Tag Archives: FOSDEM

Linux

The History on Wayland Support inside KWin

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Ever since a certain free software company decided to no longer be part of the larger ecosystem, I have seen lots of strange news postings whenever one of the KDE workspace developers mentioned the word “Wayland”. Very often it goes in the direction of “KDE is now also going on Wayland”. Every time I read something like that, I’m really surprised.

For me Wayland support has been the primary goal I have been working on over the last two years. This doesn’t mean that there is actual code for supporting Wayland (there is – the first commit for Wayland support in our git repositories is from June 11, 2011 (!)).

The Wayland research projects two years ago had been extremely important for the further development of KWin since then. First of all it showed that adding support for Wayland surfaces inside KWin’s compositor is rather trivial. Especially our effect system did not care at all about X11 or Wayland windows. So this is not going to be a difficult issue.

The more important result from this research project was that it’s impossible to work against an always changing target. At that time Wayland had not yet seen the 1.0 release, so the API was changing. Our code broke and needed adjustments for the changing API. It also meant that we could not merge the work into our master branch (distributions would kill us), we needed to be on a different branch for development. Tracking one heavily changing project is difficult enough, but also KWin itself is changing a lot. So the work needed to be on top of two moving targets – it didn’t work and the branch ended in the to be expected state. Now with Wayland 1.0 and 1.1 releases the situation changed completely.

The next lesson we learned from that research project was that the window manager part is not up to the task of becoming a Wayland compositor. It was designed as an X11 window manager and the possibility that there would not be X11 had never been considered. We started to split out functionality from the core window manager interface to have smaller units and to be able to add abstractions, where needed, to support in future more than just X11. That had been a huge task and is still ongoing and it comes with quite some nice side-effects like the rewrite of KWin scripting (helped to identify the interface of a managed Client inside KWin), the possibility to run KWin with OpenGL on EGL since 4.10, the new screen edge system in 4.11 and many many more. All these changes were implemented either directly or indirectly with Wayland in mind. That means we have been working on it for quite some time even if it is not visible in the code.

My initial plannings for adding Wayland support around October/November last year was to start hacking on it in January. I was so confident about it that I considered to submit a talk for FOSDEM which would demo KWin

From: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/04/the-history-on-wayland-support-inside-kwin/

Linux

First Open Chemistry Beta Release

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We are pleased to announce the first beta release of the Open Chemistry suite of cross platform, open-source, BSD-licensed tools and libraries – Avogadro 2, MoleQueue and MongoChem. They are being released in beta, before all planned features are complete, to get feedback from the community following the open-source mantra of “release early, release often”. We will be making regular releases over the coming months, as well as automatically generating nightly binaries. A Source article from 2011 introduced the project, slides from FOSDEM describe it more recently, and the 0.5.0 release binaries can be downloaded here.

These three desktop applications can each be used independently, but also have the capability of working together. Avogadro 2 is a rewrite of Avogadro that addresses many of the limitations we saw. This includes things such as the rendering code, scalability, scriptability, and increased flexibility, enabling us to effectively address the current and upcoming challenges in computational chemistry and related fields. MoleQueue provides desktop services for executing standalone programs both locally and on remote batch schedulers, such as Sun Grid Engine, PBS and SLURM. MongoChem provides chemically-aware search, storage, and informatics visualization using MongoDB and VTK.

Avogadro 2

Avogadro 2 is a rewrite of Avogadro; please see the recently-published paper for more details on Avogadro 1. Avogadro has been very successful over the years, and we would like to thank all of our contributors and supporters, including the core development team: Geoff Hutchison, Donald Curtis, David Lonie, Tim Vandermeersch, Benoit Jacob, Carsten Niehaus, and Marcus Hanwell. We also recently obtained permission from almost all authors to relicense the existing code under the 3-clause BSD license, which will make migration of code to the new architecture much easier.

Some notable new features of Avogadro 2 include:

  • Scalable data structures capable of addressing the needs of large molecular systems.
  • A flexible file I/O API supporting seamless addition of formats at runtime.
  • A Python-based input generator API, creating an input for a range of quantum codes.
  • A specialized scene graph for supporting scalable molecular rendering.
  • OpenGL 2.1/GLSL based rendering, employing point sprites, VBOs, etc.
  • Unit tests for core classes, with ongoing work to improve coverage.
  • Binary installers generated nightly.
  • Use of MoleQueue to run computational codes such as NWChem, MOPAC, GAMESS, etc.

