Community Report 4Th Quarter, 2010 | Issue 16
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COMMUNITY REPORT 4TH QUARTER, 2010 | ISSUE 16 WELCOME MESSAGE The fourth quarter of of KDE, driven by passion, not have participated. Many thanks 2010 concludes an money. We mentored almost a for your continued support. You amazing year for KDE hundred highschool students help to make KDE happen. You E and KDE e.V. during Google's codein on their are KDE. way into the free software A lot of great things community. 2011 promises to be another D happened. amazing year. In the summer Our fantastic sysadmin group did we'll have the Berlin Desktop We had a wonderful Summit together with our friends K it, and migrated to git. Our Akademy under the promo team did wonders, with a from GNOME. We are Finnish midnight sun, constant flux of people coming in continuing to run developer one of the best Akademies ever, and going out. The release team sprints with full steam, pushing mixing old and new people in a cranked out no less than twenty the limits of KDE. KDE will beautiful and wonderfully three releases, including the organize and participate in a organized environment. Smaller major 4.4 and 4.5 releases, large number of events bringing groups met for nineteen KDE which are accepted as stable together the community, and e.V. supported developer sprints and enjoyable even by some of showing the world what can be throughout the year to get code the stronger KDE 4 critics. done with free software. done, to plan development, to build community. We also launched our "Join the I'm thankful for a great year game" campaign which gives 2010, and looking forward to a We had a hugely successful individuals a way to contribute to fantastic year 2011. summer of code and, to me even KDE as supporting members. So more impressive, a busy season far, more than a hundred people Cornelius Schumacher CONTENTS Welcome Message 1 What's happened in KDE during the past quarter? The Supporting Members of KDE 2 Who are the people who make KDE possible? KDE Activities 3-8 Recaps from KDE Developer sprints, trade shows and other gatherings. Open Software, Open Design, Open Culture 8-9 Images from the community. New Members, Finances, and Board 10-11 Any complicated ecosystem, whether natural or of software, is composed of many smaller components. KDE is no exception. In addition to being a desktop, KDE is also a set of frameworks and foundation projects upon which other applications are built. Some of these include the Oxygen icons (top right), Akonadi search (bottom left), Nepomuk (middle), and Decibel (right). Each of the technologies has its own group of developers and community that help to drive it forward. MEET THE SUPPORTING MEMBERS OF KDE In June 2010, KDE e.V. launched the individual mainly from blog posts via the Planet KDE website. supporting membership program 'Join the Game', which is an opportunity for KDE enthusiasts to From the wide range of KDE applications, the ones support the KDE community financially. The first that Paul uses most are Dolphin, Konsole, supporting member, Georg Greve the founder of Konversation and Kate. He uses Kontact for email the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and every day, both at work and at home, and is the holder of the German 'Bundesverdienstkreuz', interested in the new upcoming KDE PIM suite. For Joined the Game on June 9th, 2010. "KDE has further improvements, he would like to see awesome technology developed by an incredible Nepomuk, Akonadi and some of the other "pillars" community that has had my support for years, so of KDE Platform 4 more smoothly integrated with it's an honor to 'Join the Game'!", explaining his KDE applications, in a way that is not too intrusive motivation to become a supporting member. or unfriendly to users. Moreover, Paul is interested to see what happens with Konqueror and the There are many good reasons to support KDE with Calligra suite. Broadly, the thing that most interests a regular contribution (25€ per quarter or 100€ per Paul about KDE is how the various components year). It enables KDE e.V. to have a predictable and applications integrate together. He believes and stable income, which can be used to support that, if the level of integration can increase without contributors and events that help speed up too many hard dependencies being created, the development of KDE software, enhance promotion desktop experience can be enriched even further. efforts and help grow the community. Paul definitely agrees with the idea of 'software KDE e.V. contributors and users are scattered freedom for everyone'. He points out how throughout the world and have many different important Free Software is to enable people from backgrounds; their reasons for contributing are different countries to collaborate over the Internet likely to be just as diverse. We caught up with our to produce such a wide range of Free and Open 125th supporting member, Paul Eggleton, to ask Source software. him why he Joined the Game. Another benefit of being a supporting member It is no wonder that Paul is involved in free / open includes an invitation to KDE e.V.'s Annual General source software professionally (as an Embedded Assembly during the international KDE contributor Linux Engineer with Intel's Open Source meeting Akademy. Paul is planning to attend Technology Centre) as well as in his leisure time. Akademy in the future to meet fellow supporters Paul has been a keen user of KDE software since and the greater KDE community. 