[dot] Trolltech Hosting Phonon Backends in KDE Subversion Repository

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1197535003/

From: Jeff Mitchell <me at jefferai.com>
Dept: lets-keep-this-awesome-ball-rolling
Date: Thursday 13/Dec/2007, @00:36

Trolltech Hosting Phonon Backends in KDE Subversion Repository
==============================================================

   Trolltech announced today
[http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/announcements/press.2007-12-11.2263733764]
that the Phonon backends, which they have been developing for inclusion
in Qt, are being transferred into the KDE source code repository
[http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/phonon/].  Phonon
[http://phonon.kde.org] is the KDE 4 API for multimedia and is also set
to be part of Qt 4.4, scheduled for the end of Q1 2008.  You heard it
right folks, a part of Qt will be officially hosted and developed inside
KDE's very own Subversion repository, from whose loins Phonon first
sprung, and be freely available to all under the LGPL.

     The code being transferred is: Trolltech's GStreamer Phonon backend
for Linux and UNIX platforms, their DirectShow 9 backend for Windows, as
well as their Quicktime 7 backend for Mac OS X.  All future development
on these backends, as well as future development by Trolltech on Phonon
itself, will take place directly in the KDE Subversion repository.

     Quoting from the press release:
 "By developing Phonon components within the globally accessible public
KDE source repository, Phonon developers are able to watch and
participate in the development of Trolltech's Phonon back-end code and
library code contributions. This also allows the community to evaluate
and provide input into the work being done by Trolltech&#8217;s internal
development team. KDE, in turn, benefits by having Trolltech's employed
developers contribute to the ongoing development and maintenance of
Phonon, freeing KDE developers to work on other aspects of the desktop.
This is a marked change from how open source libraries are usually
integrated into commercial products, which has typically involved
pulling snapshots of the open source code into the commercial product.
Additionally, the Windows and Mac OS X backends will enable KDE4
applications running on these platforms to include multimedia
functionality."
     This is a great move by Trolltech [http://trolltech.com/] and shows
that it "gets" the benefits of collaboration between open source
projects and industry.  Let's hope that this trend continues in the
future.