KDE 4.0 Release Event Keynote Now Online

On Friday, January 18th, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. gave the keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California about KDE 4, presenting KDE to the world and the world to KDE. The keynote was recorded, and is now available for streaming through Google Video. Continue reading to watch the keynote!

Aaron started with an introduction to KDE 4, beginning with the history of the project and expressing how far we have come in the last 11 years. Then, Aaron explored what KDE is, and what our community is based on - freedom and openness. Freedom to do work, have fun, and connect with others. Further, Aaron moved on to KDE 4, and discussed the near-future plans and ideas. The vision of KDE 4 is based upon three principles: beauty, accessibility, and functionality. He ventured into the many areas that KDE has improved upon, and pointed to our roadmap for the KDE 4 cycle.

The keynote is immediately available on Google Video, and will be available for download in other formats soon. The other talks will also become available tomorrow.

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Comments

by djouallah mimoune (not verified)

can i have a transcript of the speech, my english skills is very low,

by Danny Allen (not verified)

There is no transcript at the moment, but there is a summary of both the keynote and the other presentations after in the Day 2 event summary: http://dot.kde.org/1200788475/

Danny

by Chani (not verified)

"this video is currently not available. please try again later."

maybe google knows I'm really supposed to be studying and won't let me watch the video until I'm done ;)

by Chani (not verified)

waaait a sec.
"Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn't available in your country."

ok, guess I have to find all google-video hostnames and route them through a proxy :P oh yeah, I just *love* being in china :P

by Hans (not verified)

Hoho, I remember that problem from when I was there. It was strange though, I think I just changed user agent to Internet Explorer/Vista and then it worked. o_O

by nihui (not verified)

oh.
I can't watch it,either.
I'm in Shanghai, China..... :(

by Chani (not verified)

:(
if I had root on any of my proxy servers I'd offer you an account.

maybe once the oggs are up they'll be on a server you can download from.

Not that Aaron should try to imitate either of them; they're both egomaniac control freaks. KDE and Free/Open Source Software are really lucky to have has such an eloquent spokesperson as Aaron. And he's the talented developer in charge of one of the most visible parts of KDE, Plasma. Tip my hat, sir!

I don't think he outperforms Steve Jobs, but he is excellent.

it would be nice though if they tried to create a more professional production. the image quality of the video could definitely be better, and it would help if they were filming it from a few angles. also better projectors and sound system (the video he played would have been so much better).

the video editing was quite good, and so were the speakers. I guess the real question though is what is the target use of this video? because if you want to use it as marketing material for tech enthusiasts, it has to be much better. of course, there may be an issue of limited funds.

All Aaron needs to reach the level of Steve Jobs is add a few "great, extraordinary, most amazing, tremendous, better and better and better" and then put his laptop in an envelop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz1-cPx0cIk

Steve Jobs is a bit more lively, and shows more excitement about what he is talking about. the constant repetition of every point he makes does bother me.

Steve Jobs uses NLP methods a lot. That's why he is a great public speaker, and memorable. (People like Tony Robins use the same method.)

A side effect is, that it stretches a small amount of products to last about an hour's lenght.

Also keep in mind that people use Steve Jobs' keynote instead of a user manual these days to learn how to use a product.

For this last presentation Aaron's format was great, and I'm glad somebody has even decided to tape it so we can see the footage "like we were there".

I think for a consumer level presentation, it would be great if Aaron would go over all the features of KDE 4.1 (when it comes out for Windows/Mac).
That would really help "sell" (increase public awareness, publicity, and show users how to use it.) the 4.1 branch and onwards. It works for Steve Jobs, just let Aaron develop his own speaking style for KDE. I'm looking forward to a similar hype about upcoming KDE releases. (don't forget to mark them on digg, stumbleupon, del.ici.ous, etc..)

I wonder if Google is willing to sponsor such an event.

Outdoing Steve would mean saying "Better, better, better!" in every sentence.
I think Aaron was on different level as those two.

Best keynote i have seen in ages.

It was a very informative and educational presentation and he presented himself as a surprisingly (for me) professional speaker. I wouldn't compare him with the above mentioned persons because he seems to be honest and more natural. Attributes that Steve and Bill could borrow from him.

by djouallah mimoune (not verified)

ok it is stupid to appreciate someone only upon his look, but don't you think that Seigo need a hair cut. i suppose that is the task of kde marketing team!

i would like to thank you all guys, i am here proudly showing kde app under windows to my coworkers,

cheers from algeria

by Dread Knight (not verified)

Yeah, let's all have short hair and wear black suits and we'll all looks pretty much the same, that sounds like fun :|

It's all about the freedom of choice man!

