[Kde-pim] Akonadi as a freedesktop.org PIM infrastructure

[Kevin Krammer]

On Saturday 18 August 2007, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
> I'm not involved in this, but I'd like to suggest something: maybe open a
> webpage at fd.o, but keep the repository in KDE SVN... Would that work?

Of course I can't be sure, but I am afraid that it won't.

There is some kind of perception barrier around KDE. The moment something 
enters "our" realm, it gets "tainted".

See Strigi for example: when Jos (the other one) moved it to kdesupport, it 
basically became "KDE's search engine". People will just assume that it has 
all sorts of "evil" KDE dependencies and developers who are clever enought to 
check for themselves and decide to use it, will get flamed by their users and 
probably also by peers why on earth the started to "create a dependency on 
KDE".

You might have read Jos (again the other one :)) write about this XML output 
thingy he has created in order to allow third parties to use the file data 
extraction framework to feed any other indexer, i.e. not actually use Strigi 
as the "search engine" but still be able to use the underlying libraries 
capabilities for data gathering.
I might be wrong, but my current bet is that this will not happen.

This is just an immensely political issue. Moving to freedesktop.org 
infrastructure is not a magical way of "untainting" your code, but it removes 
a lot of potential ammunition against you.

Lets be frank:
- having parts of the project, e.g. akonadiserver, hosted elsewhere will make 
development more difficult
- if at all, adoption by others will take a long time

So what do we gain?
- not yet again, a couple of years down the road, being told "why do you not 
use standard $foo, like 'everyone else'?"
- publicity (which can possibly lead to other advantages, e.g. attract 
developers, see KOffice)

Or in the form of an anology:
it is like the difference between a vocal and a written invitation to a party: 
doesn't mean they show up, but it is unlikely they will deny having known 
about it.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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