[kde-community] Your KDE highlight of 2014?

[Jos van den Oever]

On Friday 19 December 2014 11:08:55 Lydia Pintscher wrote:
> 
> 2014 is coming to an end. This gives us some time for reflection. What
> are your KDE highlights of 2014? A team that kicked ass? A really good
> release? An event where you made great new friends? Something entirely
> different?

For me the highlight in KDE was the ODF Plugfest in London and the advance in 
Calligra shown off there. It was very good to see so much companies that care 
about ODF. It gave me a change to meet up again with my (now ex) colleages of 
KO GmbH.

This highlight was offset against the very slow business that we had in KO. 
Ever since KO started working on KOffice/Calligra in 2009, we had a great team 
working on many cool projects centered around ODF and Calligra. Right now, you 
can still see the results from the Calligra work on the Jolla phone, where the 
document viewer is based on Calligra. This, of course, also benefitted the 
desktop version of Calligra.

Calligra Gemini is the last result from contracting work within KO that flows 
into Calligra. Dan demonstrated Gemini at the ODF Plugfest and it was the 
first time that I saw it running on a hybrid laptop. It switches between touch 
mode and laptop mode quickly and smoothly.

As of last oktober, I'm not longer employed at KO. In fact, only Friedrich 
Kossebau remains. He is working on WebODF projects, which he combines with 
spare time Calligra contributions.

I will remain a KDE representative at the ODF technical committee. This aligns 
well with my new job as government employee: I'm now working for the dutch 
government, where I am responsible for the software that creates PDF, HTML and 
jawohl, ODF from XML. I'll also be working on Linked Data with government. My 
experiences within KDE on Nepomuk and Calligra have made me profient in this 
area. For this, I'm very grateful that KDE exists and that I'm part of it.

I wish everyone in KDE a great new year and after my years at KO, I'm 
especially appreciative of the challenges that people face that are working 
commercially with Free Software. I hope that 2015 will see new chances of 
making a living with KDE. Even while that will remain challenging, there's a 
lot of fun to be had and much useful software to be created.

All the best,
Jos