KDE.news 

Today NewsForge published the last of my daily articles from aKademy. To read more about what happened in Ludwigsburg each day, dig into the articles from Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd (the developers' conference), Monday 23rd and Tuesday 24th, Wednesday 25th, Thursday 26th and Friday 27th (the coding marathon), and finally Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th (the users' and administrators' conference). Many thanks again to Giovanni Venturi, Stephan Binner, Sven Guckes, Michael Prokop, Peter Rockai and to anyone else whose photos I used in the series!

In its current issue Linux Magazine published an article (PDF) about KickPIM, a panel applet for quick access to your address book. Already published in a previous issue and also online available is a story (PDF) about KRename, a batch file renamer. Finally we were notified by Linux Magazine that a review of Konqueror 3.2 (PDF) has been added to the archive of the June 2004 issue.

The KDE CVS-Digest for this week: KDevelop has a new project builder. KMail now supports kwallet for mail account passwords. Krita adds KJSEmbed scripting support. KOffice now supports Indic.

John Terpstra, one of the long-term members of the Samba Team, never shies away from speaking his mind. He is known not only for his work on documenting Samba, and his long experience as a Senior Consultant, but also for his outspoken views on intellectual property. Intrigued by an article he published on Groklaw recently, I took his attendance at the KDE World Summit - aKademy - as an opportunity to talk to him about his thoughts on intellectual property, what problems the free software community faces, and how we (including KDE specifically) should respond. Read on for my reflections on our discussion.

In their own series of aKademy interviews, the German IT news website Golem.de has talked to KDE contributors Fabian Franz (also a member of the Knoppix development team) and Kurt Pfeifle about FreeNX. Now OSnews carries the English translation. NX, developed by NoMachine.com aims for nothing less than to revolutionize network computing. The software allows to connect and work on remote desktops even across low bandwidth links such as ISDN or modems. While at its core it speed-boosts X11 connections, as an addon it also can accelerate VNC/RFB and Windows Terminal Server/RDP sessions by a factor of 2 or more.

September 1, 2004 (The Internet) - The KDE Project is pleased to announce the successful completion of the KDE Community World Summit ("aKademy 2004") in Ludwigsburg (Germany) taking place from August 20th to 29th.

Today on the kde-quality list, Christian Loose of Cervisia fame celebrated the initial success of the Junior Jobs, which helped him get three patches. Junior Jobs were suggested by Adriaan de Groot back in May. They serve as a "you are welcome to hack here" sign, and mark bugs or wishes that are suitable for someone who is starting to hack KDE.

In his speech at aKademy, Bernhard Reiter of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) both celebrated Software Freedom Day and reminded the KDE community of what freedom in software means. The FSFE was founded in 2001 to promote and defend Free Software, and to coordinate national Free Software organizations, throughout Europe. Bernhard is the Chancellor of the German Chapter and has been involved since the FSFE's inception. Interested in what he had to say to the KDE community, I caught up with him after his talk to ask him a few questions. Read on for his responses.

During the KDE Contributor and Developer Conference at aKademy one of the speakers Avi Alkalay talked about his project Linux Registry. We met him afterwards and asked him several questions about this project.

Please give us some background information on yourself.

At aKademy a talk about Kalyxo was given by Kévin Ottens and Peter Rockai. Curious what this effort is all about we got in touch with the Kévin and Peter and they explained it all.