[kde-usa] [campkde-organizers] Fwd: [kde-promo] KDE Cascadia

[Jeff Mitchell]

On 10/19/2011 07:59 PM, Carl Symons wrote:
>>>> I think there are two issues here. One has to be solved before the other.
> 
> Definitely 2 issues. The dependency is not so clear to me. It seems
> doable to have an event with LFNW, and start that process. Part of the
> message would be that this event has regional appeal and that other
> CampKDE's may take place at other times and places.

Well, one of the issues is whether it's a Camp KDE or some other event.
That certainly needs to get solved, although not before deciding to *do*
the cohosted event, which I'm all for. Just before we go to potential
sponsors, and publicly announce it.

>> I think the losses in contributors are likely to mostly be from outside
>> North America, especially if money is spent towards holding more of
>> these and flying local contributors to more of them, rather than flying
>> non-North-American contributors in.
> 
> There needs to be some hard thinking about the focus. It's surprising
> and disconcerting (to me) that there is not more development
> involvement in North America. Where are the Google SoC participants?

Mostly from outside North America.

> Why is it that Europe, South America and India contribute so heavily
> and the U.S. and Canada barely register a blip?

Here are three reasons:

1) In the States, the youth of today (by which I mean our historically
most valuable demographic, college students) buy Macs. They don't tend
to give much of a shit about Linux, because, why would you, Macs are so
awesome and what everyone else has and run anything you'd care about on
Linux anyways.

Macs are well over 25% of the total laptop market share, and among
incoming college freshmen the number is far higher. In 2009 it was 58%;
in 2010 it was 70%. No idea about 2011, but I'd wager it's above 80%.

Macs run Python, Ruby, Java  and HTML5/JavaScript without any problems,
which covers the majority of languages that students who are our target
demographic think will earn them scads of money when they get out of
college (of course, there's a glut of these programmers, unlike the lack
of qualified Qt programmers, but try telling them that when Hot Web Site
X is built on Rails and Node).

Macs are simply too expensive for many in South America and India.
They're overpriced here and they're horrendously overpriced in Europe
and elsewhere, and Windows sucks as a development platform, so people
turn to Linux.

Outside the States, people also tend to be more cautious of buying into
walled gardens and signing away their freedoms to large corporations,
something we in the States have down to a science.

2) Students these days (here in the States, I mean) are taught that the
way to make money is to build the next Mafia Wars or the next Angry
Birds. They're being indoctrinated into the idea (that Apple and
Microsoft and Facebook desperate to sell them, since they take 30%) that
the App Is King. (Google, and now Intel, are trying to tell them this
too, though far less successfully.) This makes the idea of building
something with a community a far less profitable, and thus interesting,
proposition.

3) The major (read: company-backed...Red Hat/Canonical mostly) North
American distros use GNOME by default (with the exception that Ubuntu
has now flipped to Unity, but used GNOME for many years), so when people
did pop a Linux install disk in to try it out, their sense of the Linux
desktop became GNOME. KDE was that other stuff that some weirdos spent
the time to install, and that they heard is big in Europe.

This isn't to say that we haven't actually had a decent following in the
U.S., but it's never been nearly as visible as the GNOME following.

KDE's U.S. presence has historically been screwed by the momentum behind
the company-backed North American distros. Now the Linux desktop is
getting screwed as a whole by Apple.

> With such a small developer/contributor community, there seems little
> value in getting IRC colleagues together in person. Except for Plasma
> Active, I don't think many users are on IRC.

Yes...which is why explicitly targeting users, as opposed to trying to
make the U.S. events developer-focused, is a better bet IMHO.

There's not much presence of users on IRC, but we might find that the
users are out there waiting to be found at these fests, if we provide
them with opportunities to meet and rally...to tell them that they
should get in touch, join us on IRC, that they too can make a difference.

Maybe it won't help, or make a difference...maybe it will. We probably
won't know unless we try.

> CampKDE--whether national or regional--don't seem to be events that
> would attract the large, national FOSS corporations. It's missing for
> me what this type of organization wants from KDE...so it's also
> missing what the message if for them and how it should be delivered.