Avogadro is not yet feature complete, but we invite you to try it out along with the suite of applications as we continue to improve it. The new Avogadro libraries feature much finer granularity; whereas before we provided a single library with all API, there is now a layered API in multiple libraries. The Core and IO libraries have minimal dependencies, with the rendering library adding a dependence on OpenGL, and the Qt libraries adding Qt 4 dependencies. This allows us to reuse the code in many more places than was possible before, with rendering possible on a server

From: http://blog.cryos.net/archives/265-First-Open-Chemistry-Beta-Release.html

Linux

Re-blog: Pau Garcia i Quiles, Mark’s divisive leadership

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A repost of elite KDE contributor Pau Garcia i Quiles' blog for Planet Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth recently critized Jonathan Riddell for proposing Xubuntu and others join the Kubuntu community. I thought I could make a few amendments to Mark’s writing:
Jonathan Mark says that CanonicalKubuntu is not taking careof the Ubuntu community.
Consider for a minute, Jonathan Mark, the difference between our actions.
Canonical Kubuntu, as one stakeholder in the Ubuntu community, is spending a large amount of energy to evaluate how its actions might impact on all the other stakeholders, and offering to do chunks of work in support of those other stakeholder needs.
You, as one stakeholder in the Ubuntu community, are inviting people to contribute less to the broader project [all the X and Wayland -based desktops], and more to one stakeholder [Unity and Mir].
Hmm. Just because you may not get what you want is no basis for divisive leadership.
Yes, you should figure out what’s important to Kubuntu Ubuntu Unity and Mir, and yes, you should motivate folks to help you achieve those goals. But it’s simplywrong to suggest that Canonical Kubuntu isn’t hugely accommodating to the needs of others, or that it’s not possible to contribute or participate in the parts of Ubuntu which Canonical Kubuntu has a particularly strong interest in. Witness the fantastic work being done on both the system and the apps to bring Ubuntu Plasma to the phone and tablet. That may not be your cup of tea, but it’s tremendously motivating and exciting and energetic.
See Mark? I only needed to do a little search and replace on your words and suddenly, meaning is completely reversed!
Canonical started looking only after its own a couple of years ago and totally dumped the community. Many people have noticed this and written about this in the past two years.
How dare you say Jonathan or anyone from Kubuntu is proposing contributing less to the broader community?The broader community uses X and/or Wayland.
Canonical recently came with Mir, a replacement for X and Wayland, out of thin air. Incompatible with X and Wayland.
No mention of it at all to anyone from X or Wayland.
No mention of it at FOSDEM one month ago, even though I, as the organizer of the Cross Desktop DevRoom, had been stalking your guy for months because we wanted diversity (and we got it: Gnome, KDE, Razor, XFCE, Enlightenment, etc, we even invided OpenBox, FVWM, CDE and others!). I even wrote a mail to you personally warning you Unity was going to lose its opportunity to be on the stand at FOSDEM. You never answered, of course.
Don’t you think Mir, a whole new replacement for X and Wayland, which has been in development for 8 months, deserved a mention at the largest open source event in Europe?
Come on, man.
It is perfectly fine to say “yes, Canonical is not so interested in the community. It’s our …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

This week in KWin (2013, week 7)

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This week we have seen much less new reported bugs than the week before. So the 4.10 release peak is over, but openSUSE and Kubuntu releases coming soon – history tells that will also results in lots of new bugs reported. This week a very interesting bug got fixed from the category “one wonders that has ever worked”. The symptoms were already really strange for the bug and if not a fellow developer would have reported it, I would not have believed it. And it took us quite some time to figure out how to reproduce the bug although I had the chance to work with the affected system at FOSDEM.

