[dot] Matthias Ettrich talks about KDE and aKademy

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1091963184/

From: aKademy Team <akademy-team at kde.org>
Dept: take-me-to-your-founder
Date: Sunday 08/Aug/2004, @13:06

Matthias Ettrich talks about KDE and aKademy
============================================

   Continuing the series of articles previewing KDE's World Summit, 
aKademy [http://conference2004.kde.org/] (running from August 21st to
29th), Tom  Chance interviewed Matthias Ettrich, the founder of the KDE
project, the creator of the LyX  document-processor, and an employee of
Trolltech. At aKademy he will be talking about  how  to design
intelligent, Qt-style APIs
[http://conference2004.kde.org/cfp-devconf/matthias.ettrich-designingqtstyleapis.php].
I asked him for his thoughts about the status of the  KDE project, its
achievements, and what he is looking forward to in aKademy. You can read
the  previous interview with Nils Magnus of LinuxTag here
[http://dot.kde.org/1091772577/].

     Q: We all know you as the founder of KDE, but what is your current
role in the project?

     Matthias Ettrich: Today I am very much focused on KDE's underlying
technology, the Qt toolkit. This pretty much is a full-time job, so I'm
no longer feeling bad about not actively contributing code to other
parts of KDE anymore. When you take a step back and recognize how much
the KDE team achieves in relation to its financial backup and the number
of developers, you'll clearly see how important a solid foundation is.
We are an insanely productive development community, and we achieve that
by layering our software stack and investing into the foundation,
instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.

     It's all about developers and what developers need to be efficient.
Every hour spent on Qt and the KDE libraries is an hour spent wisely,
because an every growing number of applications benefits from it. So
that's what I do.

     In addition my Trolltech position allows me to contribute
indirectly to KDE's success: Some of our engineers can do part-time work
on KDE, we sponsor David Faure, and of course we are an aKademy gold
sponsor. On a more personal level I do my share of giving talks and
interviews, I make an effort to bring people together, and I try to
actively help with community events like last year's conference in Nove
Hrady and this year's aKademy.

     Q: What is your favorite development in the project since you
started it?

     ME: The greatest thing for me is that we managed to grow the
project while keeping its initial culture and soul intact. We started
out with a relatively small group of equals that cooperated purely based
on mutual respect and technical merits. This is pretty standard for
small engineering groups. What makes KDE special, though, is that we
managed to scale this to the overwhelming size the project has today.
With KDE e.V. and its statutes we have found and established a mechanism
that makes sure KDE stays this way: a project owned and controlled by
its active community of individual contributors. Establishing KDE e.V.
and seeing it gaining acceptance within the KDE community was probably
the most important non-technical development that happened, and this
process is far from being over.

     Q: Almost four years ago [1] you said that in 2005 you'll be a
manager due to the success of KDE (which "will be a leading desktop
platform by then"). Given that you only have one year left, what are
your thoughts on this prediction?

     ME: Well, I have been working as a Director of Software Development
for some time now, so for me it became true already. Luckily my concerns
about being a manager turned out to be exaggerated, managing people is
not as bad as I anticipated it to be. Lesson to be learned: one should
not rely on Dilbert as the only source of information. The obvious
downside is less time for coding, but it comes with a strong upside: by
working through a team you can achieve far more than what you could do
on your own. Just imagine somebody offered you 50 extra hands. And not
only that: each pair of hands came with a brain of its own, each with
extra skills and talents that complete your own. Now, how good does that
sound?

     With regards to KDE becoming a leading desktop platform: we are
already, in many areas. We are a leader in terms of active community, in
terms of network integration, in terms of providing freedom and choice
to desktop users, and in terms of providing a sophisticated development
framework for application developers.

     Q: What do you think the "next big thing" in KDE will be?

     ME: There is one thing that will become increasingly important in
the future, not just for KDE, but for all of Linux: a convincing answer
to Microsoft's .Net. I'm not concerned about the server, I'm concerned
about the client, and about the belief that some people in the community
share, that you can successfully clone Microsoft's APIs and then keep up
with them. Free software should not be about cloning, but about
creating. If we want to be successful, we need to have our own APIs. And
guess what, we are really good at that. There is no reason to throw
everything away and start all over again from scratch. Instead we must
built upon what we already have, and that is native code.

     Native code is and will be the solid basis of every successful
computing platform, simply for its flexibility, its performance, and its
low memory consumption. With KDE and Qt, it's easy to develop native
code.  Once you get the hang on it, it is easier than e.g. developing
complex applications with Java/Swing.

     Still it would be nice to take advantage of JIT-compiled bytecode
where it makes sense, and have the two worlds interoperate. Currently
there are two technical options: integrating Mono and the CLR, or going
for a Java Virtual Machine. Mono at present has several advantages:
First, there is no free JIT-compiling JVM that is equally actively
developed and it doesn't look like there will be one. Second,
cooperating with Miguel and the Ximian group at Novell is probably a lot
easier than cooperating with Sun. And third, it is easier to integrate
native C++ code with the CLR than going through the JNI.

     Q: What are you looking forward to in aKademy?

     ME: Meeting people, having fun, and watching KDE improve! Every KDE
conference so far has been a big happy gathering of friends that
kick-started an insane commit rate to the CVS. And there's no reason why
aKademy 2004 should be any different.

     Q: What do you think people should make a special effort to attend
at aKademy?

     ME: There's so many interesting things going on at aKademy, it's
hard to pick just one. But if you are a developer and haven't thought
much about accessibility yet, I suggest you listen to Aaron Leventhal's
opening speech of the Unix Accessibility Forum on Sunday. Assistive
technologies are not only an interesting technical challenge, but an
area where we as a free software project can make a real difference in
many peoples' lifes. For the User and Administrators conference I
suggest you give the groupware and collaboration track some special
attention. Kolab and Kontakt are exciting projects that have not yet
gotten the attention they deserve. And nobody should miss the social
event on Saturday when we celebrate the Freedom Software Day.

     Q: Thank you for your answers and your time.

     ME: My pleasure :)