[dot] KDE Receives USENIX STUG Award

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1113628981/

From: Martin Konold <konold _at_ kde.org>
Dept: party-at-usenix
Date: Saturday 16/Apr/2005, @07:23

KDE Receives USENIX STUG Award
==============================

   On Tuesday at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference
[http://www.usenix.org/], KDE founder Matthias Ettrich
[http://www.kde.nl/people/ettrich.html] was awarded the Software Tools
User Group award [http://www.usenix.org/about/stug.html], shared jointly
with Miguel de Icaza of GNOME.  The award is in recognition of the
impressive work of the Unix desktop projects over the last 9 years.

     For thirty years, the USENIX Association has brought together the
community of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and
technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world.

     In the award speech [http://www.usenix.org] the Usenix Board
director mentioned that only when Matthias Ettrich, together with an
ever growing number of open minded developers and contributors, started
the KDE project that the inferior UNIX GUIs started to compete with and
overtake those of other platforms.

     A primary strength of KDE is how it allows the traditional
philosophies of UNIX to map nicely to a modern graphical interface,
providing easy access to underlying features.

     Martin Konold, who received the award on behalf of Matthias, was
pleased at being greeted with Konqueror equipped workstations running
KDE at the USENIX registration desk and the ongoing appreciation
[http://www.kde.org/awards/] of the KDE project.

     Martin commented: "The fact that KDE gets appreciated this much and
that KDE is the market leader in UNIX and Linux desktops today is
negligible compared to the extremely important effort to create a single
specification of the free desktop environment with multiple
implementations including the GNOME effort as done within the framework
of freedesktop.org [http://www.freedesktop.org]. Plurality of the
implementations while adhering to common agreed upon standards is
crucial for acceptance by both users, solution providers,  3rd party
open source developers and ISVs offering proprietary applications. The
history of operating systems and graphical user interfaces shows us that
going for a monoculture at the expense of healthy ecosystems is wrong
and consequently KDE also puts a significant effort into making sure
that it runs nicely on all GNU/Linux, *BSD and UNIX systems"