[KDE/Mac] Hi (from Kolab Client "Team", part of)

[Bernhard Reiter]

Dear fellow KDE people and friends of Free Software on Mac,
I am writing to make Kontact with you!

You know the KDE Application "Kontact". :)
It is also a nice groupware client, especially for the Kolab Groupware 
Solution (www.kolab.org). Many people within the KDEPIM community, that does 
Kontact, also worked on getting it to be a good Kolab Client.

My company (Intevation) and other companies (like KDAB and g10code)
were in the good situation of getting contracted to do some work in this area
over the last years and be able to fully work as part of the respective 
communities. This was very helpful to improve of Kontact overall.
We organised the KDE meeting with the longes track record
(8 consecutive years - longer than Akademy), and our teams helped
a lot to port Kontact and KDE4 towards Windows and now towards Akonadi.

In 2008 we did a first Kontact in the Mac attempt in the now 
discontinued "Enterprise 4" branch. We could push the envelop only a little 
bit, because the commercial (*) interest for Kontact on Mac had been low
in these times. Hopefully we can change that for the future, 
but we are all small companies and owner run, so there is no 
venture capital for a heavy investment or something similiar 
we all might dream of. ;)

Because we aimed at doing a beta first and we had to solve the rebuild and 
source delivery problems, we wanted to contribute
to one of the already ongoing packaging efforts for Mac OS X.
After some initial analysis by Emanuel we had chosen MacPorts.
I think Emanuel also is writing on one of the MacPorts lists.

Infos about our efforts here and there: 
  http://wiki.kolab.org/index.php/Kontact_for_MacOS_(beta-huge-debug)
  http://files.kolab.org/macports/

So our current aim is to get a fresh Kontact enterprise5 - which is currently
in early beta - to build and delivered reliably with MacPorts.
Note that the subteam of KDEPIM doing this, currently works with mini-branches
we call tags, which we try to do once a week. Our branches moved to use the 
new KDE SC 4.5 libs which was the last significant change, and we need to fix 
the Mac build as one of the consequences, which is the practical next step.

So Paul, Emanuel and Till are part of "our gang" in trying to get Kontact E5
working and delivered for Mac OS X.This includes a bunch of libraries,
thus a large part of KDE. Needless to say this also builds on top of your 
efforts and we are grateful for it. Let us do more together and get KDE 
Applications to become great and well known for the Mac!

Best Regards,
Bernhard

(*) We only do Free Software. "Commercial" just means that we get contracts
to work with professionals on a high level and we get paid to create, maintain 
the Free Software or support it.


-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net       (Free Software Company)
Deputy Coordinator Germany: fsfe.org. Board member: www.kolabsys.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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