KDE Developers of Spain

During the final days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the fourth edition of Akademy-es was held in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Akademy-es is the sister of Akademy aimed at Spanish speakers.

Even in the hot phase up to KDE 4.3.0, there have been quite a bunch of fixes to KDE's 4.3 branch. The KDE Release Team has decided to err on the safe side and do another release candidate before KDE 4.3.0 comes out. Dirk Müller has rolled tarballs of the current state of KDE 4.3 and put them up for testers, packages for some distributions are already under way. This also means that the release of KDE 4.3.0 has been postponed for one week. The new planned release date is August, 4th 2009.

One notable change since RC2 is a performance fix for Plasma's caching of rendered SVG graphics that lead to the applet being frozen for a short while after resizing it. A regression that cropped up after RC2, and which resulted in HTTP redirects being broken has been fixed in RC3 as well.

Please give this KDE 4.3 RC3 some good testing to make sure KDE 4.3.0 will be as flawless as possible.

Over the last few years KDE has seen increased involvement of students and university researchers. While many universities still feel uneasy about working with Free Software, the open and welcoming attitude in the KDE community has already brought several scientific research projects to life. A prime example is of course the Nepomuk project, officially finished but still very much alive within the Free Software- and scientific communities. Furthermore, many involved contributors make use of scientific research papers while looking for inspiration to solve the more complex problems involved in writing software. The Free Software community also contributes in a practical way to science: the Avogadro project, grown out of the KDE educational application Kalzium develops an advanced molecular editor designed for use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. Last Akademy, an initiative was developed by Celeste Lyn Paul to bring KDE and science even closer. Read on for an interview with Celeste about this initiative and a talk with Laura Dragan, one of the contributors to this initiative for Akademy 2009!

KDE announced today that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion-based revision control system.

"This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world."

The 500,000th commit took place on January 19th, 2006, and the 750,000th commit 23 months later on December 18th, 2007. In contrast, only nineteen more months were required to reach the 1,000,000 commit milestone.

At the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Amarok developers Bart Cerneels and Nikolaj Hald Nielsen gave a talk about how a community-developed Free Software project like Amarok can work with businesses in a way that benefited both, without compromising on the spirit or openness of the project.

One of the things that was touched upon was the recent release of the Palm Pre smartphone which relies on Apple's iTunes software for synchronising music with a computer. An interesting question asked was what would happen if Apple decided to block the Pre from using iTunes. Now, just over a week later, this is exactly what happened. Apple has indeed blocked the Pre from using iTunes with its latest update.

In 1996 when KDE was first announced, it had only a handful of developers and the project could manage the source code without using a revision control system. More and more developers have begun to contribute to KDE over the years, and while there has been some attrition, the total number of active developers working on KDE has been steadily growing.

In order to get a pulse from the current contributor community, Simon St. James and Arthur Schiwon produced and plotted two basic metrics that show the continued growth within the KDE community.

Active KDE Contributers 1997-2009 (small version)

Akademy 2009 was held as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria last week. During the week the KDE community attended conference presentations and was engaged in meetings, informal discussions and of course a great deal of coding. This article provides an overview of what's happening in the KDE universe and what can be expected for the future.

The KDE development platform gains support by Maemo's announcement to include Qt as supported platform in its next release. The semantic desktop gained traction with wider adoption of its underlying infrastructure. The Plasma team showed their upcoming netbook interface; a first version is expected to be available in the first quarter of next year. Cornelius Schumacher reports that KDE e.V., the organization behind KDE, is healthily growing and new projects to grow KDE's developer base and industry adoption are being spawned. A shift to next generation code hosting using the version control system git and its web interface Gitorious was announced, creating a way for more people to contribute to KDE in the future.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

Every two weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team will be publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you're at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for the KDE 4 port of K3b which is currently underway. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the K3b Icons Survey now.

During the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Frank Karlitschek announced the open-pc initiative. The aim of this ambitious project is to cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community. Read on for more information about this initiative from the team.

Many of you who did not come to Akademy might be wondering how this meeting compares to the previous years' conferences. After all, aside from being in a sunny location, there are many different animals around here besides the usual trolls and dragons. Gnomes might be small, but they are noticable and they certainly make for interesting company. Read on for an impresson of Akademy at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

The Akademy 2009 Group Photo