You really sound like a communist xD

Anyway, it was a great speech, I've enjoyed every minute of it, even if I was already aware of the new technology and things going on :)

Cheers! ^^

by Odysseus (not verified)

He _has_ had a haircut :-) And he has a real job too...

by djouallah mimoune (not verified)

come on i was just kidding, perhaps i am just jealous of his hair;)

Hello Guys...please check our the hair beauty products also...it's good

by Sebastian (not verified)

Please, can you stop bashing around! Talking about somebody's haircut seems to be quite amusing to some people, particularly if one can do this anonymously without being seen by the target person on the web.

I wonder how insensitive some of the posters within the last days may be that they do not realize that any comment on somebody's hairstyle is meant to offend and discredit the target person. Aaron is one of the currently most committed and active persons of the KDE project. It would be a pity if KDE loses him and his effort due to some stupid comments!

Keep you head up, Aaron! As somebody said, KDE is free in everything - opinions and personal look. Who does not understand this - well....

by Sami (not verified)

I think that it would be a good idea to implement some kind of moderation system to dot.kde.org. We ordinary people could mod stupid comments down and Real Heroes like Aaron could just read real comments without this static noise...

Well, I guess I should try to google if there's any good free systems available to replace current dot engine. By the way: is there something going on to replace current dot.?

by Dread Knight (not verified)

Well, I'm actually starting a non-profit organization specialized on open source software development, especially kde related, but i can't say it could actually compete / replace dot.kde without some actual editors in the team that can bring original news articles...

The system I'm using is drupal (open source content management system) and it's very robust/scalable. So if any editors and any other people who want to help or just want to find out more, feel free to contact me at my email address.

Cheers!

by Tsiolkovsky (not verified)

Done! This was an excellent presentation of KDE 4.0. Don't forget to also share it on other social bookmarking sites like reddit.com, del.icio.us, stumbleupon ...

by djouallah mimoune (not verified)

done, please we need your diggs ,as to make it to the front page,

by mxttie (not verified)

thanks! looking forward to the hi def download / torrent :)

by Tsiolkovsky (not verified)

Besides having it in high definition it looks like it would also be helpful to those people where they can't access Google Video because of internet censorship.

by Joseph Gaffney (not verified)

HD was not in the cards for this. Franz Keferboeck & his supporters in the booth did an excellent job in getting this together, and should be thanked for his outstanding efforts.

As far as HD goes, you've got to understand, the truly HD video cameras are in the $40k and up range, and then of course you need the devices to record to, so on...

Care to donate a 24p studio-quality camera? ;)

by tobami (not verified)

I think what he actually meant with HD was not 720p or such, but a higher definition video than at googlevideo. You don't need 720p to look decent, normal PAL or NTSC is much better than the streaming video version on googlevideo.

So no $40k needed for that ;)

by Troy Unrau (not verified)

Incidentally, the original footage was 720p :)

by tobami (not verified)

Oh!, great. Will videos in that definition be available for download?

by mxttie (not verified)

"I think what he actually meant with HD was not 720p or such, but a higher definition video than at googlevideo"

exactly! thanks ;)

could somebody remove my email address out of the original post, i didn't know it would be public and notifications don't seem to work anyway.....

by Max (not verified)

Cool, looking forward to seeing this at TV resolution (higher def than google/youtube..)

Please post when and where the torrent will be available.

by Tapio Kautto (not verified)

This was a great speech, it really combined all the bits of information about KDE 4 we've been reading before.

Thanks for Aaron and the others for a great summary.

KDE 4 sure will be a great software platform - it already is very promising and getting there. Few years ago it used to be just a desktop, later a desktop environment and set of applications. Now we can seriously talk about a software platform.

For and end user desktop and the applications are the operating system. In that sense KDE will provide a wonderful platform for application providers - both open source as well as proprietary.

