[Kde-pim] KDE PIM and 4.0

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Tuesday 13 March 2007 18:02, Wade Olson wrote:
>
> I was chatting with Aaron on the ev-marketing mailing list, and
> dicussing ways to stimulate interest in Kontact and KDE PIM for 4.0
> and beyond.

That's great. We definitely need more active developers. Although Allen is 
already acting like he has five clones, we easily have work for a dozen more 
of them.

> Some initial thoughts: 
>
> * Call for developers (Dot and blogs)

These usually tend to not have a very remarkable effect, but it still might be 
worth a try. Just please don't do it the usual boring "The world is so 
horrible because nobody works on my project. Please help me, I'm desperate." 
way.

> * Scheduling more weekend bug squashing/porting meetings (and try to
> draw new people)

I like that idea. Of course this needs active developers to coach new people. 
Bootstrap problems.

> * Assist in any upcoming KDE PIM/akonadi developer sprint

If you can turn hot air into spare time for developers, this would help. Other 
than that I don't see too much obstacles for sprints.

> * Work with comp sci departments to use KDE PIM in assignments,
> projects, thesis work, etc.

That also would be nice. Again there is a bootstrapping problem, though.

> Note the latter is a larger effort we're investigating for KDE EDU,
> KOffice and KDE PIM.  The scope could be rather large (depending on
> how adventerous we are).

Don't expect too much from that. Although it would be nice to get some 
students doing projects in the area of KDE PIM, the most valuable 
contributors are those who have an inherent motivation independent of any 
formal project, work or other formal activities and do it just because they 
want to (even if they are told that their patch is completely wrong and not 
even adheres to the coding style).

> Anyway, let me know how I (and KDE promo) can help.

I see two main reasons which make it hard to find enough new developers for 
KDE PIM:

First, KDE PIM doesn't create hype. It doesn't appear as cool as some other 
projects do. People usually don't faint due to excitement when looking at the 
KDE PIM applications or the KDE PIM source code. This of course has reasons. 
The code base and the applications are some of the biggest and most 
challenging on the desktop, they include lots of functionality and a 
tremendous amount of history, and they are not the natural subject for bling, 
because they handle data which is most valuable to the user. Being sexy 
doesn't help you if you delete precious mails. So you better are damn stable. 
Unfortunately that's not what the youth from today attracts primarily.

That said, and I reveal a secret here, Kontact actually is damn cool. It's the 
source of a wide variety of amazing technology and the applications have so 
many hidden and non-hidden gems in them that it's hard to believe that there 
are people which even consider using other apps for getting their life under 
control. I could expand on that, but that would probably get us quickly in 
pretty heavy technical details.

Second, the KDE PIMsters are a bunch of bloody brilliant people. That sounds 
like a great thing, but it's a curse as well. Because brilliant people have 
brilliant ideas and these are usually slightly larger than what they can 
realistically implement until the next release. So writing a boring mail 
reading tool would be easy for us, but the goal to write the best personal 
information management application under the sun of course brings us to our 
limits. Unfortunately it's also a no-brainer to hire KDE PIM developers. So 
instead of being healthily unemployed the developers usually have to choose 
from too many interesting things to do, and while of course KDE PIM is the 
only true way to satisfaction, getting real money is something KDE PIM 
developer usually are not stupid enough to reject. So in some way KDE PIM is 
eaten by its own success.

So, Wade, what can you and the promo team do to help finding new developers 
for KDE PIM? Maybe the most important thing would be to tell the world about 
how cool KDE PIM actually is. This might help to overcome some of the 
prejudices which exist about our code and it might help to fuel KDE PIM with 
more brilliant people than are eaten away by our own success. If we can turn 
KDE PIM into a catalyst for software talent we could be able to achieve the 
amazing results for KDE 4 and beyond we and our users deserve.

> PS-Not on any PIM mailing lists, be sure to explicitly include me in
> any responses.

You are missing all the fun...

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>
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