I’m under way right now returning from Eindhoven where I gave a talk with the
title “Business
Models with KDE”. The audience was business
club of Free Software-related IT firms. System integrators, web application
shops, embedded system developers among them.
In the talk I tried to present KDE in a business-compatible way, showing what
KDE is, telling about the organisation of our community, ways to support it and of
course licensing. I’ve also taken a couple of different business models that are
viable in the Free Software world and showed how those can be combined with
KDE.
someone coming directly from the Free Software community, visiting them and
telling them how to make money, and that there are Free Software projects around
that think about organisational issues and how to make it easier for companies
to contribute.
One of the more interesting questions I’ve got was “How do you as a desktop
person see webservices becoming more and more important?” Well, obviously we
have the technology to exploit webservices — Konqueror / KHTML. But we can of
course offer more. Integration of webservices in the desktop seems to be a big
point, and things such as Get Hot New Stuff, information of Wikipedia in
applications, KHTML as a desktop component for easy reuse can be quite a big
point. But also, of course locking down the desktop by means of Kiosk — if you
have webservices, you can switch off a lot of other stuff. Yesterday was quite a bit different. I was invited by a group of Computer
Science teachers with the CodeYard hat on, introducing them to concepts of Free
Software development, collaboration tools and peer-to-peer communication
models. Saturday, we’ll have the CodeYard Community Day
Adriaan already blogged about. But tomorrow, I’ll get to know my nephew. I’m uncle for a week and a half now!