Category: KDE

I’m travelling at about 250km/h back to the Netherlands right now, from Darmstadt in Germany
where I’ve met Eva Brucherseifer for a meeting on marketing issues in KDE. We mainly discussed
highly confidential stuff (confidential mainly because not *everyone* should read about the imminent
beginning of our world domination tour already).

After having gone through different angles of scientific strategic analysis, notably market
segmentation, relationship marketing, the techology adaption lifecycle and more applied stuff like
the decision making process in large groups, we came to the conclusion that surprise,
surprise KDE can do much better, and if we use our full potential in more
areas than only developing cutting-edge technology, we really scare of our competitors. Konqi, the little dragon is becoming a dangerous adult dragon!

More interesting recent news, there is now a shared forum for promoting the free desktop, it
has a couple of GNOMIES and some people of the KDE crowd. We’re hoping to share resources and stop dragging the free
desktop into different directions, and thereby wasting resources. It doesn’t make sense anyway to
try to steal from the small piece of pie other friends of the free desktop have. We need to break
into the 90%+ of the desktop market that has not yet been freed. This is one of the first real
results from Portland
and I hope there’s more to come.

In my non-KDE life, I’m working on quality
metrics for Open Source software, to be more precise, on the criteria for a standard for quality
certification of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). I’m talking a lot to different people about
such kind of new stuff, and generally people, especially from the “business world” like the idea
very much. ISVs are missing a certification that offers them the opportunity make a difference,
customers like the idea of being able to base their choice on hard criteria. My personal opinion is
that such a certificate is needed to show decision makers that Open Source can score very well in
the real world, that quality of Open Source products is not only good, but that it can be measured.

But how would you measure the quality of Open Source products from the point of view of a
customer? Quite often, you see that the time it takes “the community” to fix a certain bug is
measured. Well, that’s a beginning, but it’s definitely quite unusable as the only measurement for
the maintainance level of some software component. You have to put that in relation to the severity
of the bug, to the “risc level”. I think Open Source quality has to offer quite some more with
respect to quality, and some characteristics of Open Source software make quality assessment a fair
bit easier. You don’t need to sign NDAs to be able to review code and to do for example static
checking of the source base. You can have a look at the development process, you’re able to test the
software without the need to think about license questions, you’re able to look at history and you
might even take advantage of assessment that has earlier been made Hack, most Open Source components
even publish their bug database. So what more do you want?
A lot!
Fact is that a lot of Open Source project rely on peer-review as the only
means to improve and maintain good quality. While that certainly works for quite some projects, I
think it’s about time to apply more methods to maintain and improve quality of Open Source software.

In the near future, I’m planning to blog more often on different aspects of software
quality, especially in the Open Source world, to raise the awareness within the community, and
simply because it’s an interesting subject with a lot of different ways to approach it. So stay
tuned.

As other
people already noted, the KDE-NL new year’s meeting has been quite a success. We
talked wrapped up the last year, talked about upcoming events and had a couple of drinks together. I
took my camera with me, so there are photos available. Claire, Martijn and me also took the opportunity to talk
about Marketing stuff, mainly strategic things, our expectations for the future and how we can
further improve KDE’s exposure to the rest of the world. Quite useful to stick your heads together
and share ideas. We missed Wade.

The newest regional group of KDE is also one with an
enormous potential, KDE India. Judging from the number of potential
users, KDE India’s importance for the future of KDE just cannot be overstated.
But also in terms of more strategic issues, there’s a lot KDE India can contribute: think
experience with eastern cultures, think merchandising, think issues in giant (geographically,
culturally) countries. KDE India can make KDE so much richer, especially regarding the lack of
coverage of KDE in eastern countries.
But not everything is easy, for example, a logo such as the one designed by Kenneth can mean
a legal challenge. Apparently, rules for using
official symbols in India are quite strict, using something strongly resembling the Indian national flag can make you a
criminal. Probably a good exercise for opening your mind and training intercultural communication
skills.
But then, it’s really refreshing to see an enthousiastic group of KDE people on the other
side of the world, both culturally and geographically working on getting KDE India off the ground
there.

So Martijn made the mistake to mention
that he was going to make tiramisu yesterday,
for consumption today. Well, that was exactly my plan. Here’s the result.

En garde, Martijn, and everyone who dares showing his dessert!

Aaron’s recent
blogentry about the closed development process of Xgl made me reflect on the whole development
process of XFree86 and Xorg during the last years. The result of that is that people might say
“Well, if that brings me a working OpenGL-based X server any sooner, I’m all in for it”,
but sadly, those people miss the whole point. It’s not like removing external developers from the
developing process and closing your doors is going to make Xgl development any faster. Quite the
opposite. (For those not in the know, Xgl is an X server that uses OpenGL for rendering graphics.
Rendering graphics via OpenGL is much faster and allows for nice
effects.)

Funny detail, tonight, a double release of Xorg is planned. A traditional, monolithic
release, numbered 6.9 will be made available to us mere users, and another one, a modular tree with
the magic version number 7.0 (read: seven-point-oh). The modular will further enhance the
development process of Xorg, in the future, release cycles will be much more flexible. Those two
releases are the result of hard work during the last year, and have only been possible because
development of XFree86 has opened up in a fork, the Xorg. Yes, read again: Opened up. An open
development process is a good thing. The most popular free (and open) implementation of the
X11 protocol would never have happened if the small team of developers hadn’t been broken
open, resulting in more developers contributing to the project and X finally receiving the love it
had longly needed. Development of XFree86 and Xorg has never before happend at such a fast pace. X
on free operating systems has always been slow and dodgy, no fun at all. The last months especially
show progress (e.g. EXA).

