-12 collection management tool, Gilles Benjamin from France did February 2012. Starting with pizza also managed to close 40 bug tremendous work on a panorama Friday afternoon running until reports in 2 days. stitching tool, which we tested right Sunday around 17:00, the meeting away as Genoa offered many nice attracted more than 20 hackers This was Dhruv Patel's first time in vistas. It is now easy and working on the various parts of Europe, and, in fact, his first time straightforward to use—just give it KDE PIM. outside India. Dhruv participated in a set of pics, let it do its magic, Season of KDE last year, starting a make the final crop and The meeting officially started on QML presentation tool for digiKam. bam!...panorama picture. Lukasz, a Friday when everyone had arrived Dhruv continued the work in contributor from Poland, worked around 16:30. Cornelius Genoa while others gave valuable on the Photo Layouts Editor kipi- Schumacher took the lead, feedback. plugin. With his work, users are introducing 10 years of KDE PIM now able to use SVG templates (in sprints making it the longest Local developer Daniele and addition to transparent PNG and running series in KDE, as well as
KDE eV Community Report | Issue 21 | 1st Quarter, 2012 ev.kde.org/reports 6 KDE PIM Sprint Team the first real sprint! Only three were the usual moments of options (Upgrade to images of people have attended all ten synchronization and overview-of- KDE PIM hacker Volker) were put meetings—Cornelius, Ingo and work-done. Throughout the sprint, on the table and are still not Bernhard. there were bug fixing frenzies and exactly clear. But we had fun with "fix the problems of my mail the joke. We expect the The very first KDE PIM meeting setup" sessions. collaboration between KDE PIM, brought together developers OpenUsability and openSUSE to working independently on their The next morning we started by lead to something interesting. respective applications. It was discussing progress from Friday. decided at that meeting to move Difficult items were brought A couple of discussions related to KMail from the KDE Network group forward for the group to discuss. Kolab and its relationship with KDE to the brand new KDE PIM CVS Part of this was a discussion about PIM. Christian Mollekopf presented location, creating a real 'team' getting KDE PIM ready for KDE the next generation of the Kolab dedicated to maintaining the Frameworks 5. Kévin Ottens, KDE XML format, which is based on applications. At the KDE PIM sprint Frameworks 5 Release Manager, xCard and xCal. Georg Greve in 2004, there was a move was present so this was a good presented the concept of putting towards deeper integration: the time to discuss time lines and Akonadi on the server to provide a creation of one unified layer priorities. The conclusion was that scalable groupware solution instead of separate data storage KDE PIM will not likely go making use of the experience and locations. And now, at this recent Frameworks 5 before the high-level functionality provided PIM sprint, the first real unified beginning of 2013. by the KDE PIM backend. Both are KDE PIM can be celebrated. part of the current Kolab 3.0 Release 4.7 brought users 5 years Partnerships development cycle. On top of that, of hard work, and in the 4.8.0 Björn Balazs from there was some discussion about release, most problems from this OpenUsability.org joined us and IMAP 5, which could converge huge merger have already been presented a plan to gather more protocol efforts around Kolab and fixed. user feedback on KDE PIM. The Akonadi into a standard for wider idea was enthusiastically received. usage. Tomas Koch, a student who Planning Some work was started to display is working on a thesis around KDE After reminiscing, we went through images of KDE PIM hacker PIM, brought up the topic of introductions, started creating our Stephen in the UI to put a "human creating a REST backend for Kolab, Kanban list of TODO items and got face" on our apps. The exact an interesting approach for to work. During the day there implementation and upgrade refreshing the traditional protocols used for email and other PIM data. Marketing and Platforms PIM on Windows and Mac; both KDE is increasingly well received are close to "good enough". The each year, especially as the Marketing was the focus of biggest issue with these platforms stability and resource usage have discussions in the afternoon. The is that they are understaffed. improved so much. It's really a refactoring of the KDE PIM There is almost no awareness of pleasure to demonstrate backend is done, and there is a the state of KDE on Windows and Workspaces and software that are solid foundation. Now the KDE on Mac. Both projects need equal to or better than anything perspective will switch to the user only a small push to be ready