Q: We all know you as the founder of KDE, but what is your current role in the project?

Matthias Ettrich: Today I am very much focused on KDE's underlying technology, the Qt toolkit. This pretty much is a full-time job, so I'm no longer feeling bad about not actively contributing code to other parts of KDE anymore. When you take a step back and recognize how much the KDE team achieves in relation to its financial backup and the number of developers, you'll clearly see how important a solid foundation is. We are an insanely productive development community, and we achieve that by layering our software stack and investing into the foundation, instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.

It's all about developers and what developers need to be efficient. Every hour spent on Qt and the KDE libraries is an hour spent wisely, because an every growing number of applications benefits from it. So that's what I do.

In addition my Trolltech position allows me to contribute indirectly to KDE's success: Some of our engineers can do part-time work on KDE, we sponsor David Faure, and of course we are an aKademy gold sponsor. On a more personal level I do my share of giving talks and interviews, I make an effort to bring people together, and I try to actively help with community events like last year's conference in Nove Hrady and this year's aKademy.

Q: What is your favorite development in the project since you started it?

ME: The greatest thing for me is that we managed to grow the project while keeping its initial culture and soul intact. We started out with a relatively small group of equals that cooperated purely based on mutual respect and technical merits. This is pretty standard for small engineering groups. What makes KDE special, though, is that we managed to scale this to the overwhelming size the project has today. With KDE e.V. and its statutes we have found and established a mechanism that makes sure KDE stays this way: a project owned and controlled by its active community of individual contributors. Establishing KDE e.V. and seeing it gaining acceptance within the KDE community was probably the most important non-technical development that happened, and this process is far from being over.

Q: Almost four years ago [1] you said that in 2005 you'll be a manager due to the success of KDE (which "will be a leading desktop platform by then"). Given that you only have one year left, what are your thoughts on this prediction?

ME: Well, I have been working as a Director of Software Development for some time now, so for me it became true already. Luckily my concerns about being a manager turned out to be exaggerated, managing people is not as bad as I anticipated it to be. Lesson to be learned: one should not rely on Dilbert as the only source of information. The obvious downside is less time for coding, but it comes with a strong upside: by working through a team you can achieve far more than what you could do on your own. Just imagine somebody offered you 50 extra hands. And not only that: each pair of hands came with a brain of its own, each with extra skills and talents that complete your own. Now, how good does that sound?

With regards to KDE becoming a leading desktop platform: we are already, in many areas. We are a leader in terms of active community, in terms of network integration, in terms of providing freedom and choice to desktop users, and in terms of providing a sophisticated development framework for application developers.

Q: What do you think the "next big thing" in KDE will be?

ME: There is one thing that will become increasingly important in the future, not just for KDE, but for all of Linux: a convincing answer to Microsoft's .Net. I'm not concerned about the server, I'm concerned about the client, and about the belief that some people in the community share, that you can successfully clone Microsoft's APIs and then keep up with them. Free software should not be about cloning, but about creating. If we want to be successful, we need to have our own APIs. And guess what, we are really good at that. There is no reason to throw everything away and start all over again from scratch. Instead we must built upon what we already have, and that is native code.

Native code is and will be the solid basis of every successful computing platform, simply for its flexibility, its performance, and its low memory consumption. With KDE and Qt, it's easy to develop native code. Once you get the hang on it, it is easier than e.g. developing complex applications with Java/Swing.

Still it would be nice to take advantage of JIT-compiled bytecode where it makes sense, and have the two worlds interoperate. Currently there are two technical options: integrating Mono and the CLR, or going for a Java Virtual Machine. Mono at present has several advantages: First, there is no free JIT-compiling JVM that is equally actively developed and it doesn't look like there will be one. Second, cooperating with Miguel and the Ximian group at Novell is probably a lot easier than cooperating with Sun. And third, it is easier to integrate native C++ code with the CLR than going through the JNI.

Q: What are you looking forward to in aKademy?

ME: Meeting people, having fun, and watching KDE improve! Every KDE conference so far has been a big happy gathering of friends that kick-started an insane commit rate to the CVS. And there's no reason why aKademy 2004 should be any different.

Q: What do you think people should make a special effort to attend at aKademy?

ME: There's so many interesting things going on at aKademy, it's hard to pick just one. But if you are a developer and haven't thought much about accessibility yet, I suggest you listen to Aaron Leventhal's opening speech of the Unix Accessibility Forum on Sunday. Assistive technologies are not only an interesting technical challenge, but an area where we as a free software project can make a real difference in many peoples' lifes. For the User and Administrators conference I suggest you give the groupware and collaboration track some special attention. Kolab and Kontakt are exciting projects that have not yet gotten the attention they deserve. And nobody should miss the social event on Saturday when we celebrate the Freedom Software Day.

Q: Thank you for your answers and your time.