Not sure what you mean by FOSS corporations, specifically, but the
message I've been trying to hammer into Google -- after at Camp KDE at
LFCS they said how committed they were to expanding open source into
education -- is that with KDE being the largest FOSS project in the
world by most metrics, we are also the single largest entity providing
opportunities for students to engage in FOSS (and our GSoC numbers show
it)...and they should put their money where their mouth is.

> Based on my experience with observing Plasma Active development (IRC
> is the best!) and demonstrating the ExoPC, it might be interesting to
> have a focus--at LFNW or elsewhere--on that. Surely there are
> companies that would like to escape the Android & iOS concentration of
> market power. And developers who would like to participate either in
> PA development or in creating QML apps that run on the
> platform...create a QML and HTML5 horde. Intel is a natural big-time
> sponsor.

Not anymore, they're not. Not unless we're looking at Tizen, and Qt/QML
on there is AFAIK unlikely.

The message we need to be getting out to companies is that iOS is
completely unsuited for their own products and Android is not a good fit
for many uses, especially many enterprise uses. I won't go into all the
details why, although I could do so at some length (in fact, I'm giving
a presentation on this exact topic on Tuesday). A better fit for a great
many needs is a mobile device running an optimized, full Linux stack.

There are some really awesome things coming out. Look at Raspberry Pi
for an example -- which seems like it'll have Mer on board, including
Qt/QML capability, and the videos they show of it pumping out graphics
are quite impressive (check out the size of it on the Media page, and
the price tag). If it pans out, it'll be the Little Development Board
That Could.

If they have good development boards, and they have a full stack to play
with, KDE suddenly can provide cool stuff...especially if we can get our
libraries upstreamed with Qt Open Governance. Plasma Active can be very
important here too -- it can be a flexible default development desktop,
replacing such legacy things as OpenEmbedded/Yocto's GTK-based Sato
desktop, or the Unity desktop on Linaro's Ubuntu offering.

For some proof, take a look at this:
http://lockheedmartin.com.vn/news/press_releases/2010/MFC_060810_LockheedDevelopsTac.html

This is a device that runs a piece of software that the U.S. military
uses heavily called FBCB2. There's not a chance in hell of making that
software an Android app, so instead of making FBCB2 run *on* Android,
they developed their TDA that runs both FBCB2 *and* Android. So, what
should their user interface look like when the Android bits don't have
front-and-center? How much nicer would it be to take something
flexible/customizable like Plasma and build what they want than to do an
entire UI on their own?

>> One possibility then would be that Camp KDE is a traveling show with
>> whatever fests we can partner with..."Camp KDE will be at LFNW in
>> April!" "Camp KDE is coming to Ohio Linux Fest!" and so on.
> 
> ++good
> 
>>
>> The other is that LFNW has KDE Cascadia, Ohio Linux Fest has KDE
>> Buckeye, and so on. The danger here is just the risk of confusion from a
>> multiplicity of names.
> 
> Colocation with other events for a Camp KDE event would require "Camp KDE".
> Camp KDE Cascadia
> Camp KDE Cape Cod
> Cactus Camp KDE (with ableconf.com in Phoenix)
> Camp KDE Cajun
> Camp KDE Carolina
> Camp KDE Calgary
> 
> If you can't alliterate with CampKDE, you can't have an event B^)
> 
> Toscalix has been talking about broadening the definition of
> organizations to include .edus. We could recruit students at colleges
> and universities across the country.
> Campus KDE

All great ideas. "Camp KDE is coming to the Cascades for Camp KDE Cascadia!"

>>> I think it is our best option for this year. We're running out of time
>>> to do a solo event
>>
>> This is only a problem if you think that our best move is to keep doing
>> solo events.
>>
>> The suggestion I've been making and trying to get feedback on is that we
>> ditch the idea of a solo event entirely in favor of a traveling event,
>> or a series of separate colocated events.
>>
>> --Jeff
>>
> 
> I like this, Jeff.
> 
> However it doesn't preclude a solo, stand-alone event for KDE in North
> America when we get enough interest and support for this. The stars
> don't seem to be aligned for this at present.

Oh, totally agreed. I hope I didn't accidentally imply that we can't do
solo stand-alone events. I don't think we can successfully do this right
now (for the Board's definition of successful, which isn't really
off-base at all), but if we can at some point, then we should.

--Jeff

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