KDE.news 

The open source WYSIWYG web editor project Kafka is looking for interested developers. We are looking for coders, documentation writers, testers etc. Anyone and everyone is invited to get involved.

You can find out more here.

The organization Norsk Målungdom, which works with promoting the Norwegian (Nynorsk) language, asks Norwegian schools to boycott Microsoft products and use KDE instead. MS Windows and Office only exist in the Norwegian (Bokmål) language, but Norwegian law states that pupils have the right to books and equipment in their own language.

Luis Digital wrote us about his various presentations on the KDE2 betas directed at the Hispanic community, but with screenshots everyone can enjoy. In a similar vein, MachineOfTheMonth is presenting a review of Kandidat (warning: popup ads). As always, these kinds of reviews always tend to get out of date very quickly -- several of the issues mentioned have been addressed in more recent updates. And finally, yes, KDE2 is right on track for a release next week. Congrats to everyone involved!

theKompany.com is pleased to announce the first public beta of Kivio, our diagramming and flowcharting tool for Linux/KDE.

Kivio is the first and most complete diagramming tool for KDE. Kivio has been integrated into KOffice through the use of KParts. This technology preview release is the first public beta of Kivio. There is a core set of functionality and features to start getting feedback from the Linux/KDE community.

I'm pleased to announce that KDE received the Linux Journal Readers' Choice award for Favorite Desktop Environment at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. You can take a look at the award poster. Congratulations everyone!

Sun Microsystems, probably best known at the KDE end of the spectrum for their influential paper on local vs distributed computing, recently open-sourced StarOffice, making it freely available to KDE as well as other projects. What impact will this have on KDE and KOffice? Ideally, even though OpenOffice is technically a competitor to KOffice (Sun apparently denies this) and despite the naysayers, OpenOffice will be of sizable benefit to KDE. Read on for a few of my initial thoughts on the matter.

Ivan E Moore has pulled the plug on the KDE Linux Packaging Project. On his page he explains the reasons, citing a lack of time and the fact that he received little help from the community, along with "one person".

This week's installment of The People Behind KDE, interviews David Faure of Konqueror fame. David has done some amazing programming for KDE and continues to impress. What is David's current role in KDE? "Doing the dirty job :). Fixing bugs everywhere I can, helping users and developers that have problems. I also work on some Mandrake-specific KDE stuff. Oh, and when I have time after all this, I work on improving konqueror and I plan to do more on koffice in the future."

LinuxOnline is currently featuring an interesting interview with Shawn Gordon of theKompany.com.

"Everyone I've talked to is amazed that we are able to make this work. theKompany is spread across 11 time zones at the moment. We have people in England, Germany, Italy, Russia and Romania, with people in the Ukraine and Thailand we are looking to hire shortly. Overall it works very well, but we do have enclaves of people in Moscow and Iasi Romania, we are going to open an office in Iasi soon for the 5 people that will be working there. The advantages are a lower overhead cost for me. It's not like we intentionally looked at other countries, we just looked for good people, and that's just where they lived."

Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel recently announced Java bindings for DCOP. In other words, Java can now communicate with and control KDE2 applications. A welcome addition to the existing C bindings for DCOP, originally used by the long gone kmapnotify. Then, of course, there's kxmlrpc which provides a bridge to DCOP for anything that can speak HTTP and XML (eg, control DCOP-speaking apps from a shell script or python). And as if all that wasn't enough, there's the command-line or point-n-shoot DCOP browser/executor that just goes to show how far, flexible and mature DCOP has become in a short matter of time. Simplicity pays off in the end.