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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] KDE & itsme
From:       Vincenzo Di Massa <vincenzo.dimassa () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-11-30 15:02:02
Message-ID: 6b4d3d10911300702x4656959ex83929f4439b35ef () mail ! gmail ! com
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I CC Nico Sica, our PR person, and Giovanni Martinelli, our
developement leader, so that KDE-promo has the contacts of the persons
in the "control room".

Then I CC Michele Tameni our "worst enemy" Gnome fanboy and itsme developer :-)

Btw, it is not itsme talking to KDE here, it is Vincenzo speaking.
Only Giovanni and Nico can speak for itsme.

I answer inline ...

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Vincenzo Di Massa
> <vincenzo.dimassa@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Jos,
> > In the comments of that post I wrote:
> > 
> > """
> > How can we join forces? Can we pursue a win-win objective?
> > 
> > It would be great to hear from KDE people.
> > 
> > Itsme has (great) human resources devoted to communication: maybe just
> > helping each oher communicating could help.
> > Being alone telling to the world that “the plain, old style, desktop
> > metaphor is showing its age”, is not as good as beeing 2 or more.
> > Moreover activities/venues can be seen (IMHO) as different
> > implmentations of similar concepts).
> 
> Sounds interesting, I can't think of a concrete thing we can do but
> maybe somebody on the promo list can.

Or maybe Nico can.

> > Of course also sharing lines of code would be great, where/if this can be done.
> > """
> > 
> > I'm not expert as a "communicator", so I don't have any hint or
> > idea... but I think that the fact that not just KDE is thinking about
> > a new "desktop workflow/metaphor" could be a start for more
> > "persuasive" communication. Being more than 1 could help creating hype
> > and could help giving the impression of a "stronger concept". Prof
> > G.De Michelis has studied this subject for years, itsme has spend
> > thousand hundreds euros in the study its concept... and KDE-activities
> > are really a close relative to itsme-venues. I think it could work as
> > a "validation": two independent projects arrived at the same
> > conclusion.
> 
> Sounds interesting. If we knew a bit more about what your company is
> doing and what technology they use it would be even better ;-) Can you
> tell us a bit more about that?
Have a look at this big pack of slides
http://www.slideshare.net/itsmesrl/itsme-lezione-usi-lugano

Short answer we are developing a gui based on a metaphor which does
not provide folders anymore (yes, really). Everything you do must be
stored into a venue (which is somewhat similar to an activity).
We are using Qt (Qt Graphics View Framework) for the GUI, tracker and
nepomuk for the backend (our pilar).

> Maybe it's worth an interview or you
> guys can host a meeting or something sometime, that's a neath way of
> getting closer to the KDE community.

Nico, Giovanni: what about a meeting or hosting? Even skype call could
be a nice start point.

> > I'm just guessing, maybe I'm completely wrong, but I know many
> > companies pay millions for "studies" that tell to their customers and
> > investors that what they are doing is sound and not completely crazy.
> > Sometime they pay lies (ever heard about "Get the facts"? :-P)...
> > If the kde-promo team wishes and comes up with an idea, KDE-activities
> > (or KDE-plasma-desktop) can have this sort of "validation" :-)
> > 
> > Moreover my team has many Gnome/Gtk lovers. I don't like that
> > technology so I hope a stronger link between KDE and itsme could
> > improve things.
> 
> Sure, absolutely good. What can we do? It's hard for me to think of
> ways to help you - you know what you need...

You know the effect that the 4.0 release had on Gtk/Gnome people... we
are not there anymore, but it still hurts sometimes. (I'm not blaming
the 4.0 release, but we must admit it gave new energies to so many
trolls). Maybe talking with KDE people who are good at communicating
it could emerge how much KDE technologies shine today :-)

> > We just moved from kde-nepomuk to tracker because of  2 reasons:
> > A) our developers not understanding the benefit of the Nepomuk
> > integration with the rest of KDE products
> 
> Wow, that's like... "I've ordered a BMW 5 series but it took a week
> longer to deliver than a Ford KA so I settled for that"
> 
> Do they exactly know what these technologies are supposed to do?