The porting for Qt 5 did a huge step over the last week. KWin’s XRenderUtils library got ported from XLib to XCB and with that also “evil” usage of QPixmap got removed. Most of our XRender effects are now also ported to XCB. I hope to finish the QPixmap chapter this week.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    Critical Bug Fixes

      Bug Fixes

      • 314760: Keyboard input doesn’t work after assigning window shortcut
        This change will be available in version 4.10.1
        Git Commit
      • 313145: Edges and “hiden panels” stop working when System Activity is shown
        This change will be available in version 4.10.1
        Git Commit
      • 314756: (Desktop Effect) Mouse Click Animation does not recognize mouse buttons correctly
        This change will be available in version 4.10.1
        Git Commit
      • 314625: window border “stays on top” after using present windows
        This change will be available in version 4.10.1
        Git Commit
      • 314762: (Desktop Effect) Mouse Click Animation does not work when rising or focusing a window
        This change will be available in version 4.10.1
        Git Commit

      New Features

        Tasks

          …read more
          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          FOSDEM talk reflections 3/3: HipHop, communities, public procurement

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          Nikerabbit arrives at the MediaWiki meetup at FOSDEM

          Meetup of MediaWiki community. Or Wikimedia tech? How to call the Wikimedia software development ecosystem? (Photo by henna, copyright status unknown.)

          This is the third post about FOSDEM 2013; see 1/3: I18n in the WEB, Mozilla i18n and L20n for the first and2/3: docs, code and community health, stabilityfor the second. Links to the abstracts in the headers.

          Scaling PHP with HipHop

          HipHop is still alive, and faster than ever. It has evolved from PHP to C translator to a JIT bytecode interpreter system, just like PHP itself is, without JIT of course. The speedups they are seeing are impressive (it was deployed on Facebook about a month ago). Given that they have removed the compile everything before deploy step, it is now much more feasible to use.

          I’m considering to give HipHop a try on translatewiki.net later this year, probably after we have upgraded to at least Ubuntu 12.04, where Facebook provides packages for it. It is still a pain in the ass to set up manually, as it was few years ago. Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has dropped its evaluation, but perhaps they will reconsider after our experiences, and HipHop, or hhvm as it is called now, has indeed changed a lot since then.

          It was highlighted that the supported language features and libraries of hhvm and PHP vary to an extent. hhvm provides some nice features like strict type hinting, but it is unlikely I can use those anytime soon, since there is no way to take advantage of these on hhvm without breaking support for normal PHP, which is something that really cannot be done in the MediaWiki ecosystem.

          Community/BOF meetup

          Almost 20 people were around, a few outside of WMF. Discussions circled around events like the Amsterdam Hackathon and MediaWiki groups. The most interesting part (to me) is how to call the Wikimedia software development ecosystem, so it can be marketed properly. Suggestions ranged from extending the meaning of MediaWiki to cover everything including mobile, gadgets and so on; using Wikipedia as it is the brand most well known; or creating a new Wikitech brand.

          There are pros and cons to each of the above, but one thing is true: There is no name that can currently be used to refer to everything technical done around MediaWiki and Wikimedia that would also be understood by potential participants. Also, MediaWiki development is not perceived to be cool anymore, because it’s PHP. But it isn’t. MediaWiki development is also Redis, Varnish, puppet, git, Solr, HipHop, semantic, node.js, mobile, OpenStack, and more. Quim Gil will continue work on coming up with a brand. Curious visitors can also compare this to what KDE did recently when they expanded the meaning of KDE to be not only the desktop, but also the community and everything they do. The change process wasn’t painless for them, and wouldn’t be for us, but at the same time (<a target=_blank …read more
          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          Listaller, AppStream & “GNOME-Apps”

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          Listaller-Logo

          I think many of you read the recent announcements and blog posts about “GNOME-Apps”, like this one. Initially I wanted to be at FOSDEM and attend the GNOME hackfest were this was discussed too, but university binds me here so I was unable to come (which is really unfortunate).

          Some people asked me what the GNOME-App-Bundles mean for Listaller. The GNOME bundle proposal will make cross-distro application deployment for GNOME apps possible, and this essentially the same goal as the one of Listaller. So it is reasonable to question the future of Listaller when GNOME enforces their App Bundles (because most distros ship GNOME, most distros will have the app bundle support, which means people will use it because they can rely on it being present). Instead of answering the same questions again and again via private mail (remember, there is a new public Listaller mailinglist available, replacing the old Google Group) I’ll write this post.

