Hi there,

sorry for not replying first... mail was lost in my backlog

There will be few people from Itsme there (Bob, Fabio, Lorenzo & Michele) so good  if you know each other!

In term of Itsme project we are know putting together some of our building blocks and at FOSDEM you will see one of them. From a technical perspective we are taking several pieces around that actually fit with our needs: our GUI will be Qt based and will probably re-use some KDE as basis, while for the part you will see sit on top of tracker.

So yes, would be nice for us to talk about future cooperation/synergy  but would be perfect for us to postpone the discussion for a month or so.  We are now in a transitional phase in term of internal organization so better if we can postpone a bit.

Would it still be ok for you? We can probably schedule a conf call for sometime beginning of March...


Cheers,
Giovanni



2010/2/1 Stéphane Laurière <slauriere@mandriva.com>
Hi everyone,

As a follow-up, just in case you don't know about it, Sebastian will
give a talk on the current status and the future of Nepomuk in the
CrossDesktop room at the FOSDEM next Sunday [1]. That'd be great to see
some ItsMe contributors there for discussing any possible future
synergies between the two projects.

[1] http://www.fosdem.org/2010/schedule/events/xd_nepomuk

Hoping to see you in Brussels,

Cheers

Stéphane Lauričre, in charge of semantic and collaborative technologies
at Mandriva



On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Vincenzo Di Massa <vincenzo.dimassa@gmail.com> wrote:
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 :-)

Hi all!

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:
<snip>
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.

Depending on what and how much you do with KDE technology a story on the dot might be possible. That's quite a high-profile site with many
 other news sites picking it up.

<snip>
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
:-)

Well, the 4.0 release has hurt some users (due to distributions shipping it despite our discouragement), but since then our developer
 force has doubled. For developers the 4.0 release was great - a framework which is technically ahead of whatever MS and Apple can throw at us.

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

Interesting.

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.

Well, that is unfortunate as it is my understanding from Sebastian Trueg's website that the new virtuosa backend for Soprano kind'a solves the problems it has... http://trueg.wordpress.com/

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".

Yes, I guess that's something really worth communicating. It takes a while to get the infrastructure up and running but once you do you
can get features others spend months on in a couple of hours.

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.

That would be interesting - if anyone on your team could blog about that, I can link to it from planet.kde.org. Or even more interesting,
 talk about it with Sebastian ;-)

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)

Cool. I guess you contacted developers using IRC or mailinglists or personal mail? This works best when it comes to getting answers ;-)

Of course when it comes to making decisions on technology there are a
 couple of companies in the KDE ecosystem who can help with that. For
 example KDAB, BasysKom, KO GmbH and Collabora.

To get down to business:

- I would love to hear a bit more about your usage of KDE technologies, that might lead to a dot story. We can take it from there and see if there are more ways to cooperate in the marketing
and promo department.

- I will ask Sebastian Trueg to get in contact with you and see if he
 can help out on the Nepomuk things.

- When it comes to technical questions you should really contact the appropriate developers through IRC, mailinglists etc, if you need
help ask me. For more in-depth consultancy contact one of the KDE businesses.

Did I miss anything?

Greetings,

Jos Poortvliet KDE Marketing


--
Stéphane Lauričre
Mandriva http://mandriva.com
Mobile: +33 6 45 81 62 02
http://twitter.com/arkub