From kde-cygwin Fri Jul 11 22:52:58 2003 From: "Ralf Habacker" Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 22:52:58 +0000 To: kde-cygwin Subject: KDE-cygwin news from the linuxtag X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-cygwin&m=105796393123320 Hi all, This week the linuxtag happens in Karlsruhe, Germany from 10.7 to 13.7. 2003 On thursday I was on the linuxtag business congress with some interesting sessions about managing and lawing aspects of oss development which are also interesting for the kde-cygwin project. Also I was on the linuxtag to talk with some important people like Holger Schröder, the kde team and others. For example I have asked Kalle Dahlheimer, one of the chiefs of the kde e.V. some questions: An important question was about there influence on the trolltech manager to release a win32 based gpl'ed port of QT (which would be the easiest solution for us). He answered, that - although he knows the trolltech chiefs very well - the people who really direct the company are the investors and the layers. Kalle Dahlheimer stated too, that some analysts see that trolltechs dual licensing strategy of the x11 qt as one of the major reasons, why trolltech was able to stand against much bigger companies in the early days. Because trolltechs market situation currently is complete different - they has much more market share and more money, this dual licensing strategy of trolltech will probably *never* be applied to the windows release. This make us (Holger and me) sure, that the started qt win32 port seems the *only* way to get ever a gpl'ed win32 qt (and a win32 based kde in the future) and that we should not expect any help from trolltech for this port! But this doesn't matter, if you take a look into the qt/win32 roadmap on http://cygwin.kde.org/qt2-win32/roadmap.php you can see that we are currently in stage 2 of the porting. So we can say that, Richard Lärkäng has introduced this stage. Whow !! I'm very impressed by this. As Holger has started the qt2 port, I have thought about how this port should go to miminize the steps and the needed efforts, but I haven't thought that step 2 would be started at only half a year after the qt2 port and how far the results already are. Seeing this makes me more believable, that another important step, which isn't documented yet, but will be coming soon, could happen. An additional question was, how the KDE organisation the KDE on windows initiative see and he answers, that they like see this happens and that they will not put any stones in the way. Later in the day Ralf Nolden told us: "KDE on windows ? Great thing. Do it!!!". So everybody is invitated to help, that this vision will be come true. Notes to the KDE3/win32 port After Holger Schröder leaved the qt2/win32 porting - going to earn money in a company, while he is still studing in hannover, he have gotten access to a commercial qt license, which give him the chance to try how kde/win32 works with a already ported QT3/win32 library. So he is preparing the kde3/win32 port in the background. A very important event will be the KDE developer conference in Novre havre. Holger Schröder will have the chance to speek to the developer forum about the ongoing efforts of the KDE-cygwin team. One of the major goals of this presentation will be to inform the kde developers about the requirements of the windows port in relation to the operation system and gui differences like forking, which isn't available under a native windows, unix domain sockets, unix path layout versus windows path layouts, how to separate os and gui depending kde code from the rest and other important this. In the next time we are going to collect such issues to which anyone is invitated to contribute. For example we will start to publish a class list todo of some kdelibs parts in the next week. If you are interested in contributing to the coming KDE windows port, think about visiting the developer conference. You have the chance to get in contact with many kde core or application developers, which may be important for your further personal business carrier, because KDE will be one of the major platform independent application framework in the furture and you can get a part of this now. If you are really interested, please contact Holger Schröder. KDE/cygwin on the linuxtag dvd Another interesting news is, that Klaus Knopper - the maintainer of the KNOPPIX Linux CD - has build a linuxtag DVD with a special KNOPPIX edition, informations about the linuxtag and now the very good news, he has added the KDE-3.1.1/cygwin release to this dvd. This is very cool and a good way to increase the publicity of the KDE/cygwin port. Additional we have spoken how to distribute further KDE/cygwin releases and/or applications like a kgroupware client or something else. I think we will be in contact in future. KDE on Windows will be more interesting for people, if it distributes real known and functional applications. On the linux tag I've got the chance to speek with people of the german BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit und Informationstechnik) and the german Innenministerium, which are responsible for the oss strategy of the german goverment, for example they have initiated and sponsered the Spinx and the KGroupware project. I've informed them about the real possibility to provide a KDE based win32 Kroupware client in the future replacing outlook and the commercial connecter, which is used currently. They were very surprised about this possibilities and requested to hold in contact with the kde-cygwin team. Great possibilites, i think. I think thats all for now and please forgive my bad english. I'm still learning :-) Cheers Ralf _______________________________________________ kde-cygwin mailing list kde-cygwin@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-cygwin