          In my opinion, there is no reason to worry about Listaller. I think the Listaller approach of app-directories and shared resources is much better than having app bundles mounted via FUSE. When Listaller was started, the Klik project already existed (Klik is dead now, Glick2 was developed by Alexander Larsson as replacement. Glick and Listaller nearly have the same age (I think Listaller might be older, when counting the first experiemnts…), so this is no case of “re-inventing” the wheel on both sides.). I initially wanted to contribute to Klik. However, FUSE-mounted app bundles have certain problems:

          • No system integration: It is incredibly complicated to integrate the bundled apps with the system, e.g. if an application wants to register mimetypes.
          • The way of “installing” app bundles is odd for most users, and having apps lying around in random directories is not really nice.
          • App bundles can’t easily share resources. This means every app bundle has to provide all it’s dependencies again, while maybe another bundle already provides them (wastes lots of space).
          • Auto-updating bundles is not possible (you simply have to re-download the new app version and replace the old bundle)
          • Because every app provides it’s own dependencies, security updates provided by the distribution for a certain library won’t automatically be applied to bundled applications, which makes them a potential security risk.
          • (The GNOME-Apps stuff is planned GNOME-only at time (nobody can blame anyone for that). A cross-desktop solution would be much better)

          Listaller, on the contrary, integrates nicely with the system. Applications installed with Listaller will show up in every Software Center which uses PackageKit. The regular system updater is able to update Listaller applications as well as distribution components, and the Listaller dependency solver will always prefer distribution packages to satisfy dependencies, before falling back to other solutions. This tight platform integration is also one of the main reasons why Listaller is different from ZeroInstall (Listaller is also Linux-only, while ZeroInstall is not – both projects cover slightly different user-cases).

          In order to have these advantages, Listaller requires all applications to be relocatable, while Glick2 does not require that (which …read more
          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          Client Side Window Decorations and Wayland

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          This weekend I was at FOSDEM and attended a talk about Wayland for application developers. One thing that came around multiple times was that “applications have to provide the decorations”. Every time I had to cringe, because it’s just not true and I find it sad that people who give presentations about Wayland repeat that.

          Nothing in the Wayland protocol requires Client Side Decorations or forbids Server Side Decorations. And that’s not surprising as it just should not matter to a protocol. The same is true for the X11 protocol, there is nothing said about window decorations. Just on X11 people realized that server side decorations are the better choice, but still there are applications doing client side (maybe people think that the possibility of re-parenting says anything about window decorations, it doesn’t you don’t need re-parenting to provide server side decorations). What is true is that the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, Weston, requires Client Side Decorations, but it’s just one implementation and doesn’t say anything about other implementations. And here it’s important to remember that Weston is not Wayland.

          There are good arguments pro and contra client side decorations. The most commonly listed ones pro client side are:

          1. Only one texture needs to be rendered
          2. No aliasing when rotating/wobbling windows
          3. Application developers are free to experiment

          The first two are true. I have to agree there. I know KWin’s OpenGL decoration rendering code and the problems with it. I do not like it and I do see the disadvantages. Also I do know that wobbling windows is not looking nice.

          The third argument is more complex. Here I do not agree, because I have not seen any valid use cases for these “experiments”. All we have so far is the Chromium use case and since then nobody else came up with any use case. So somehow that shows that we are not restricting the application developers as some pro-CSD people would claim. In fact allowing CSD limits the possibilities of the workspace.

          Plasma provides three workspaces: desktop, netbook and tablet. From KWin perspective the main difference is how window decorations are handled. On Desktop we have full decorations, on netbook we disable decorations for maximized windows (control moved to the Shell’s panel) and on active we don’t have any decorations at all. With client side decorations such possibilities are gone. We are no longer able to take the desktop further by just changing this aspect for all applications. Many KDE applications are useable on Plasma Active (tablet) without any adjustments. If they would use CSD they were not usable.

          My main fear with CSD is that it ends up in a mess as we can see on Microsoft Windows. There CSD are common but applications don’t use it to do useful stuff, but to enforce their corporate design. This is bad for usability. Each application looking different? Stupid idea. Not even Microsoft is having a consistent decoration for their various products. Some have titles on the left, some centered. A complete mess. And my fear is …read more
          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          Plasma Active for Archos G9 armv7hl

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          I had this lurking on my local disk and in my repositories on cobs @ meego.com far too long. Up to now, Plasma Active for Archos G9 had only been available as armv7l (soft float).

          Some time ago I was trying to update the accelerated pvr graphics drivers for Plasma Active on Archos G9. While I didn’t really succeed with that attempt, one, imho nice, result is an armv7hl (hard float) version of Plasma Active for Archos G9.

