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Corporate KDE
roomisigloomis writes "This article at CNET shows some headway being made in KDE development with aims at the corporate desktop. It's cool that it's funded by the German government."
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This is the same one that ousted M$ some time go, isn't it? I like that government... at least on the outside.
Good to know that there are responsible governments who make a lot better use of their taxpayer's money.
The Raven
Ingo Klöcker says,
- 3.1-release-plan.htmln /en/html/index.html
Hi everybody!
The C|Net article claims that "the first elements [of Kroupware] have appeared in the new KDE 3.1"[1]. That's (unfortunately) wrong. As you can check yourself cvs was "frozen for feature commits that are not listed in the planned-feature document"[2] on July 1, 2002 while the Kroupware "project began in September."[1]. So it wasn't possible to include anything from the Kroupware project in KDE 3.1.
In particular the article claims:
"Two elements of the client work are in the new KDE 3.1, released Tuesday: the KMail software can handle encrypted e-mail attachments, and the KOrganizer calendar software can communicate with Exchange 2000 servers."
Both elements are not part of the Kroupware project.
The KMail improvements, i.e. support for PGP/MIME (RFC 3156) and S/MIME, were made by the Ägypten project[3] (which incidentally also was ordered by Germany's agency for information technology security).
The KOrganizer plugin[4] for connections to Microsoft Exchange 2000® servers was written by Jan-Pascal van Best completely independant of the Kroupware project.
Anyway, you can all look forward to KDE 3.2 which will include most (if not all) of the client side elements of the Kroupware project.
Regards,
Ingo
[1] http://news.com.com/2100-1001-982816.html
[2] http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde
[3] http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/index.html
[4] http://korganizer.kde.org/workshops/ExchangePlugi
Time for a name change, I propose Germany be renamed to Kermany :).
Must send e-mail to the Kerman Kovernment.
StarTux
heh they forgot aetherea
which looks like a nice outlook clone
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I have tried 3.1 betas and release candidates, and I'd say it's definitely coming along as far as desktop usability. I've been using it as my primary desktop at home for a couple years now.
But, with 3.1, it has been an easy switch to convert my entire household to it. This conversion includes my barely computer literate wife, my 7 year old son and 3.5 year old daughter.
The Kroupware project is what will make it ultimately challenging to MS to compete. Replacing Exchange is the turning point for most corporate uses.
KDE...Kraut Desktop Environment?
-Waldo Jaquith
the KMail software can handle encrypted e-mail attachments, and the KOrganizer calendar software can communicate with Exchange 2000 servers.
This is huge. At least for corporations that use Exchange (and not Lotus or something similiar). I've been waiting anxiously for these products to appear. I always thought the exchange-outlook component was the hardest one to break for the linux/alternative workstation OS.
I don't use KDE, so let me ask: are Korganizer and Kmail integrated so they can work together- within a same interface? Like that of Outlook?
Also...doesn't Evolution have these capabilities. I remember once reading that it would. I do use Evolution, but our company does not use Outlook, so I cannot test this.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Would you rather your tax dollars were spent on proprietary software that is buggy, insecure and unmodifable? Perhaps, you like that the US government waists an enormous amount of money on useless proprietary software by hiring a bunch of contractors/consultants who digest the government largess like a bunch of bottom fish.
At least this way the software has a chance to be useful to a great number of individuals.
Don't trust the Germans, they make potato cannons.
Trolling is a art,
People need to be careful here since US trade laws
could be used by MS against Linux with KDE since the product could be claimed to be Govt. subsidized.
There were some reports earlier that MS did exactly
this to put a stop to the NSA adding strong
security features to Linux.
Now I just need them to release KDE 3.11 for WorkKroups!