The screenshot shows using recently added features of composite managers that make
translucent windows possible. In the screenshot, I’ve setup my desktop to make inactive windows
translucent, so that the focus is automatically attracted to the active window. The settings are
overdone to make the effect more clear. As soon as you move the window, it becomes translucent.
Newly opened windows fade in smoothly, it’s a pretty slick thing — and this is just the beginning
of what’s becoming possible on with the new X servers on the horizon.
By the way, if you’re not
comfortable with X terminology, here’s
a good read on the status of Linux graphics.

So stop smoking crack and Open up!

I’ve finished the sizeview widget of guidance‘s mountconfig this week. You can now
doubleclick on a harddisk in mountconfig, and a dialog will be opened that shows the physical layout
of the disk and the different partitions on it, presented as a bar graph showing how much free space
is left.

Also, preparations of the KDE Multimedia Meeting in the Netherlands in late spring have
started, I’ve put up a wikipage
with the preliminary planning. Please let me know if you can help to make the Multimedia Meeting
a succes (send an email to sebas(a)kde(dot)nl).

Adriaan and me have begun preparing attendance of FOSDEM
2006 of the KDE crowd. That means a residence will have to be reserved, transport of people has
to be coordinated, a schedule for the devroom needs to be prepared (also, it would be nice to have
interesting talks there, of course, again email sebas(a)kde(dot)nl if you’re interested in giving a
talk). People that want to attend FOSDEM2006 along with the KDE crowd should subscribe to
kde-events-benelux@kde.org and reply to my email from
Monday. Having a bunch of KDE people there would truely rock!

Adriaan and me have visited the Holland Open
networking meeting tonight, which was quite a success. We’re trying to put a foot into the door
(does that parse?) in this young dutch organisation which tries to become a roof organisation for
Open Source and Open Standards in the Netherlands, representing business as well as Open Source
organisations. We talked to quite a lot of people, and introduced ourselves as possible
representatives of the “Linux Desktop”. Unfortunately, no Gnome people showed up, but it
might still be nice to show at least one of the possible choices for a desktop. I got the impression
that KDE is more than welcome to attend the next conference as a first-class citizen, and that we
could play an important role in pushing Open Source technology in the Netherlands.

We (KDE-NL) have been quite busy visiting events over the last weeks, and it begins to pay
off, we’re being recognized as KDE people.

On Thursday, I visited the OSOSS
symposium Open Doen in Nieuwegein in the Netherlands. It was targeted at
(semi-)governmental organisation, informing about deployment of Open Source and open standards. A
couple of migration pilots were discussed, amongst others. What really stroke me was the way they
handled those. Let’s say you have a Windows environment, servers running NT4 still, maybe already
Win2k, desktops mainly win2000, that means mail is done with Exchange, authentication via Active
Directory. You want to use more Open Source software in your organisation. One of the approaches to
migrating to an “Open Source desktop” had as a requirements “No changes to the backend, we’re doing
only desktops”. This requirement is quite a strange one. The first thing you should do is migrating
your email to Open Source technology, then deploying LDAP and switching all those funny backend
solutions. Your users won’t really notice, and the switching of those services will have little
affect on the productivity of your organisation. In fact, it will probably be quite easy.
But
no, let’s try to use Open Source software but authenticate with AD, connect your email client to
Exchange – causes you headache for sure. I was under the impression that those migration pilots are
not quite whole-hearted, which is a pity, since evaluating the Open Source desktop is not something
you will do every year. Once you get a bad impression (which is actually caused by protocols not
being open) OSS won’t get another chance for some years. If you do it, do it right at first.
First convert your communication protocols to something open to create equal chances, then have a
look at what does perform well and what doesn’t, then choose the best solution.

Harvard’s Jeffrey A. Kaplan presented the “Roadmap for Open ICT ecosystems” which
put the whole thing in a much broader context. A good read for decisionmakers.

Third interesting thing is that Maturity Models seem to be gaining more supporters, the term
could’ve been heard in about half of the presentations I attended. I’m interested in those maturity
models since I’m doing research on quality metrics for Open Source software (solutions).

Yesterday night, I found the time to finally fix a usability bug on my website, a far too
long “photo” menu which just dropped out of the bottom of everybody’s browser window. Hint: Do not
create menu entries automatically. Well, now I have categories of photo galleries, which should be reasonably easy to
handle for the next time. Also my wallpaper section
has gotten a major cleanup, now listing wallpapers in a nicer way than just Apache’s standard
directory listing.

So I found the time to finish the PyQt tutorial I’ve been writing at aKademy2005 in Malage, at
least to a degree that I think it might be useful for some people. It should be an easy read for
anyone having a little programming experience, especially for those that wanted to look at PyQt for
some time already, just enough to get you running. And I know you people are out there!

Have a look at http://vizZzion.org/?id=pyqt and let
me know what’s wrong, and what you’re missing (patches welcome). I might find the time again to fix
it.