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List:       kde-user
Subject:    FWD: From Matthias Ettrich KDE Project Leader/Founder
From:       Martin Konold <konold () alpha ! tat ! physik ! uni-tuebingen ! de>
Date:       1998-06-09 12:09:54
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>Subject: 5th International Linux Kongress

>Hi,
>
>in the recent postings about the LinuxExpo (or should I say
>RedHatExpo?  ;-) some people mentioned that SuSE was the only booth
>running KDE but at least several people have been running KDE in the
>talks.
>
>It was a bit different at the 5th internationl linux kongress in
>cologne: Almost all booths have been running KDE, including all
>speakers. This includes Miguel as well :-) Well, to be honest: all
>speakers shared one machine for the online presentation (Kalle used
>--- the world's first public presentation! --- kpresenter for that.
>Worked great except a hardware problem near the end of the talk which
>caused even (k)ernel to hang....) Even kimp worked great. Well, I
>couldn't resist to show a running version during my talk to proof the
>multi-toolkit approach. Kimp is a good thing IMO, since it is just
>1100 lines of codes which integrate the GIMP very well into the KDE
>desktop by providing a KDE compliant user interface (toolbars,
>statusbar, menubar) and using standard KDE dialogs (colorselector,
>fileselector). This makes it almost unnecessary to start a new image
>manipulation program for KDE from scratch, so we do not unncessarily
>double effort. kimp also makes it possible to write extension modules
>with KDE interface. Integration in the original gimp is easy as well
>and could be achieved just by linking Qt (or some nice day in the
>future: Harmony)
>
>Anyways, Miguel's talk was very interesting and he is certainly
>entertaining.  Actually, if you remove the paragraphs about gtk, you
>could almost use his slides for a KDE talk.  We have been a bit
>dissapointed that he did not show any running stuff, though, neither
>during his talk or later :-(
>
>The stuff about an object model (they intend to clone OLE2 from
>Microsoft) was pretty interesting as well, especially after Torben
>Weis showed the fully working OpenParts/KOM system with the
>spreadsheet, image and chart component from KOffice during his talk a
>few hours before.  We believe that it's the technical better solution
>than cloning the Microsoft API. Hopefully the gnomes will jump in the
>boat, at least Miguel seemed to be very interested.  Since
>OpenPars/KOM are already usable and do not rely on Qt, they are a
>perfect solution for any unix desktop.
>
>Last not least: there was no hard fight and everybody survived. Even
>more, everybody agreed about the importance of a fair competition and
>that freedom also means freedom of choice. I really wish that the
>advocates in the usenet and on slashdot could take the developers as a
>modell how to deal with each other. These senseless flamewars lead to
>nothing.
>
>Before I forget it: Bruce Perens also said in his talk at the panel
>discussion at the end of the kongress, that he is aware of the fact
>that KDE itself is indeed free (which means: open source) software. He
>also mentioned that if RedHat or Debian say that they "cannot" ship
>KDE, this does not mean they cannot ship KDE due to some juridical
>licensing problems like having to pay anything to anybody, but simply
>that shipping KDE will not confirm to their policies.  I wish they
>would not use the term "cannot" in this context, since many people
>seemed to have been confused by this. We noticed this everytime, when
>people have been surprised that it is indeed legal to get money for
>developing Qt-software with the FreeEdition of Qt and even to sell
>this software, as long as it remains free software. This is pretty
>much what is required by the GPL as well, btw.
>
>So the positions are pretty clear and it will depend on the users
>wether technical issues or personal policies will determine the
>decision what flavor of Linux and what flavor of interface will be it
>at the end.  At least we developers consider the linux market big
>enough for both.
>
>So keep on hacking, it seems that distributors and the press hold
>their breath to finally see KDE-1.0. After that we can finally start
>with the really kewl features, I guess a lot of code is already
>waiting on several hard discs out there ;-)
> 
>     Matthias

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