KDE-cygwin news from the linuxtag

[Ralf Habacker]

Hi all,

This week the linuxtag happens in Karlsruhe, Germany from 10.7 to 13.7. 2003

On thursday I was on the linuxtag business congress with some interesting
sessions about managing and lawing aspects of oss development which are also
interesting for the kde-cygwin project.

Also I was on the linuxtag to talk with some important people like Holger
Schröder, the kde team and others.

For example I have asked Kalle Dahlheimer, one of the chiefs of the kde e.V.
some questions:

An important question was about there influence on the trolltech manager to
release a win32 based gpl'ed port of QT (which would be the easiest solution for
us). He answered, that - although he knows the trolltech chiefs very well - the
people who really direct the company are the investors and the layers.

Kalle Dahlheimer stated too, that some analysts see that trolltechs dual
licensing strategy of the x11 qt as one of the major reasons, why trolltech was
able to stand against much bigger companies in the early days. Because
trolltechs market situation currently is complete different - they has much more
market share and more money, this dual licensing strategy of trolltech will
probably *never* be applied to the windows release. This make us (Holger and me)
sure, that the started qt win32 port seems the *only* way to get ever a gpl'ed
win32 qt (and a win32 based kde in the future) and that we should not expect any
help from trolltech for this port!

But this doesn't matter, if you take a look into the qt/win32 roadmap on
http://cygwin.kde.org/qt2-win32/roadmap.php you can see that we are currently in
stage 2 of the porting. So we can say that, Richard Lärkäng has introduced this
stage. Whow !!

I'm very impressed by this. As Holger has started the qt2 port, I have thought
about how this port should go to miminize the steps and the needed efforts, but
I haven't thought that step 2 would be started at only half a year after the qt2
port and how far the results already are.

Seeing this makes me more believable, that another important step, which isn't
documented yet, but will be coming soon, could happen.

An additional question was, how the KDE organisation the KDE on windows
initiative see and he answers, that they like see this happens and that they
will not put any stones in the way. Later in the day Ralf Nolden told us: "KDE
on windows ? Great thing. Do it!!!". So everybody is invitated to help, that
this vision will be come true.


Notes to the KDE3/win32 port

After Holger Schröder leaved the qt2/win32 porting - going to earn money in a
company, while he is still studing in hannover,  he have gotten access to a
commercial qt license, which give him the chance to try how kde/win32 works with
a already ported QT3/win32 library. So he is preparing the kde3/win32 port in
the background.

A very important event will be the KDE developer conference in Novre havre.
Holger Schröder will have the chance to speek to the developer forum about the
ongoing efforts of the KDE-cygwin team.

One of the major goals of this presentation will be to inform the kde developers
about the requirements of the windows port in relation to the operation system
and gui differences like forking, which isn't available under a native windows,
unix domain sockets, unix path layout versus windows path layouts, how to
separate os and gui depending kde code from the rest and other important this.
In the next time we are going to collect such issues to which anyone is
invitated to contribute. For example we will start to publish a class list todo
of some kdelibs parts in the next week.

If you are interested in contributing to the coming KDE windows port, think
about visiting the developer conference. You have the chance to get in contact
with many kde core or application developers, which may be important for your
further personal business carrier, because KDE will be one of the major platform
independent application framework in the furture and you can get a part of this
now. If you are really interested, please contact Holger Schröder.

KDE/cygwin on the linuxtag dvd

Another interesting news is, that Klaus Knopper - the maintainer of the KNOPPIX
Linux CD - has build a linuxtag DVD with a special KNOPPIX edition, informations
about the linuxtag and now the very good news, he has added the KDE-3.1.1/cygwin
release to this dvd. This is very cool and a good way to increase the publicity
of the KDE/cygwin port.

Additional we have spoken how to distribute further KDE/cygwin releases and/or
applications like a kgroupware client or something else. I think we will be in
contact in future.

KDE on Windows will be more interesting for people, if it distributes real known
and functional applications.

On the linux tag I've got the chance to speek with people of the german BSI
(Bundesamt für Sicherheit und Informationstechnik) and the german
Innenministerium, which are responsible for the oss strategy of the german
goverment,  for example they have initiated and sponsered the Spinx and the
KGroupware project.

I've informed them about the real possibility to provide a KDE based win32
Kroupware client in the future replacing outlook and the commercial connecter,
which is used currently. They were very surprised about this possibilities and
requested to hold in contact with the kde-cygwin team. Great possibilites, i
think.

I think thats all for now and please forgive my bad english. I'm still learning
:-)


Cheers
Ralf