today's my first day back home, having arrived last night. i missed a week of weather highlighted by -40C days, which is nice. it's "only" -10C right now, and having mostly caught up with email i thought i'd actually blog quickly before taking care of some more work items.
earlier this week the kde e.v. board had a two day meeting in darmstadt, germany. we met at the offices of eva's company, baysyscom, and got a ton done. we actually covered the entire agenda we set out and managed to meet with kenny, the lead organizer for next year's akademy, and the wikipedia germany staffers at their office in frankfurt. a report is forthcoming.
i unfortunately missed the marketing meeting (which i understand was a great success) that happened on the weekend immediately before that as i was still in india wrapping up foss.in. i'll blog about that trip later in a separate entry, but for now i'll just say that there's a number of people working on some very exciting projects related to free software. there seems to be some need for networking and motivational aides, however.
while i was away i got sent a link to a rather interesting, if tin-foil-hat-ish, blog entry which purports that my recent blog entry about positioning "kde" as an umbrella brand is actually an elaborate plot by trolltech to which i am a puppet. you can read it here for youself if you wish. aside from repeatedly misspelling my last name ;) the writer has made what seems to be a common, and incorrect, set of assumptions about my engagement with trolltech. i am not told what to do by them and am given a pretty completely free hand and i have only a modicum of additional insight into what trolltech is doing than other outsiders do. my primary interest is and always will remain kde. any other theory as to where my thoughts are is rubbish.
i did get a nice chuckle out of his claim that my blog entry was obviously "prepared": i mean, it's nice that my ramblings come out as cogent and coherent bits of text. but that's only because i tend to think about these things a bit (ok, quite a bit) before opening my yap. my blog is not a press release channel or an otherwise coordinated event. it's a place for my randomness to undulate.
one interesting thing in the entry is that the fellow seems to think we're moving most applications out of kde itself. which is not the case, at least not at this point. we still intend on providing a fully functional desktop and not just a desktop shell. we may well end up branding and promoting the pieces more effectively individually however. but these are two very different topics (packaging and public relations).
in completely unrelatedness, i don't know if i mentioned it before, but for the spanish speaking/reading group out there i was introduced to the essentia libre e-mag put out by a columbian group of free software enthusiasts. the latest issue (#4) has quite a bit of nice kde material in it.
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5 comments:
That pclessgeek blog post is funny, but pisses me off anyway. He is obviously making some HUGE stretches and conjectures. The worst part is that he calls KDE "demoware." Hey, I get full time work-and-home productivity out of my demoware workstations! He obviously needs to do some research. Based on previous comments you've made here and elsewhere, I think that you probably have some reservations about porting great KDE apps to Windows (like many people do). After all, the proposed benefits are somewhat questionable in a lot of minds. ...demoware. . .HA!
Wait a minute this pclessgeek person is wrong but somehow correct?
Aaron you wrote:
"one interesting thing in the entry is that the fellow seems to think we're moving most applications out of kde itself. which is not the case, at least not at this point. we still intend on providing a fully functional desktop and not just a desktop shell. we may well end up branding and promoting the pieces more effectively individually however. but these are two very different topics (packaging and public relations)."
????
Did I read this correctly? If I did you just validated what the pclessgeek wrote. Even if he is off that is what you accomplished. I did not think what the pclessgeek had written had any weight to it until I read what you just wrote. Honestly what would be the benefit to anyone by removing the apps from KDE? Come to think of it where did he call you a "puppet"? I do not see it mentioned anywhere in the pclessgeeks blog. I am thinking that your reply to the pclessgeek blog was kind of a mistake. :( But what do I know. Shrug
@anonymous: not sure what is confusing you, but let me take another run at it:
we will be shipping a set of apps with the desktop workspace apps that create a "full" desktop, just as we always have. i added "at least not at this point" because i can't see 10 years into the future. sorry for being honest.
as for branding and promotion, a good example is kpdf/okular/ligature. i often see evince used as an example of an open source pdf viewer in white papers though more people likely use kpdf right now and kpdf was certainly first on the scene with certain feature sets that set it apart. but because bury it in with the workspace ("part of the kde 3.5 release.." for example) people don't think of kpdf when they try and think of an open source viewer.
we also have issues with koffice being perceived by some as a "kde app" which means they can't (or shouldn't?) run it in gnome. this is rediculous, but a result of how we market everything monolithically.
we are in need of divorcing our packaging and our marketing somewhat so that we market individual bits better while continuing to ship things as a whole.
does that help clear things up?
as for where he called me a "puppet" that's called "reading comprehension": when you say that someone is now the public spin doctor for a company's laid out plans which they are slowly and nefariously revealing, that person is a puppet.
Yes that did clear things up a bit with the 10 years thing.
But I do not read this any where in the pclessgeek blog either.
"when you say that someone is now the public spin doctor for a company's laid out plans which they are slowly and nefariously revealing, that person is a puppet."
Stuff like this makes it appear like you are in fact spinning. :(
@anonymous: "Stuff like this makes it appear like you are in fact spinning"
... so that isn't what pclessgeek's blog entry was saying? if someone is going to make a claim, and the claim certainly was that trolltech has some secret plan which i am fronting to the community, then i certainly have the right to respond.
it's not the first time i've had this allegation levelled in my direction. indeed, i see most people who get picked up from the community get accused of this and it's really unfair to the vast majority of them/us.
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