FOSDEM Interviews

FOSDEM writes "The first FOSDEM speakers' interviews are available on the FOSDEM website. The FOSDEM folks have produced 3 great interviews of Alexander Larsson from Nautilus (Gnome), Matthias Ettrich from KDE and Olivier Fourdan from XFCE."

Comments

Re:Freedesktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Olivier Fourdan - We are not much involved in the freedesktop.org group. In fact, we try to stay compliant with the freedesktop.org standards as much as we can but we take no part in the standards themselves. We have very limited resources, and being involved with the freedesktop.org would probably mean less involvement with Xfce (well, at least for me).

Where does he say "they don't pay a lot of attention to it?"

Re:Freedesktop

[asv108]

The KDE mentions a little bit of cooperation, and the XFCE guy outright stats that they don't pay a lot of attention to it. The exact words of the Oliver:

Olivier Fourdan - We are not much involved in the freedesktop.org group. In fact, we try to stay compliant with the freedesktop.org standards as much as we can but we take no part in the standards themselves. We have very limited resources, and being involved with the freedesktop.org would probably mean less involvement with Xfce (well, at least for me).

XFCE4 is compliant with many freedesktop.org standards, but their developers are not involved in writing the standards.

Don't let the facts get in the way....

[Chuck Chunder]

But these interviews show that Freedesktop is barely making a difference. The KDE mentions a little bit of cooperation

Er....

FOSDEM - In your point of view, how do you see the relationship between the KDE and GNOME community, but also FreeDesktop.Org?

Matthias Ettrich - If you mean "community" as in "developer community", there is a professional level of cooperation through freedesktop.org. While many KDE developers had some initial skepticism towards freedesktop.org, it has now gained broad acceptance.

and

FOSDEM - Are there any plans for KDE 4 to colaborate more closely with Gnome to establish a common framework for things like IO, database access, multimedia, configuration, usual desktop services like file open dialog, print dialog, systray icon, etc

Matthias Ettrich - Most of the things you mentioned are covered through continuous efforts done at freedesktop.org. In the area of multimedia there's even more cooperation, so I guess the answer is yes.

Re:Freedesktop

[erikharrison]

Umm, I haven't read Olivier's interview yet, but as a minor Xfce developer I can say that the project does the opposite of ignore fd.o. In fact, during the 4.0 development process, Xfce was ahead of Gnome in it's implementation. There was even some talk of thinking of Xfce as a reference implementation of a desktop built to fully utilize the standard.

fd.o is gaining momentum. I think the problem with fd.o is that it's low barrier to entry means that people want to standardize _everything_ almost to the point that no innovation can occur.

But XDND? The icon's spec? The MIME spec? Xsettings? .desktop files? All pretty major fd.o accomplishments, all implemented by the 4 major OS Desktop Environments (KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Rox). In fact, the MIME spec is pretty facinating in that it's a case of an extremely minor player in the OS desktop, Rox, was doing one thing better than anyone else, and saw pretty quick adoption on all sides essentially just by presenting what they were already doing as a proposed standard.

Re:Now I know

[Anonymous Coward]

But then we wouldn't make the big bucks and get all the hot chicks...

Re:I'm excited about going ;)

[unknownalain]

As mentionned by the news, these are the FIRST interviews, which means there will be others, from all speakers !

Re:FOSDEM

[Dicky]

Lazy git!

FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, a free, grassroots, um, free and open source software conference which takes place in Brussels every February. It's an intensely communal event which gathers people from all over Europe (I'm part of a group which has gone over from the UK for the past few years) for a weekend of technical stuff, beer, socialising, beer, networking, beer, and of course Belgian beer. Amongst other things, they have a tradition of posting interviews with as many of the speakers as they can before the conference, a lot of the conference is webcast live or recorded, and the annual GNU Free Software award has been announced and presented there for the past few years, which normally means a bonus high-profile speaker :-)

In short, it's a blast, network conjestion excepted, and we'll be at Roy d'Espagne as usual on Friday night...