Well, lets me "patch" this part of my previous email: we studied and
internally documented many KDE technologies (plamsa, akonadi, nepomuk,
soprano, strigi, -virtuoso-, and others I can't remember right now)...
we had meetings where everyone else had to listen/learn about those
pieces of software. Then we decided to start using soprano+sesame2...
I was involved in the implementation of a basic backend for soprano
then moved back to GUI stuff.

Look at the following slides (particularly slide 82) for a description
of what role soprano played
http://www.slideshare.net/itsmesrl/itsme-lezione-usi-lugano

Since then we had problems with soprano and a guy in our team started
experimenting with tracker. He immediately felt better with tracker
(he is a Gtk/Gnome kind of person :-P), and the whole team was
convinced that using tracker + DIY (do it yourself) would be better
than trying to fix soprano (wich because of sesame was really feature
missing at the time). Since then they migrated Guglielmo (the itsme
equivalent of nepomuk-kde) and AVFS (will have a new name shortly,
basically it is a fuse overlay over the RDF storage, sort of like
KIO::nepomuk) to tracker.

Our initial Guglielmo code will hopefully be released as open-source
in a month or so.

So they know what the technologies do, and they tried to use them...
Where I wrote "our developers not understanding the benefit of the Nepomuk
integration with the rest of KDE products" please read "our developers
not evaluating the benefits of the Nepomuk integration with the other
KDE technologies more than the efforts needed to fix Nepomuk/Soprano".

In my opinion what my team is not "understanding" is that the
flexibility and the tight integration of KDE technologies is really
huge compared to the cost of "fixing it when it does not work for your
needs".

> Tracker
> is really not flexible enough for what you want to do, as far as I can
> tell.

I have the same impression, but I guess that experimenting both
tracker and soprano is added value to itsme and KDE and Gnome :-)

Maybe we could write a post about the switch  and its reasons.

> How about we get a Nepomuk person to your company to help you
> guys out?

I would love to meet people from the Nepomuk team (we contacted
Sebastian Trueg while working on soprano and also submitted some
patches)
> 
> > B) many of our developers knows/uses gtk in my team better than Qt
> > 
> > Of course using only KDE technologies in itsme would be great, but
> > "joining communication forces" (where it applies) is IMHO more
> > important and comes first.
> 
> Sure, no problem with that... Just make sure you choose the best technology ;-)
> 
> > Just my 0.2€
> > 
> > Vincenzo
> > 
> > P.S.: remember to CC me if you reply ;-)
> > 
> > On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Vincenzo Di Massa
> > > <vincenzo.dimassa@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Hi kde-promo list.
> > > > I'm a kde contributor (small, very small, very very small contributor)
> > > > and big fanboy ;-)
> > > > 
> > > > I'm employed in a small company (www.itsme.it), developing a new OS
> > > > metaphor. I think itsme is having great advantages by the existence of
> > > > KDE and I could that joining forces could be a win-win.
> > > 
> > > Oh, I've seen that before, checked out http://itsme.it/project/ a
> > > while ago. Interesting! We love innovative companies ;-)
> > > 
> > > > I write to the list for sebas directions ;-)
> > > > 
> > > > I'm not subscribing to the list, so please CC me if you reply.
> > > 
> > > Well, I doubt anyone would be against cooperation, the question is
> > > how. What exactly do you have in mind, how can we help you and how an
> > > itsme help the KDE community?
> > > 
> > > greetings,
> > > 
> > > Jos
> > > 
> > > > Ciao
> > > > Vincenzo
> > > > 
> > > > [11:33] <vincenzo> Hi Chani
> > > > [11:35] <vincenzo> Your last blog post is linked on
> > > > http://itsme.it/news/2009/11/30/activities-in-kde-4-8 ...
> > > > [11:36] <vincenzo> I think kde & itsme could benefit each other (well,
> > > > itsme already benefits from KDE)...
> > > > [12:12] <sebas> vincenzo: if you don't get an answer here, email to kde-promo
> > > > [12:12] <sebas> it's quite an active list
> > > > 
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > This message is from the kde-promo mailing list.
> > > > 
> > > > Visit https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-promo to unsubscribe, set \
> > > > digest on or temporarily stop your subscription. 
> > > 
> > 
> 
 
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