Excellent and enlightening speech!

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Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Tapio Kautto on Sunday 20/Jan/2008, @06:48

This was a great speech, it really combined all the bits of information about KDE 4 we've been reading before.

Thanks for Aaron and the others for a great summary.

KDE 4 sure will be a great software platform - it already is very promising and getting there. Few years ago it used to be just a desktop, later a desktop environment and set of applications. Now we can seriously talk about a software platform.

For and end user desktop and the applications are the operating system. In that sense KDE will provide a wonderful platform for application providers - both open source as well as proprietary.

What I'm dreaming of is a seamless integration of free and closed software on the same platform. Examples of that would be:

- a lot more commercial and proprietary applications based on KDE libraries
- seamless integration of commercial plugins (Flash, Shockwave, DivX, mp3) in KDE
- seamless integration of proprietary hardware drivers (Win32 drivers on Unix/Linux, automatic or semi-automatic installation of proprietary Unix/Linux drivers)
- seamless integration of Windows applications on Unix/Linux and KDE, especially commercial 3D games

I'm an open source fan and a promoter, but I think that commercial closed source software has to be taken into account as well. If we could integrate commercial offerings into this great open environment, we'd definetly be on a path to WORLD DOMINATION ;)

A lot of this is already on it's way. There is a way to run plugins and applications on Wine and KDE, but these solutions are not ready for the end user.

Tapio Kautto

Related Links

·   Articles on Community and Events
·   Also by Tapio Kautto
·   Contact author

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Kevin Kofler on Sunday 20/Jan/2008, @07:08

No thanks, we're already infected by too much proprietary stuff, see e.g. the use of Flash streaming to deliver these videos.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Monday 21/Jan/2008, @03:46

>a lot more commercial and proprietary applications based on KDE libraries

Should not happen, once KDE is GPL. Too bad, I would like this also. Luckly they can do Qt programs that will look well uintegrated in KDE.

About the other commentary, I don't think proprietary technology is bad per-se and we can't like in a aquarium forever, so let's do a reality check:
Does most of web sites today use flash? Yes
Does a big part of them *require* flash to work properly? Yes
Do we have a free native qt/kde implementation of flash? No

Sure, the ideal would be to have SVG+JavaScript, but not even free platafforms support those very well, so unless we have a better product to offer (see Firefox, XVid and others) using something proprietary is a need :-(

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Morty on Monday 21/Jan/2008, @04:13

>>a lot more commercial and proprietary applications based on KDE libraries

>Should not happe, nonce KDE is GPL

It will happen, it's designed for this. The KDE libraries are LGPL/BSD to allow this. This has been KDE library policy since forewer. Whatever license KDE applications use(GPL2, GPL3, BSD, MIT, QPL, EPL etc), can not change this.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Tuesday 22/Jan/2008, @09:18

So my mistake here, but I *ever* read articles stating that kdelibs where GPL and this was one of the advantages of gnome (lGPL) over kde.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Grósz Dániel on Wednesday 23/Jan/2008, @13:02

Qt is GPL or commercial. So to develop commercial KDE software one has to purchase an expensive commercial Qt license but one can use KDE libs in the commercial product.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Kevin Kofler on Monday 21/Jan/2008, @05:56

I can do fine without Flash, thank you very much.
Moreover, there is Klash (from the Gnash project) now.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Tuesday 22/Jan/2008, @09:19

I can't because of youtube, charges.com.br and other fun sites.
I can live without them, but and where all the fun will be? ;)

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by nobody on Monday 21/Jan/2008, @06:04

Great idea!
Let's replace everything in our free and open operating system piece by piece with proprietary software. Why haven't I thought of that.
That's just genius.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Max on Monday 21/Jan/2008, @18:34

ADOBE - if you're reading this:

Please start working on Adobe Creative suite for KDE 4.X.Y branch. Think about it, you'd be able to write software that seamlessly integrates Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

It would open up a great sales opportunity for you.

TO OTHERS:

I think the future will be a nice split between proprietory and open source software. It would be great if KDE helps merge these two words seamlessly together and be truly platform independent. Free software will follow. I love open source, but I do acknowledge that there is some closed source software that is great and deserves to also exist under Open source platforms, such as KDE, Linux, and the like.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by Tapio Kautto on Tuesday 22/Jan/2008, @05:52

Amen.

Perhaps some people like to troll or just have their head up in their **s, but I'll repeat my opinion anyway.

It's not realistic to think that all applications and libraries would be open source. I'd really love if they would, but it's not going to happen. Many important applications will be proprietary, and we just have to accept that.

Why Firefox is popular? It's a great application, there's a need for it but also because it supports proprietary plugins. It offers more complete user experience than it would offer without supporting for them. Many people would just try it and abandon it because they would like to see the evil content that's not open.

Why OpenOffice.org? Because it supports evil operating systems and evil document formats.

We need more and more open source implementations, but we also need to take closed apps and plugins into account (I just can't say 'support' because it would feel bad to say so as an open source person)

Having the best platform will draw attention from commercial entities, this means more companies paying for people to work on KDE. That will benefit as all, those that have aggressive attitude towards proprietary vendors as well as those of us that accept the reality.

TK.

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Re: Excellent and enlightening speech!
by ofcourse on Tuesday 22/Jan/2008, @13:10

Yes.. and change the KDE slogan to:
"don't be free..."

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