Stuart Jarvis 

KDE has again taken part in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as its biggest participating organization. Fifty-nine out of mind-boggling sixty projects have been completed successfully. Lots of new things have been learned, lots of code has been written and there's been plenty of fun. GSoC is over but the code has not gone away and the work is not finished. Over the next months, many of the students will continue to be part of KDE, integrate the code for future releases, improve it, maintain it, become more part of KDE. For now, however, pencils are down and we congratulate the students. It was a great summer and we enjoyed having you around!

While the heat of the Desktop Summit 2011 is still remaining, we are already looking for a host for Akademy 2012.

Akademy is the annual gathering of the KDE community, one of the largest and most significant in the world of Free and Open Source Software. At Akademy, the KDE community gathers to exchange ideas for development and to discuss other important topics. It is an extraordinary occasion for creativity, enthusiasm, commitment, close working relationships and innovation, so hosting Akademy is a rare opportunity.

Jonathan Kolberg

One particular highlight of the past few days was the Intel AppUp workshop, in which conference attendees who had preregistered were able to learn about the AppUp program, including App stores and development tools to optimize and distribute applications for Windows and MeeGo. The Intel team explained that Intel AppUp is the only large online Appstore system that is really friendly to distributing free software. For example, if the application developer chooses GPL, they are prompted to upload source code which can then be automatically distributed along with the applications binary. As a bonus, Intel loaned each of the workshop attendees a developer tablet running MeeGo to enable easy testing of applications and aid development.

Boudewijn Rempt shows off Krita

The hallways and courtyard were again busy with small, lively discussions. As the morning went on the attendance at talks increased noticeably. Sunday was also the day of the press conference, where key figures from GNOME, KDE and the cross-community organizing team met with the press to answer their questions about the event and the future of free software.

Friday, 5 August - Preparations for a Big Event

Friday, 10:00, August 5, 2011. A big group of people was standing a bit lost in the cloakroom of the Humboldt University at Unter den Linden, Berlin. They were the volunteers for the Desktop Summit 2011 - but without guidance and leadership, they were just nervously looking around and talking to each other.

Thomas Thwaite, designer and technologist, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer's Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.

The Desktop Summit Team is now pleased to announce this year's program of talks.

The report summarizes KDE activities in the last three months on 2010, including sprints and trade shows attended by KDE contributors with the support of KDE e.V. It features the individual supporting membership campaign 'Join the Game', and how KDE benefits from it. There is a showcase for community artwork, including the report itself. New KDE e.V. members are presented, as is an overview of KDE e.V.'s finances.

The Necessitas team, led by Bogdan Vatra, is pleased to announce the first alpha release of Necessitas, a Qt SDK for the Android mobile platform.

The release contains the following:

Google Code-in begins at 08:00 UTC on 22 November 2010 and the first KDE projects will be available then, although more will be added later. Google Code-in ends on 10 January 2011. Anyone aged between 13 and 18 on 22 November can take part as long as they are in pre-university education and have their parents' consent (see contest rules for details on eligibility). In addition to gaining skills by completing the tasks and becoming part of the KDE community, all students who successfully complete a task will receive a t-shirt and certificate. Students will also revive US$100 for every three tasks they complete, up to a maximum payment of US$500 per student. There will also be grand prizes for students accumulating the most points. Full details can be found on the Google Code-in FAQ and the timeline.

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KDE.News Opinion articles represent only the view of the author on a particular issue and should not be interpreted as reflecting KDE's official position

Akademy is barely over, but tech news sites and mainstream publications are already reporting on events in Tampere.

DistroWatch on Nokia's Akademy Keynote

Read the full story in DistroWatch Weekly.

Not everyone can make it to Akademy, although given the record number of people captured in the group photo, it probably seems like everyone did.

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We've received a number of excellent designs and now it is time to pick the best. The judging panel will include four members of the KDE promotion team and you.

Learn where you are

While the KDE community busied itself with preparations for the 4.3 release, KDE 4 continued to spread to new platforms with ReactOS user Davy Bartoloni reporting (machine translation of original Italian) some success in running KDE applications on that operating system.