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Interview: KDE League Chairman Andreas Pour
Frank writes "Here's a good interview with KDE League chairman Andreas Pour. He talks about the K desktop environment (KDE) 2.1, that will be Hitting the streets on Monday, February 26. He reveals info about some significant advantages over the old 1.0 platform, including a full-fledged browser and the upcoming KOffice suite of business applications."
I love the new shell plugin idea. Konqueror has been top-notch stuff, and adding the ability to conveniently execute shell programs and capture them to a terminal just rocks.
I've been using the embedded terminal feature to do this in KDE 2, and having a way to do it without needing to pop open a shell in advance is just nifty. I bit of configuration lets me set up development directories that are extremely convenient to use.
I've been hearing this fiction that KDE is not for serious Unix users, but this is just bull IMHO. Konqueror is easily the most productive programming environment I've ever worked with.
Consider your history. Why are there now two desktop environments for Linux? Well, we have reached this state because of liscensing issues. The Gnome project formed purely because people were unhappy with the KDE qt liscense.
The origin of the projects is no longer important. So if MIT suddenly is given the source code for all the printer drivers in use on their campus, should RMS give up the Free Software Foundation? (click here if that didn't make sense to you)
Why continue to divide out labor on two projects which both hope to achieve the same thing?
Because they plan to do this in completely different ways, also once they are mature the differences willbeself evident.
Imagine how much more polished the Linux desktop environment would be if all effort were focused on just one. Twice as much effort would be expended on it every day.
Anyone who has read Frederick Brooke's Mythical Man Month knows that your statements are a big misconception. Doubling the number of developers on a project does not double the amount of time taken to finish the project because new developers have to be brought up to speed and the layers of communication increase which leads to more errorsoccuring due to miscommunication. Basically there is a certain level of complexity where throwing more developers at a product produces little net gain. KDE and GNOME are at that level of complexity.
KDE is mainly C++, GNOME is mainly C (if you do not realize there is a fundamental difference in these languages then go to comp.lang.c or comp.lang.c++ and state this and see the responses you'll get). GNOME uses all sorts of CORBA stuff while KDE does not. GNOME uses OrBit while the few KDE developers who know CORBA used Mico. Both projects are extremely undocumented and very few, if any, have a complete grasp of the entire system in either case.
Quite frankly,if KDE and GNOME merged the efforts involved in adjusting to the merger would slow down development a lot more than any perceived current lack of developers does. In addition, some functionality that was a part of one or the other system would be lost (because stuff always gets trimmed in a merger).
A better suggestion is for KDE and GNOME to start actively pursing interoperability. Unfortunately this is one place were Open Source may fail. It is unlikely that GNOME interoperability is high on the list of any KDE developer's list of itches he/she wants scratched and vice versa. Thus since they are all simply volunteers they can't be made to do it like would happen in a professional development environment, where a manager can just assign a bunch of coders this task.
Finagle's First Law
The following links might be interesting to read:
1, 2, 3, 4.
Nautilus --which has a large set of developers and a lot of work going towards it-- is really one of the core components of the desktop. I am sorry for Alan if there are not too many hackers working on new IRC clients, or on new color selectors, I think that overall, we are more focused on the problems of users than we were in the past.
Components like Evolution contain some killer features that will help a lot of people transition to Linux, and the kind of work and effort required to develop an application of this size is not trivial. Just supporting every feature correctly for IMAP and broken IMAP servers is a daunting task. Having the best syncronizing tool for PalmPilots and for syncing multiple devices is also an important feature not available anywhere else (not to mention vFolders, quick searches, great user interfaces and more).
Both applications (Nautilus and Evolution) rely on very new technologies that are at the core of GNOME
Also, look at things like the Ximian Setup Tools, which are just a set of GNOME applications (branded by my company, to get some credit for the work we are putting on it) that addresses the major problem of having a user-friendly unified system configuration for Unix (here)
Our work on the Bonobo foundation is unparalleled. Once we started deploying it, many new ideas came out (like Monikers) that have enabled extremely powerful mechanisms to be created.
We sadly do not have white-papers for all of our technologies, but we are working towards documenting them. If you are interested in helping, get in touch with me.
A few things we have recently done and are shipping as part of GNOME 1.4:
- Bonobo 1.0 Ready to ship with GNOME 1.4
- GtkHTML: An HTML editor and rendering engine.
- EBrowser: A Bonobo component to do web browsing
- Gnome Spell: A Bonobo component for doing spelling, suggestions, and dictionary lookups. All available to any application that supports Bonobo.
- Gnome VFS: Access any resources on the network transparently.
There are a lot more technologies comming down for GNOME 2.0, and you can read about some of them at: http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-2.0Other things like Gtk from frame buffers and Pango are developed at the RHAD Labs (http://www.labs.redhat.com) and constitute part of the core technologies in GNOME 2.0
Miguel.