2002, and also a developer, though he currently doesn't contribute code to KDE. That's why he If you too would like to financially support KDE, decided to enable KDE development indirectly by please visit the individual supporting membership 'Joining the Game'. He learned about this program program website at http://jointhegame.kde.org ALL GREAT ENDEAVORS ARE COMPOSED OF SMALLER EFFORTS THANK YOU TO THE MANY WHO MAKE KDE POSSIBLE TO SUPPORT KDE, PLEASE GO TO JOINTHEGAME.KDE.ORG KDE eV Community Report | Issue 16 | 4th Quarter, 2010 ev.kde.org/reports 2 Leaf Structure JFest Germany (Look:KDE). KDE ACTIVITIES beyond. There are now quite a result of these conversations, Developer Sprints few developers working on KDE Spain attended SIMO Solid, so it was a good time to Networks, the largest IT event in OLID PRINT S S , get them all together for a sprint Madrid. MADRID, SPAIN in Madrid, Spain. 1st to 3rd October 2010 The Solid sprint was a great Sebastian Kügler, Release success. Some Solid Solid is the part of the Manager and KDE e.V. Board components have moved to a KDE Platform that Member, combined his visit to more flexible, scalable, usable handles interaction with the Solid sprint with meetings and energyfriendly architecture, hardware, making it easy for with local representatives from while others have received love application developers to deal Madrid City Council and the in usability, stability and feature with things like network central government IT completeness. Janitorlike tasks availability by abstracting Department. Sebastian and like deprecating HAL in KDE underlying libraries within a Rafael Fernandez (KDE Spain software have been moved familiar KDEstyle API. Solid is Vice President) with members of forward, and are expected to be becoming a welldefined team ASOLIF (the federation of free completed with the next feature within KDE. Everybody is software small and medium release of the KDE Platform in excited about the idea of enterprise associations), January 2011. attracting more developers introduced KDE and KDE Spain, interested in hardware support discussing legal, economic and on the desktop, mobile devices, management aspects of free netbooks, media center and software communities. As a SPRINTS PROVIDE KDE USERS, DEVELOPERS, AND DESIGNERS THE OPPORTUNITY TO MEET AND SOLVE PROBLEMS FACE TO FACE. Left, Developers at Ovi Sprint (photo by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen). Bottom left, KDE Developers working at Solid Sprint. Bottom right, The Solid Developer Team. (Photo by Sebastian Kügler.) KDE eV Community Report | Issue 16 | 4th Quarter, 2010 ev.kde.org/reports 3 OVI IS AN UMBRELLA FOR NOKIA'S CLOUD SERVICES. AT THE OVI SPRINT, THERE WAS DISCUSSION OF HOW OWNCLOUD, A KDE TECHNOLOGY, MIGHT BE USED ALONGSIDE OTHER, EXISTING NOKIA SOFTWARE. OVI AND KDE SPRINT, for the sprinters, both at a Bernhard Beschow presented personal level and for their the first results of the OpenGL MUNICH, GERMANY 8th to 10th October 2010 sprintrelated research work. The rendering development. results of the brainstorming Inclusion of OpenGL into Marble Dinesh Sai sessions will soon be sent to is currently scheduled for Marble Nokia and a fruitful collaboration 1.2; the proper integration of this From October 8th to 10th, Nokia expected. capability into the Marble library and KDE jointly hosted a was an important topic as it can developer sprint at Nokia's Office offer power savings, useful for in Munich. Knut Yrvin, well mobile versions of the software. known community manager of Other developer sessions Nokia, helped set up the sprint. covered libmarble Qt Quick The sprint brought together 13 Bindings, Marble's internal OGC members of the KDE community KML based data structures, the to work on the topic: How Ovi Mac port and improved support and KDE can mutually benefit for Digital Elevation Models. each other from the perspectives of both software The current Marble 0.10.0 was development and a purely the first release that brought collaborative effort. official support for mobile KDE MARBLE SPRINT, platforms. So the Marble MeeGo Ovi is an umbrella for Nokia's NUREMBERG, GERMANY version and the current state of cloud services, and currently 5th to 7th November 2010 Qt Mobility were at the center of includes a Messaging service, discussions.