*modifies his splash*
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
For a little insight on the KDE-Germany connection, here's a snippet from http://ktown.kde.org/~nolden/kde/README, a readme by Ralf Nolden, one of the people responsible for building KDE for debian:
The main reason to set up this repository is, amongst others, that I'm working at credativ GmbH, located in Juelich, Germany since September 2002. We are contracted to set up KDE 3.1 together with the Aegypten project (http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/) on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody) by the BSI (Bundesamt fuer Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik), the german governmental agency for security in IT-technology. The Aegypten project itself is a development effort contracted by the BSI to enable governmental authorities to use S/MIME certifications for email communications with KMail and Mutt as email clients. The graphical user interface for Desktop use is the primary goal behind the project. The same is valid for the Kroupware (http://www.kroupware.org) project, wich implements a groupware solution for KDE with two components, the kolab server as the group-ware server component and KMail, KAddressbook and KOrganizer as client-side components. The Kroupware project is currently under development by the according companies and will be merged into KDE 3.2.
The article is wrong: the german government did not fund work on KDE, a t least not directly. A number of companies have been contracted to extend KDE for the government. As the code is GPL, they have to release it to the public.
Hmm, I see it the other way round. Why should MY government (which is, by strange coincidence, the German government) pay MY tax dollars^H^H^Heuros for commercial software, which doesn't benefit me in any way, instead of funding the development of something which might be of good use for me personally (and, of course, others, but this doesn't hurt me at all).
You bring up an interesting point. I'm glad MY government doesn't fund open source projects. Why should MY tax dollars fund development that is going to be used by people who don't pay taxes to the US?
This is just one more thing that the government has no business wasting my money on.
You're probably just a troll, but for all those readers who may be swayed by your amazingly bad attitude, let me explain why governemt funding of open source software is a very good thing.
We live in a global economy. If the U.S. takes an economic plunge, the world feels it. The same is true (although perhaps less strongly felt) for other countries, especially Europe and Japan. IANAE (I am not an economist), but doesn't it make sense that one government's expenses to benefit its own economy have an effect on the global economy? How much money has the U.S. governemt spent on technological research? Doesn't technology benefit the world? What about medical research? How much has government-funded research improved the quality of medical care around the world?
Now consider this: Would you rather the government 1) pay an international tax to some software developer in another country, or 2) develop their own software (which they can maintain total control of and don't have to pay an international company to use) while benefitting their own people by providing great free software and employing software designers?
There was a great interview with Andreas Pour of KDE where he talked about government funding of open source projects. The section is too long to quote here (I hate those super-long comments...) but here's a small chunk:
If you will, you can liken a desktop infrastructure as society's infrastructure, not so different from roads, schools, universities and emergency services. These types of infrastructure are inherently monopolistic since economic (development cost, transaction costs, return on investment, etc.) and "moral" factors (freedom, equality, etc.) are such that the use of taxes for creating and maintaining them is universal.
The most difficult challenge to obtaining substantial financial contributions for FS / OS projects is that the person making the contribution does not, in general, obtain a proportionately larger benefit. So currently financial contributions (including hiring developers or releasing proprietary code to the FS / OS communities) are made mainly when the cost to the bottom line is reasonable (e.g., a company may conclude that releasing a product which it was already distributing for free would reduce its development costs without impacting its revenues, and perhaps also increase market share for the proprietary enhancements). But it is far less likely that a company will on its own fund the development of a widely-used product with no particular benefit to it.
As with roads and schools, however, Governments need not concern themselves with questions of direct returns on investment. Improvements in the general welfare alone justify public expenditures. Rather than seek to reap profits for some relatively small set of owners, the purpose of Government spending is to improve the quality of life for all their citizens. Moreover, a large part of the Government's historic economic role was to spread costs among its citizens where the benefits would be shared largely by all and the economics of development made other forms of construction less practical. Finally, Governments of free nations dedicated to the principles of freedom, democracy and choice have traditionally allocated resources to important public projects that promote or preserve these essential human rights.
Surely any believer in free government must consider this a powerful argument in favor of governemt funding for open source. Would you rather the government pay to fix bugs in MS software? That's being done as well, so stop complaining or CowboyNeal will eat you.
If you've never used a fully integrated GUI environment, it will be hard to appreciate what KDE is trying to accomplish on the desktop.
KDE's strength is in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.
What you get when you mix apps is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps not quite fitting together. Red Hat 8's superficial skinning does nothing about this. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
I'm under no delusion that KDE is quite there yet. But some day, the major KDE apps will be merely good enough for everyday use. If they are merely adequate, the overall integration will offer a major advantage over non-KDE apps that can put them over the top for all practical purposes.