to else available. side, continually improving the go. applications and resolving issues. Some visitors were experienced Users are encouraged to submit KDE Telepathy Linux users who said, "I tried 4.x bug reports. and it crashed a lot and was a There was a video conference call resource hog." After a short demo, On Sunday we discussed on Sunday with some members of they were eager to install KDE 4.8 platforms for Kontact Desktop and the Telepathy team to discuss the on their computers. Another type Kontact Touch. Android is hard, KDE contact aggregation strategy. of visitor asked, "Why can't KDE because it's a limited platform Decisions came rather quickly: it do ... ?" Because KDE has such particularly with regard to the makes most sense to store excellent customization multi-process design of Kontact. relations between contacts in possibilities, as well as the ability Blackberry would be easier to Nepomuk as this is exactly what to use non-KDE software, the support with its full Unix Nepomuk has been designed to answer was, "Yes it can ... here's environment and Qt as its primary do. Some performance issues still how." Many people were unclear UI toolkit.iPhone simply won't be exist, but the team expects that as to how widgets and activities possible due to legal restrictions. these can be addressed rather can be used. After a short demo, quickly. MeeGo versions of Kontact Touch they were ready to implement are up and running, but the Appreciation features whose value they did not platform has some issues. To get previously understand. Dinner was sponsored by this running will require either the Intevation, KDAB and Kolab For the techies, we showed off creation of a touch-compatible Systems on both evenings. Thank simple Kdialog GUIs and a cool QWidget theme, or porting you for keeping us well fed! And integration of KDE software everything that is still not QML- thank you to KDE e.V. for running on a remote computer via based. Neither are particularly sponsoring accommodation and an ssh connection and running a easy or fast to implement. travel expenses. (remote) KDE 3.5 panel on the The QML porting work is also local KDE 4.7 desktop. hampered by open build service The scope of SCALE was issues. Moving from MeeGo to Trade Shows and awesome. There were talks openSUSE or self-hosting are ranging from cloud possibilities; these decisions Community Events implementation to best practices in belong to the Mer Project. They security, to protecting GPL and are not completely straightforward SCALE 10X other open source copyrights. either due to requirements for LOS ANGELES Various open source packages application signing. January 2012 oriented toward educators were Meanwhile, Nokia's latest OS and shown. The KDE booth was Barrington Daltrey Windows Mobile 8 are other flanked by Facebook and Linux possible targets for KDE PIM. astronomy. The astronomy group The Southern California Linux had collections of home-made Porting will probably be easy, but Exposition 10x (SCALE) was held in these are new developments and step-motors, bread boards and Los Angeles, California at the Los equipment mounts with binoculars, their directions and restrictions are Angeles Airport Hilton. This year's not clear. telescopes and camera lenses, all SCALE was very successful in driven by Linux to gaze at the terms of participation and vendor There was a discussion about KDE stars (or just get a close-up of sponsorship. what was going on across the
KDE eV Community Report | Issue 21 | 1st Quarter, 2012 ev.kde.org/reports 8 room). The KDE exhibit got great support from other organizations (OpenSUSE who provided some give-away disks, Qt, Ubuntu, various BSD organizations, and others).
Recruiters for Linux programmers were also present. There has been a significant increase in the participation of women who use (and program) Linux. This is an important development; I hope they will convince my wife to quit using the clunky and expensive proprietary software! FOSDEM BRUSSELS February 2012 Lydia presents Open Advice
Claudia Rauch, photos by Jonathan Riddell There were many visitors to the end of the event. KDE booth. Demos of KDE As in recent years, KDE had a Software on every form In the Crossdesktop Devroom, large presence at FOSDEM. There factor—mobile, tablet, desktop, there were several talks about KDE were more than 20 KDE folks cloud and server—were of and Qt. One of the highlights was present, staffing the KDE booth, particular interest. We also had the presentation of the book milling in the hallways or giving cool new KDE t-shirts at the booth "Open Advice", a collection of talks in the Cross-Desktop which were almost sold out at the knowledge and experience from a Devroom. wide variety of Free Software projects. The book was compiled and edited by Lydia Pintscher, KDE e.V. Board member.
