[dot] Report: KDE at FOSDEM Brussels, 2004

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1077708347/

From: Fabrice Mous <fabrice at kde.nl>
Dept: lots-of-talks-and-hacking
Date: Wednesday 25/Feb/2004, @12:25

Report: KDE at FOSDEM Brussels, 2004
====================================

   A group of KDE hackers went to the FOSDEM event
[http://www.fosdem.org/] to represent KDE. FOSDEM is a two-day summit
were leading developers in the Free Software community come together. It
is an event held by developers, for developers where you can attend many
interesting presentations, mingle and hold discussions with other
projects.

     Some (KDE) people already arrived on Friday night and got together
[http://www.kde.nl/archief/Fosdem2004/0001.jpg]  in downtown Brussels.
We had a nice time drinking beers like Maredsous and Duvel
[http://www.duvel.com/uk/Products.htm] in a pub called Manneken Pis,
close to Grand Place and across from the  famous statue.
 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manneken_Pis]
     Saturday 10:30, FOSDEM 2004 kicked of with a talk from Tim
O'Reilly. Not completely back in the land of the living you can  find
those KDE hackers [http://www.kde.nl/archief/Fosdem2004/0004.jpg]  (left
to right: Cies Breijs,  Simon Edwards, Adriaan de Groot, Otto Brugman)
attending that talk. After the O'Reilly talk,  Richard Stallman held a
talk about the Free Software Foundation.

     Every year the event follows some kind of theme and this year it is
accessibility which been chosen as a main theme and so some of the
tracks were dedicated to accessibility software. FOSDEM 2004 had a
friendly and inspiring atmosphere,  where hackers moved from one room to
another [http://www.kde.nl/archief/Fosdem2004/0007.jpg] to attend the
talks.  You could find all kind of developers staffing their booth and
telling you about their project.

     KDE's main speaker, Gunnar Schmi Dt from the KDE Accessibility
Project [http://accessibility.kde.org/],  told about the progress
accessibility is making in KDE, the new accessibility features in KDE
3.2 and the upcoming  bridge between Qt and AT-SPI
[http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/bridge.php]. Very good contact 
was made with the GNOME Accessibility Project
[http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/] and  other accessibility
authors and will very likely lead to better inter-operatibility in the
future.

     Furthermore we noticed a great interest in "Linux on the Desktop".
Robert Love's "Kernel and the Desktop" talk was very well attended,
while Keith Packard's "XFree86" talk  was standing room only!

     Speaking of talks, some KDE hackers also gave talks
[http://www.kde.nl/archief/Fosdem2004/0014.jpg]  in our Developers' Room
about the following topics:

    * Basic KDE technology by Adriaan de Groot
    * C++ Pitfalls by Scott Wheeler
    * KConfigXT by Adriaan de Groot
    * KTurtle by Cies Breijs

     KDE hackers invited Daniel Veillard to do a talk on libxslt
[http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/] in the  KDE Developers' Room. The network
connectivity in the KDE Developers' Room was well enjoyed by several
Gnomies  who sneaked in. :-)

     Please check out our photos
[http://www.kde.nl/archief/Fosdem2004/images.html], because  we spotted
a new convert [http://www.kde.nl/archief/Fosdem2004/0052.jpg]. :-)

     Thanks to Simon Edwards, Olaf Jan Schmidt and Phillipe Schroll for
their contributions to this small write-up.