KDE Wins Spot @Comdex Open Source Pavillion

Saturday, 8 November 2003 | Chowells

KDE will be represented at the large US computer show COMDEX, in Las Vegas, from the 17th to 20th November, as a result of placing second in a poll run by O'Reilly Network. Developer George Staikos will be demonstrating the soon-to-be-released KDE 3.2, featuring a vast number of improvements in all areas, as well Kolab, the Free Software groupware solution. Thank you for voting for KDE and giving us this opportunity of introducing our desktop to a whole new audience. See you there!

Comments:

Sounds like a great opportunity. - Eike Hein - 2003-11-07

Neat. Go, George, go! :-)

Plone? - Spy Hunter - 2003-11-08

What the heck is Plone, and how did it get more votes than KDE?

Re: Plone? - Eike Hein - 2003-11-08

Exactly my first question ;-). Apparently, it's a CMS: <a href="http://www.plone.org/">http://www.plone.org/</a>

Re: Plone? - Spy Hunter - 2003-11-08

CMSes are a dime a dozen. I've never heard of Plone, even though I've heard of every other project on that list other than the three bottom ones. Is it really that much better than the other CMSes that it deserves its own booth at Comdex? Are there even 1690 people using Plone to manage their site? I don't see how it could get that many votes. Not that I hate Plone or anything, I'm just kind of curious who is voting for it.

Re: Plone? - cies - 2003-11-08

> I'm just kind of curious who is voting for it. me too: Plone is build on CMF, CMF in it's turn is based on Zope, Zope is written in Python and needs a tweaked Apache (if I remember well). [dot.kde.org made with squishdot, which is also built on Zope, BTW] So Plone is only a layer on top of a lot of (IMHO very good) code... I interpreted the 'victory' for Plone as a victory for all stuff underneath it, just as I think KDE is thanking part of it's glory to trolltech and it's cute-'Qt'-lib. cheers, cies. P.S.: Not that i wasn't thinking of a voting script in the first place ;-)

Re: Plone? - Thorsten Schnebeck - 2003-11-08

We use Zope and Plone for our complete intern and extern webmanagement and workflow. Its a quite complex but powerful tool. We use the zope server on localhost and use Apache virtualhost feature to bind urls to our zope webservices via zope's so called Vitual Host Monster. Bye Thorsten

Re: Plone? - Anonymous - 2003-11-08

I agree. I voted in this poll a while ago when gnomedesktop.org was running something on it. I was surprised that Gnome had less than 1/3 the votes of KDE! I'm also shocked that OpenOffice had so many votes also. It's not a very exciting project, in my opinion. Too bad the OS booth couldn't have been cooler. KDE is definitely going to be the center of attention!

Re: Plone? - Anonymous - 2003-11-08

[Mod's note: Wiggle again...]

Re: Plone? - Eike Hein - 2003-11-08

This does qualify as mindless, destructive trolling, no? Mods?

Re: Plone? - Ian Reinhart Geiser - 2003-11-08

I think this is very premature. Novell purchased SuSE for its desktop distribution and tight integration. I would venture to guess that they would destroy SuSE linux in the process of converting it wholesale to gnome. On that note I'd be more mindful of Novell's past history (Word Perfect, UnixWare, etc..) I'm thinking worst case senario the world will miss SuSE and Ximian, while KDE marches on, unencumbered by corperate agendas and missteps. Just my 2c though -ian reinhart geiser

Thanks... - cies - 2003-11-08

...well said. Much better to reason than to mod trolls off.

Re: Thanks... - Eike Hein - 2003-11-08

Well, yeah, you're probably right. In my defense, I'm quickly getting frustrated and I've heard above comment a lot over the last few days, sometimes even in worse, even more content-lacking versions. I just don't comprehend what people get out of behaving like that.

Re: Thanks... - Aaron J. Seigo - 2003-11-08

here's my theory: a lot of people are personally invested in the various desktop projects and some of those people would be more than happy to see their favourite "win" through the destruction of the others. after all, if there is no competition, your favourite will always be the best, right? and if your favourite will always be the best, then your personal investment is guaranteed to be worthwhile and shrewd. you win, they loose. hooray! yes, this is shortsighted and sad, but not completely uncommon. the reverse can also happen out of panic: something appears to be negative for your favourite, and because of the personal loss such a death-knell would represent were it actually true, one may get overly concerned or read the situation to be overly-negative. i think Sun Tzu would have a choice word or three for both sorts...

Re: Thanks... - Ian Reinhart Geiser - 2003-11-08

Well i think both sides are just plane nervous now. I mean no-one knows whats going to happen. Will it just fizzle out? Will it be the next big thing? I think its enough to make people crazy. I mean personally Id love to see KDE succeed. I really dont care less if Gnome goes anywhere, but I know they push us to keep getting better. I think the true tragity would be to have one or the other ignored, or worse, them molded into some mess that is not what the respective authors want. Well see... its going to be a fun year :) -ian reinhart geiser

Re: Thanks... - Navindra Umanee - 2003-11-08

Proven long-time abusers are not welcome here. That's all.

Re: Thanks... - Ian Reinhart Geiser - 2003-11-08

You have more patence than me, i had to disable anon posting on kdedevelopers because we had some guy comming in and just posting garbage posts in past blogs... it sucks but the internet is the worlds largest bathroom stall door :)

Re: Thanks... - anon - 2003-11-08

Yes, perhaps we can switch to plone from squishdot/zope ;) there probably is even a migration path from various zope prods to plone.. =)

Re: Thanks... - Navindra Umanee - 2003-11-08

Hehe. I thought I'd take a look at Plone. So out of curiosity I did a search for "squishdot" on the site to see if there is a decent/backwards-compatible migration path. Guess what? The <a href="http://www.plone.org/Members/runyaga/news/News Item,2002-03-09,1015704695057735977/talkback/1015710958/view">first 2 results</a> I found mention dot.kde.org in a rather flattering way. :-)

Re: Thanks... - Navindra Umanee - 2003-11-08

I don't think one person justifies changing the way the dot works though... and I dare say the dot works dang well. :-)

Re: Thanks... - Wiggle - 2003-11-08

[Mod's note: Baleeted.]

Re: Thanks... - Datschge - 2003-11-08

[Mod's note: Don't feed the troll. :)]

Re: Plone? - Language - 2003-11-08

Well, that's ximian spin on the story. SuSe has a market, Ximian is just a programming think tank. In Europe Linux means Linux/KDE. Customers request it. Linux isn't strong on the desktop because of Ximian but KDE. So probably it will be more the other way round. Marketing: Ximian FUD: push - strategy give them Gnome SuSE: Pull strategy - the customers request KDE Guess who will be the stronger part? I imagine that ximian will be forced to drop its KDE bullying and will be forced to provide proer interoperability. "Novell purchased SuSE for its desktop distribution and tight integration" No, for the market access.

Re: Plone? - Ian Reinhart Geiser - 2003-11-08

well i refuse to speculate until the cards are on the table, i mean there are too many unknowns that go both ways. until someone says "This is what we are going to do..." its all wild armchair speculation :) in the mean time im going to try to make KDE kick ass... cheers -ian reinhart geiser

Re: Plone? - anon - 2003-11-08

nice try wiggie troll!

Re: Plone? - Navindra Umanee - 2003-11-08

Yes, it's wiggle -- somehow with Lynx/shell access to defiant.msoe.edu although his DSL is apparently still in the UK.

Re: Plone? - anon - 2003-11-08

> Gnome had less than 1/3 the votes of KDE becuase nobody reads gnomedesktop.org (in comparison to the old gnotices, of course =) ) > It's not a very exciting project I disagree.. OpenOffice is the premier free software office suite, just like KDE is the premier free software desktop.

Re: Plone? - Henno Harms - 2003-11-08

OpenOffice is no Gnome project. Unfortunately they oriented the apllication suite more towards Gnome while KDE or QT integration is still poor. However, perhaps SOT Office may focus on this.

Re: Plone? - John Alamo - 2003-11-08

As others have said, Plone is a CMS based on Zope. While there are lots of CMS packages out there, Plone is modular and comes packed with a LOT under the hood such as workflows, user & group management, customized content types, cache management, clustering (run multiple servers behind a load balancer and have centralized management), etc. Needless to say, for larger sites that maintain a larger staff of content developers, Plone provides a fantastic foundation to allow the site to be managed. As far as why it topped out the list, I am guessing that this has a lot to do with timing. The project just had a conference in mid-March which stirred up a LOT of interest .. I think around 150 people attended and over 800 people watched the live stream of the conference. In addition to this, on the plone.org website as well as mailing lists, etc.. the core development team persisted with reminders to get people to vote. In anycase, with Plone v2 set to be released at the end of the month (or early next month), I think having such an impressive project at Comdex is a great thing. It sounds like there have been many major newspapers, government agencies and businesses that have used the Plone/Zope combo. It should provide some impressive case studies for people unfamiliar with these larger OSS projects to be made aware of them. Needless to say, I am very excited that KDE will be there as well. KDE is the best FOSS desktop available and with the exciting new features in 3.2, it should make for an EXCELLENT Open Source Pavillion.. Hopefully there is ample time to make the booths inviting and fun to continue to open the eyes of others that have been less fortunate to experience FOSS first hand. :-)

Re: Plone? - steve - 2003-11-08

does it got something to do with slashdot? they called it "they're own" on they're site.

Re: Plone? - Spy Hunter - 2003-11-08

No, the story submitter called it his own, not the Slashdot editors. It has nothing to do with Slashdot, which runs on its own Perl code (Slashcode).

COMDEX - Evan "JabberWokky" E. - 2003-11-08

Thanks for reminding me to register. KDE will be in the exhibit area, right? I wonder how many people on the KDE boards and scene are going? It would be nice if we could all get together for lunch or dinner one day. Vegas is certainly the place for groups to meet.

Congradulations! - Alex - 2003-11-08

I'm suprised nobody mentioned that KDE came in ahead of GNOME by about 8,00 votes, which means that KDE got voted about twice as many times as GNOME did =)

Re: Congradulations! - Alex - 2003-11-08

Correction, KDE is ahead of gnome by 800 votes and got about three times as many votes as GNOME. I was ina hurry ;p

Re: Congradulations! - anon2 - 2003-11-08

Yeah, but then dot.kde.org was the only site that openly encouraged its viewers to vote early and vote often.

Re: Congradulations! - Anonymous - 2003-11-08

Wrong, http://plone.org/newsitems/comdex

Re: Congradulations! - anon - 2003-11-08

Actually, no. The site that gnomedesktop.org linked to (O'Reilly) encouraged a daily vote.

Worked out Well - David - 2003-11-08

It's nice to see my favourite and voted-for projects up there! KDE is a given, but Zope together with Plone are two very good projects. CMSs are not a dime a dozen, particularly with the advantages that an environment like Zope provides.

Is Plone really that good? - Anonymous - 2003-11-08

Is Plone really that good? Just tried their demo server at http://demo.plone.org and I got: 502 Proxy Error Proxy Error The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /. Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Operation timed out

Re: Is Plone really that good? - Paul Eggleton - 2003-11-09

Timed out... I guess it has been very popular lately then :)

Re: Is Plone really that good? - Navindra Umanee - 2003-11-09

That wouldn't be a Plone thing so much as the Zope server on which it is built. The server's been slashdotted though...

Isn't PHP-NUKE better? - Alex - 2003-11-09

From what I heard, ti is very good.

Re: Isn't PHP-NUKE better? - anon - 2003-11-09

nope - php-nuke isn't quite as advanced as plone is. plone is really targeted more at professional/government/enterprise websites than php-nuke is, and as such, has goodies like full section 508 compliance and a quite modern optional design mode (which doesn't work with konq)