CEBIT HANOVER March 2012
After two years absence, KDE presented again at CeBIT 2012—the world's largest computer expo, which took place from March 6th to 10th in Hanover, Germany. The KDE booth was part of the Open Source Project Lounge. The booth presence was organized by Eckhart Wörner who was supported by seven other KDE contributors throughout the KDEWear at FOSDEM event. They presented a variety of KDE software, including the latest Plasma Desktop and the first KDE is a recognized leader in the KDE and Qt. This included an release of the Calligra Office and free software world, hence was an introduction to KDE and a brief Creative Suite. Aaron Seigo integral part of the event. The overview of various software demonstrated an early version of popularity that KDE has among provided by KDE such as Kontact, Plasma Active—KDE's Workspace budding software developers is KDevelop, Calligra, and KMail. She for mobile devices—on a phenomenal, and so KDE was one also spoke about KDE’s prototype of the Vivaldi tablet, a of the partners in LeThAc. participation in Google Summer collaborative effort involving Of Code, Season of KDE and gave several members of the KDE Mr. Sudhendu Kumar Roy, an avid useful tips on how to be a part of Community. interface designer and a KDE these prestigious programs. Eager developer, enlightened the learners appreciated an overview LETHAC students on how to taking the first of KDE Bugzilla. steps in the KDE community, how NEW DELHI the community works, explained KDE e.V. provided us with March 2012 KDE e.V., and showed Qt-based awesome goodies for the event: t- Shreya Pandit application development. This shirts, badges and lovely stickers included an introduction to Qt, its which were a favorite among the LeThAc (Learn, Think, Act) was an applications, beginning audience. The most enthusiastic open source conclave organized development with Qt, getting students got a bag full of these by Guru Gobind Singh familiar with various IDE’s used for goodies as a prize. Indraprastha University in New KDE development such as Delhi, India from 9-10th March, KDevelop and Qt Creator. The Learning about the wonderful KDE 2012. The conclave brought students enjoyed a hands-on family was highly encouraging together open source enthusiasts hacking session with KDE apps like and motivating for all, and elicited and eminent people in the open Kexi, KMail and more. enthusiastic response from the source industry in one place for attendees, many of whom shared learning and spreading Shreya Pandit, an open-source resolved to become a part of KDE. awareness about the growing contributor and a KDE developer, Lots of thanks to KDE for making FOSS industry. delivered a lecture-cum-session on our event a huge success!
Happy Valentine's Day Eugene Trounev (LGPL)
KDE eV Community Report | Issue 21 | 1st Quarter, 2012 ev.kde.org/reports 10 NEW MEMBERS
KDE e.V. is happy to welcome the following new members:
Martin Klapatek
Shaun Reich
KDE eV Community Report | Issue 21 | 1st Quarter, 2012 ev.kde.org/reports 11 FINANCES KDE E.V.
INCOME (€): BOARD Cornelius Schumacher Corporate Supporters: 14,760 President Donations: 6,456
Other events: 1,823 CONTACT Akademy organization: 208 Website: ev.kde.org Email: [email protected] Other expenses: 4,935 Total: 35,268 Report Prepared By QUARTERLY RESULT (1Q2011) Agustín Benito Bethencourt Carl Symons 16,868 Claudia Rauch Thanks to the other KDE members and supporters who contributed to AT THE END OF THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2012, KDE E.V. HAD A POSITIVE this report. BALANCE OF €181,900. Note: The financial numbers provided here are approximations and are provided for informational purposes only. For a complete accounting record, please contact the KDE e.V. directly.
SYSADMIN REPORT
1 ST QUARTER Created 29 subversion accounts; disabled 1 subversion account Modified 2 kdemail.net aliases Created 8 kde.org aliases; disabled 5 kde.org aliases; modified 6 kde.org aliases Created 4 kde.org mailing-lists: rocs-devel zanshin-devel kde-connect-team kde-telepathy-bugs Disabled 2 kde.org mailing-lists: kde-appmonth kitchensync
IF YOUR COMPANY WANTS TO SUPPORT KDE, PLEASE VISIT THE SUPPORTING MEMBERS PAGE AT EV.KDE.ORG/GETINVOLVED/SUPPORTING-MEMBERS.PHP.
KDE is a registered trademark of KDE e.V. in the United States and other countries. Visit ev.kde.org for more information.