What I'm dreaming of is a seamless integration of free and closed software on the same platform. Examples of that would be:

- a lot more commercial and proprietary applications based on KDE libraries
- seamless integration of commercial plugins (Flash, Shockwave, DivX, mp3) in KDE
- seamless integration of proprietary hardware drivers (Win32 drivers on Unix/Linux, automatic or semi-automatic installation of proprietary Unix/Linux drivers)
- seamless integration of Windows applications on Unix/Linux and KDE, especially commercial 3D games

I'm an open source fan and a promoter, but I think that commercial closed source software has to be taken into account as well. If we could integrate commercial offerings into this great open environment, we'd definetly be on a path to WORLD DOMINATION ;)

A lot of this is already on it's way. There is a way to run plugins and applications on Wine and KDE, but these solutions are not ready for the end user.

Tapio Kautto

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

No thanks, we're already infected by too much proprietary stuff, see e.g. the use of Flash streaming to deliver these videos.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

>a lot more commercial and proprietary applications based on KDE libraries

Should not happen, once KDE is GPL. Too bad, I would like this also. Luckly they can do Qt programs that will look well uintegrated in KDE.

About the other commentary, I don't think proprietary technology is bad per-se and we can't like in a aquarium forever, so let's do a reality check:
Does most of web sites today use flash? Yes
Does a big part of them *require* flash to work properly? Yes
Do we have a free native qt/kde implementation of flash? No

Sure, the ideal would be to have SVG+JavaScript, but not even free platafforms support those very well, so unless we have a better product to offer (see Firefox, XVid and others) using something proprietary is a need :-(

by Morty (not verified)

>>a lot more commercial and proprietary applications based on KDE libraries

>Should not happe, nonce KDE is GPL

It will happen, it's designed for this. The KDE libraries are LGPL/BSD to allow this. This has been KDE library policy since forewer. Whatever license KDE applications use(GPL2, GPL3, BSD, MIT, QPL, EPL etc), can not change this.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

So my mistake here, but I *ever* read articles stating that kdelibs where GPL and this was one of the advantages of gnome (lGPL) over kde.

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

Qt is GPL or commercial. So to develop commercial KDE software one has to purchase an expensive commercial Qt license but one can use KDE libs in the commercial product.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

I can do fine without Flash, thank you very much.
Moreover, there is Klash (from the Gnash project) now.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

I can't because of youtube, charges.com.br and other fun sites.
I can live without them, but and where all the fun will be? ;)

by nobody (not verified)

Great idea!
Let's replace everything in our free and open operating system piece by piece with proprietary software. Why haven't I thought of that.
That's just genius.

ADOBE - if you're reading this:

Please start working on Adobe Creative suite for KDE 4.X.Y branch. Think about it, you'd be able to write software that seamlessly integrates Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

It would open up a great sales opportunity for you.

TO OTHERS:

I think the future will be a nice split between proprietory and open source software. It would be great if KDE helps merge these two words seamlessly together and be truly platform independent. Free software will follow. I love open source, but I do acknowledge that there is some closed source software that is great and deserves to also exist under Open source platforms, such as KDE, Linux, and the like.

by Tapio Kautto (not verified)

Amen.

Perhaps some people like to troll or just have their head up in their **s, but I'll repeat my opinion anyway.

It's not realistic to think that all applications and libraries would be open source. I'd really love if they would, but it's not going to happen. Many important applications will be proprietary, and we just have to accept that.

Why Firefox is popular? It's a great application, there's a need for it but also because it supports proprietary plugins. It offers more complete user experience than it would offer without supporting for them. Many people would just try it and abandon it because they would like to see the evil content that's not open.

Why OpenOffice.org? Because it supports evil operating systems and evil document formats.

We need more and more open source implementations, but we also need to take closed apps and plugins into account (I just can't say 'support' because it would feel bad to say so as an open source person)

Having the best platform will draw attention from commercial entities, this means more companies paying for people to work on KDE. That will benefit as all, those that have aggressive attitude towards proprietary vendors as well as those of us that accept the reality.

TK.

by ofcourse (not verified)

Yes.. and change the KDE slogan to:
"don't be free..."

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

> The keynote is immediately available on Google Video, and will be available
> for download in other formats soon.

Hopefully Ogg Theora+Vorbis will be one of those! Down with proprietary formats!

See also this great blog post by John "J5" Palmieri about this topic: http://www.j5live.com/?p=421

by Paul (not verified)

+1
I want my theora video please.

by Thomas Zander (not verified)

I'm a bit disappointed that KDE choose to release the videos in a closed format first. I'm also waiting for the open formats (due to flash not being available for me).

On the positive side; I can't recall the videos being available so shortly after the event, ever. Thats awsomeness right there :)