Daniel Molkentin von der KDE Community spricht mit mir ueber die aktuelle Entwicklung der Desktop-Oberfläche auf dem Linuxtag 2008 in Berlin. Themen sind
- die Plasmaoberfläche von KDE 4.1
- Moeglichkeiten fuer kommerzielle Distributoren den Desktop zu branden
- die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Communities, wie Wikipedia und der Idee von Offlineclients
- die Zusammenarbeit mit dem OpenStreetmap-Projekt beim KDE Desktop Globus Marble
- die weltweiten Parties zum Release von KDE 4.0
- das geplante Camp KDE in Amerika
- das Potential der wachsenden Community in Asien
- Moeglichkeiten bei KDE mitzumachen

Linuxtag 2008, Interview mit Daniel Molkentin von KDE from Mario Behling/Kamera: Stefan Koehler

Die K Desktop Environment (KDE; auf Deutsch K-Arbeitsumgebung; früher: Kool Desktop Environment) ist eine frei verfügbare Arbeitsumgebung, das heißt eine grafische Benutzeroberfläche mit vielen Zusatzprogrammen für den täglichen Gebrauch. Diese ist vorrangig für Computer gedacht, auf denen ein Unix-ähnliches Betriebssystem läuft, wie z. B. BSD, Linux oder Solaris. Die Version 3 kann mit Cygwin auch unter Windows und mit Fink auch unter Mac OS X betrieben werden. Seit Version 4 kann KDE-Software prinzipiell auch nativ unter Windows und Mac OS X genutzt werden, die Entwickler planen eine lauffähige Version von KDE für Windows und für Mac OS X für KDE 4.1. Version 15. Juni 2008 um 22:56, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kde)

Daniel Molkentin: "Wo es im Moment interessant wird. ... Wir haben einen Desktop-Globus namens Marble und dort arbeiten die Autoren aktiv mit OpenStreetMap zusammen. Wir koennen jetzt bereits OpenStreetMap-Karten anzeigen, noch als "Tiles" und wir hoffen diese "Tiles" bis Ende des Jahres durch wirkliche Vektordaten erzetzen zu koennen, die wir dann ueber die Landkarte legen koennen. Da sind sehr viele Leute aus dem KDE-Projekt aktiv geworden. Torsten Rahn ist da zu nennen, der Autor und andere."

OpenStreetMap ist ein freies Software-Projekt mit dem Ziel, für jeden frei verfügbares weltweites Kartenmaterial in elektronischer Form zu schaffen. Es handelt sich bei dem Projekt um ein Wiki mit geographischen Daten, die (im Gegensatz zu proprietärem Material) unter einer freien Lizenz (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0) verwendbar sind.

Jim Zemlin talks about the the Linux Foundation, its members, the participation in Europe and new projects involving (GNU)Linux as an operating system and platform.

The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007 by the merger of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG), it sponsors the work Linus Torvalds, the original developer of the Linux kernel, and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects, and standardizes Linux "by providing a comprehensive set of services to compete effectively with closed platforms." (Version, 10 May 2008, 17:55, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Foundation)

Interview: Mario Behling // Camera: Stefan Koehler
Direct Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1023750676842833246

Jim: The Linux Foundation ... it is made of all of the largest backers of Linux in the world. Many thousands of individuals in the world as well. Some of our prominent members include NEC, IBM, Hitachi, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, AMD, Intell, Novell, redhat. It is kind of everybody than Microsoft... And what we do is we provide services to help grow the Linux platform. Some of which include employing and paying people like Linus Torvalds to work on the Linux kernel. We provide a program to standardize the Linux operating system... We promote advance that help the community collaborate on Linux, such as Kernel Summit, a collaboration summit. And we work on all kinds of different collaborative development projects to enhance the Linux platform.

Mario: How big is the involvement in Europe?

Jim: It started in the US and we got a limited participation in Europe, which is ironic considering Linux really was born in Europe, but we are a young organization and we wanna extend over here.

Mario: How do you see the future of Linux?

Jim: ... I think what we are seeing is Linux is growing in three different categories. One in embedded and mobile, you are seeing Motorola ships their cell phones based on Linux platform. Google announced two months ago a reference platform for mobile devices based on Linux, Android. ... And you are seeing ... companies like Samsung, Lenovo and others with interesting new mobile devices. So there is tremendous amount of growth there. We are also seeing growth in the desktop world, not only we are seeing Linux being used in large corporations, in fact Peugeot in Europe uses Linux on their desktops and saves quite a bit of money in doing so, more importantly we are seeing pc manufacturers for the first time ship their computers to the market with Linux preinstalled. ... This is a break through. ... And finally we are seeing a ton of growth in the server side of the market. Linux has a about 35 percent market share now and that is growing, and we have trends like virtualization, where Linux is strong. ... in high performance computing, in super computing...

Jim Zemlin, formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference, Linux World and OSCON. Zemlin is an adviser on open source strategy to various companies and governmental groups including Hyperic, Zmanda and the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union. (May 26, 2008, http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Staff)

At the CeBIT I had the chance to talk to some fantastic folks of direct open embedded systems, a new Latvian company that is producing WLAN devices based on the GNU/Linux distributions like OpenWRT, OpenEmbedded and FlashSYS Linux.

In the video they present their devices and some show cases as well as FlashSYS, their own web based firmware for small router computers.

FlashSYS environment is a cross-operating system clent-server environment that allows developers to use existing web development skills (HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, SQLite, and Lua) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for an embedded system with a very small footprint. (http://openrb.com)

direct open embedded systems is able to produce WLAN devices that can act as small web servers with currently up to 64 GB storage space.

Most of the free and open source companies presented their products in hall 5, which was packed with crowds of people. You can get an idea when you hear the background noise in the video. The interest in free and open source technologies is amazing and ever increasing.