GCompris has joined the KDE incubator. GCompris is the high quality educational software suite comprising numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10, and well known by parents and teachers all over the world.

GCompris was started in 2000 by Bruno Coudoin as a Free Software project. Originally written in GTK+, the project developers decided in early 2014 to make a radical change and rewrite it in Qt Quick. The main motivation is the ability of the Qt platform to address the desktop and the tablet market from a single code base.

In order to get the great level of support from a strong developer community, GCompris joined the KDE incubator.

2014 Group picture, by Martin Klapetek (CC-BY-SA)

It's been quite some time since the Randa Meetings 2014 and even this year's edition of the KDE Community Summit called Akademy has already happened, but it's still nice to look back and see what was accomplished at this KDE Tech Summit in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

And before we tell you what all the seven groups that participated in the meetings this year (and because of the different group and collection of several meetings under one and the same roof it's called "Randa Meetings" with a plural s ;-) we would like to thank all the supporters and people who made this gathering possible. It's because of you that we were able to work hard for a whole week and make the software you love even better. On the group picture you see how diverse KDE is and that this year some KDE contributors could bring their families and partners and thus didn't need to decide between either family or hacking for KDE.

KDE was one of about 50 exhibitors at the LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference November 12th and 13th in Seattle. The expo was part of the week-long conference for system administrators that has been held annually since 1986. Expo participants included big name tech companies and smaller niche organizations offering products and services to this audience of professional technical people. As we discovered, KDE is well known among this audience.

The Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. The contest runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015. For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

About a year ago, the Calligra community added a new application to the suite by the name of Krita Gemini, which combined the functionality of the Krita digital painting application with the touch optimised user interface of the tablet focused Krita Sketch, into a shell with the ability to switch between the two at runtime. The goal was to create a responsive user interface for Krita, and this is now a part of Calligra. In May of this year, Intel approached the team which produced Krita Gemini with the idea of doing the same for other parts of Calligra, by creating an application which would encapsulate the Words and Stage components in the same way as Krita Gemini did for the Krita component.

Now, about half a year later, we have an application which, while rough around the edges, works for day to day use. In fact, the author of this article has been using Calligra Gemini to produce both a novel and a short story, as well as various other bits of work, and a presentation which was shown off at the Qt Developer Days 2014 in Berlin. Also worth mentioning here is that the pdf, epub and mobi versions of the short story available on the page there were also all created using Calligra Gemini, functionality which is available out of the box with Calligra.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

This month the Plasma 5 team brings you 5.1.1, a bugfix release to polish up the offering. It includes all the latest translations and a bunch of bugfixes. The bugfixes include syncing settings better with kdelibs4 applications so if you select which web browser you prefer to use that will affect all KDE applications. The VDG team have also continued their impressive work with numberous tweaks to the Breeze and Oxygen styles to get those margins just right as well as improve support for right-to-left languages.

This is the first part of KDE & Freedom, a series of interviews with people who use and contribute to FOSS in their everyday lives. Please consider donating to the KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser. We need your help!

Franklin is a 39 year old FOSS activist based in Taipei. He has coordinated KDE's zh_TW translation team since 2006, and is the core developer of ezgo (Chinese), a compilation of educational software used by schools all over Taiwan. ezgo, which in its Linux installation uses KDE software by default, blends more than 100 free software applications into one localized, easy to use package. [More information in a previous Dot article.]

Exchanging emails led to a voice conversation between The Dot and Franklin.

What is your motivation behind computer freedom?

Many people asked me the same question. My simple answer is because I like to be free.

Before the year 2000, when we wanted to install and run an open source application, we would download the code, then there would be a file called "INSTALL" telling us how to compile and install the application. If we followed all the steps there would be a 95% chance that the compilation will fail. But then we would still have clues to find out what the problem was. We didn't need to call the vendor and ask why it's not working and have him ignore us. I like the feeling of finding the answer, no matter if it is by myself or by discussing with others on the Internet.

In Taiwan there were many excellent people working on the i18n [internationalization] framework, which made localization a lot easier. I appreciated their contributions very much, and that's also what drove me to contribute more into the open source world.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: