Trouw: Snowflake Becomes Avalanche

If you can still get your hands on a copy of Trouw from last Friday, you might be thrilled to find half of page 16 dedicated to an interview with KDE contributors Charles Samuels, Rob Kaper and, myself, Fabrice Mous. The three of us met in The Hague with Vincent Dekker and the result is a long article in the Dutch newspaper. A translation of the article follows with the permission of the paper.

Snowflake Becomes Avalanche

by Vincent Dekker

Our enormous dependence on computer software from the American-based entity known as Microsoft isn't a healthy situation. Fortunately, the Linux community provides an alternative in the form of free software for use on PCs and is already gaining quite some terrain. Despite this, Microsoft still reigns supreme in the desktop arena. Hopefully this will not be for long as Lindows, a small competitor to Microsoft, works to combine the power of Linux with the ease of use of Windows.

Rob Kaper is truly a computer freak. He's a student at the "Academy of Digital Communication" at Utrecht and one can often find him behind his PC even deep into the night. Fabrice Mous seems wiser: he exchanges his study of "Design and Interaction" at The Hague for working on the joint project only for "an average of an hour a day". And Charles Samuels, American student of computer technology, is feeling grumpy: "My current address in England has no internet connection so currently I can work on KDE for barely an hour a week."

What binds the three is KDE, a world-wide initiative to deliver computer users a good and especially useful alternative to Microsoft's Windows. The meaning of K seems to be a riddle, but the D and E are the first letters of Desktop Environment and that what it's all about. In the world of computers the desktop is the part of the software with which the user interacts directly.

"You can compare it to a car," says Rob Kaper. "Linux would be the engine, a part where the driver might never interact with directly. A desktop like KDE would be the dashboard with controls and warning LEDs". Car manufacturers deliver many variants of engines but around the dashboard everything has to be easily recognisable and usable. One who drives a rented car should not have to search hours for the light switch or brake pedal.

From that point of view Microsoft has done a big favor to the world. As 90 percent of all desktop PCs in the world have Windows on them and this forces other programs to offer standard procedures and paradigms, we can easily switch from one PC to another. Starting a program, printing something, closing windows: when somebody is familiar with the concept of mouse clicks, you can perform the actions anywhere.

In the beginning of the nineties it became clear that Microsoft was developing a huge monopoly in the market of PC software market. Competitors offered Unix, a somewhat older operating system for powerful enterprise computers. They modified and polished it but it failed miserably. Each competitor wanted to make money and were making their own unique versions.

In Finland a guy called Linus Torvalds chose another path. He made a version of Unix which was free for all to use and enhance. Very quickly a lot of computer enthusiasts began supporting his initiative and that's how Linux was started, a powerful operating system that keeps gaining territory in the operating system market.

But as said before, Linux is the 'engine'. What was missing is the complementary 'dashboard', the desktop. As Rob Kaper explains, "In October 1996, German Matthias Ettrich raised the alarm on the Internet that every Unix vendor had its own desktop, severely complicating the life of users. He proposed to develop an integrated desktop within the community."

"Meanwhile what started as a little snowflake, has grown to the proportion of an avalanche," says Fabrice Mous. Scattered all over the world, thousands of people are working voluntarily on making enhancements and adjustments to what has become known as the KDE desktop. Sometimes very handy stuff like file management, Internet access and so on, sometimes just programs for fun. "The most important element I contributed was a Monopoly game," stated Kaper. I wanted that myself and when I wrote the program I thought 'Why keep this to myself?' And most importantly, people will report bugs when you start releasing it for the KDE platform and that sounded like a good idea."

"On the other hand he also reported and fixed some bugs in other programs," supplies Fabrice Mous. Mous is no programmer himself but a translator. Together with other people from KDE.nl they take care of the Dutch versions of the program. "Right now KDE has been translated to 57 languages and the Dutch language is always one of the first translations available."

Charles Samuels from San Jose, California is a programmer just like Rob Kaper and the two know each other from their work on the KDE. He is currently in the Netherlands for a brief vacation. Samuels has written a so-called media player for playing MP3's and other music files on the computer. Just like Kaper he did this primarily because he wanted to have a nice media player for himself.

"Don't think we are a bunch of reds who want to destroy capitalism, because we are not," says Fabrice Mous. "People who are working on this project come from all walks of life. KDE in the Netherlands has participation of managers, lots of students like us and we have a cook who is the coordinator of our Dutch group."

Reds or not, the way KDE is producing new versions would have gotten quite some sympathy from a typical idealist from the sixties or seventies. Fabrice Mous, "There is not one person who has a final say in this, like Linus Torvalds has with Linux. Everybody is equal and every contribution is equal. Although we have the concept that we have people with an account when they want to touch the code themselves, and people without these accounts. This is because not everybody is going to be involved for a long time. When it looks like somebody is going to stick around for a while then it is useful to get write access. It is a also meant as some form of security. You don't want outsiders to do a lot of damage to a program."

"All participants of the project determine together which parts will be added to new versions or which parts need to be enhanced. Each version has a release dude, some kind of coordinator. This person has to ensure that every workgroup is releasing their contribution on time."

Early next year, maybe already in January, KDE 3.2 will be released and already people, all over the world, are planning the successor. For several years, Mous, Kaper and Samuels have been devoted to continuously enhancing KDE. Slowly but surely the project is harvesting world-wide recognition. As previously mentioned, the American-based Lindows, competitor to Microsoft, has been working solidly on their reputation, and have been making their Linux-based operating system LindowsOS user-friendly with the help of the KDE desktop. The biggest American department store Wal Mart is selling PCs with LindowsOS pre-installed on it and Seagate, the biggest manufacturer of hard disks will deliver LindowsOS on your harddisk without extra payments. This will contribute to make KDE the de facto standard for Windows alternatives.

Mous suspects that KDE already has that kind of position in Europe. Partly thanks to SUSE, a German company by origin that distributes a variant of Linux mostly aimed at enterprise deployments. SUSE too uses KDE as the desktop component of their operating system. In principle everybody delivers their contributions to KDE without direct monetary compensation, although some do get paid. Mous: "SUSE asked the KDE group if they could develop a program to burn DVDs on the PC. We managed to do that and thus SUSE was able to be the first Linux distribution to supply this burner program. But afterwards the burner program became part of KDE and it is freely available now."

Companies like SUSE are not the 'owner' of a Linux/KDE version and can not sell the program individually. Instead of that they earn their with providing services to companies who are using Linux. And if they put their program on a CD and make it therefore easy to install on a PC, they can ask a fee, mostly a small one, for that CD.

Also the government has shown more and more interest in programs like Linux and KDE. On one hand they want to be less dependent on Microsoft; on the other hand they notice that the so called Open Source Software (software where the source code is totally public) is winning more and more in quality.

The German government is already a big user of KDE. Kaper: "Germany always wanted to get away from Windows but didn't want to lose certain features they had with Windows programs. As a result, a number of KDE programmers were contracted to develop software to share addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and appointments. This work has also become a standard part of KDE."

A special development is that KDE can be used on the newest Apple computers. "Apple always had their own operating system, but the newest, OSX, is based on a version of Unix. This makes it possible to run KDE on your desktop of your Apple computer. I think that Apple noticed the power we have at hand to develop better versions every time", says Kaper.

Having KDE on Apple computers is an interesting proposition. Many people might think that the program Windows is an invention of Microsoft, but in fact Microsoft copied a lot from Mac OS which was developed by Apple and made quite a splash in the eighties. With KDE on Apple, the user-friendly software is about to return to its source.

Rob Kaper: "It isn't about world domination, but..." -- "Well," interrupts Charles, "it is a little bit about world domination." "Sure, maybe a little bit. But eventually we just want to make the best product available"

© 2003 Trouw