[dot] KDE to Become Better Supported on the Ubuntu Platform

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1147097810/

From: Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org>
Dept: towards-humanity
Date: Monday 08/May/2006, @07:16

KDE to Become Better Supported on the Ubuntu Platform
=====================================================

   At Linuxtag [http://www.linuxtag.org/2006] on Saturday, a meeting of
Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the
collaboration of both projects.  The aim was to to talk about the common
future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from
Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the
conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product
for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.
    Mark Shuttleworth during his keynote at Linuxtag 2006.

  I. INTRODUCTIONS

     At the beginning of the meeting, Mark outlined Canonical's vision
of the future of Ubuntu Linux and the role of Kubuntu and KDE therein.
Canonical wants to create a free, professional economic eco-system and
help to develop and transport KDE's vision of the future of the free
desktop. Starting with Dapper Drake, the next release of Kubuntu to be
released at the beginning of June, Canonical will ship CD sets of
Kubuntu in the same manner as it did with Ubuntu in the past. Artwork of
the CD sets was shown to the attendants of the meeting.

     Eva Brucherseifer held a short introduction to KDE, explaining
different aspects of how the community works together, challenges in the
community life cycle such as finding enough new developers and improving
the sustainability of KDE as a Free Software project. She also explains
that KDE is working actively on extending the KDE community further to
non-developers. Eva described the decision making process within KDE as
being very much bazaar-like; people exchanging ideas, seeking mindshare
and creating it.


 II. THE FUTURE OF KUBUNTU

     Mark said that Canonical has created some tools to make Free
Software developer communities more scalable such as Rosetta
[http://launchpad.net/rosetta] and Malone [http://launchpad.net/malone].
It is also important to help newcomers to get into the project. Ubuntu's
vision includes offering multiple desktops because it is a healthy way
for a sustainable future that those desktop environments should work
great together. Tighter integration of Canonical's collaboration tools
with e.g. KDE's bugzilla is another keypoint of the collaboration in the
future.

     Mark went on acknowledging that native office programs - such as
KOffice - are the preferred way to go, but that the process of adopting
those is not easy because of exchange of for example files with the
Windows platform and because they do not work on Windows as
OpenOffice.org does. Canonical is committed to making sure to connect
the source code vision of a project such as KDE to a user and market
centric vision of Ubuntu. They will invite a number of contributors from
different parts of the KDE project to the next developers meeting in
June in Paris, where the next Kubuntu release - Edgy Eft - will be
sketched.


III. SPLIT UP SESSIONS

     After the more general part of the discussion, the group split up
to discuss issues such as human computer interaction, artwork, marketing
and naturally technological issues.

     Collaborations in the improvement of the technical side of things
cover topics such as communication on developer level, for example
discussing distribution-specific problems directly between the Kubuntu
developers and packagers, but also very specific issues such as
extending the Ubuntu laptop testing and any other future derivatives to
ensure a high quality level of future releases of Kubuntu.

     From the human computer interaction point of view, improvements in
the acceptance of usability and accessibility are important to be made
in the future. Creating more mindshare among artists is another
challenge for the future. KDE needs more artists and must help them
enter the Free Software community. Kubuntu and KDE will collaborate in
trying to attract more non-coding contributors to the projects, not only
for work on the human-computer interaction, but also on promotion and
marketing.

     There are also quite a lot of technological issues that can be
solved by having more KDE people in the middle of the Ubuntu community,
currently most of the Ubuntu platform developers are mostly using GNOME
when developing the underlying operating system basis.  In order to
achieve that improved interoperation between the different desktop
environments on the Ubuntu platform, Canonical will make sure that some
of the people Canonical will hire in the future for working on (K)Ubuntu
come from the KDE world.