          You can get a .ks file for creating a Plasma Active armv7hl rootfs tarball for Archos G9 from here. I hope some will find this useful and that there are people out there who still use their trusted Archos G9 and run Plasma Active. ;)

          PS: Thanks to dm8tbr: I took our discussion at FOSDEM as motivation to upload this.


          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          FOSDEM 2013 (Legal Quotes)

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          “Minimal compliance vs. abundant compliance” “It is imperative that Free Software becomes visible in App Stores” “Morally wrong is sometimes practically convenient” “Clarification is difficult” “Bastards”

          Last time I was at FOSDEM was three years ago, I think. Part of the venue has moved to a new building — it’s much bigger and airier. I must say that I don’t miss standing next to the drafty exit at the lower end of the H building, but it did have its charm. Plenty of interesting stands to visit. GNOME still have their nice round 2″ foot stickers. KDE is well-stocked with T-shirts, but our hoodies and bags have sold out already. Postgres has very nice frosted-glass mugs. Oracle has no mention of Solaris at all — drat, I was vaguely hoping they might still have Solaris beer mugs. For once, I’ve got some time to visit talks, the legal devroom in particular.
          The legal devroom is just packed — has been all day. I think that’s an amazing change (for the better) from a few years back when legal was still a tiny niche topic.

          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          FOSDEM’13: Community development and legal issues devroom

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          Hello! I am at the FOSDEM’13″>FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, in Brussels. The flight here last night from Berlin was delayed, so I missed the pre-party. Instead I bumped into Frank Karlitschek of ownCloud and his buddies. This immediately sparked a discussion about company-community relations over a pint and something to nibble on. After an interesting excursion into the city of Brussels this morning (we trusted the navigation system and ended up at the wrong university campus in the first trial), I finally made it to the venue. In the following, find some notes from presentations I attended.

          Messaging for Free Software Groups and Projects

          Deborah Nicholson presented on messaging for Free Software communities, a topic that commonly gives contributors that shivering feeling down the spine that they should do something about it, and then procrastinate about it. Her suggestions are simple and easy to implement: Tell a positive story about your project. The audience pointed to Thumper’s rule: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” My children probably heard it a thousand times by now, but it never grows old. Teach people how to help themselves. Use neutral examples and by that, avoid stereotypes (like presumptions about income levels or technical inclinations of certain groups). Be welcoming and approachable. Welcome all contributors, not just coders, and regularly thank them for their work. Be approachable to users and contributors – when at a conference, do not hide behind your laptop (maybe do not even bring one). Have two people at your booth, showing that the project is fun to work on. Consider standing in front of the booth to remove the barrier of the conference table.

          Deb explained how people respond more to the “Why” of a project than the “What”. The choice of programming language or database system may not be as interesting for them up front than the problem that the project will help them to solve. Following her simple guidelines to FLOSS projects attracts contributors and users. They are a good thing to keep in mind.

          (to be continued)


          Google+

          Filed under: English, FLOSS, KDE, OSS Tagged: city of brussels, deborah nicholson, FLOSS, FOSDEM’13, free software communities
          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          Vincent Untz: Next stop: FOSDEM 2013

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          In a couple of hours, I’ll be taking the train and heading to Brussels for FOSDEM. I’ve lost counts of how many FOSDEM I’ve attended, which is probably a good indication of how great the event is!

          FOSDEM

          As usual, this will be a good place to catch up with friends, but also to talk with tons of different people about so many topics. If you want to chat about OpenStack, SUSE Cloud, openSUSE or GNOME, I’ll be glad to join you.

          The schedule is quite packed, but from what I can tell so far, I’ll be sitting in the cloud devroom on Sunday (don’t hesitate to join in order to learn about what’s happening in the OpenStack world!). Oh, I’ll also give a talk in Janson about challenges that the GNOME project is facing, just before the closing keynote.

          And no, I won’t have my blue hat, so you’ll need to find another way to catch me (hint: I have a SUSE backpack nowadays) 😉

          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

          Linux

          Keeping SSDs fresh

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          With a new SSD the laptop is quieter and feels faster than before. I want to keep it that way, which (still) means keeping the number of writes to it down. OpenSUSE has some tips, as does Fedora, but they leave a few bits untouched which might be useful, so I’m taking note here.

          – Make /tmp a tmpfs filesystem. This means no longer relying on /tmp across reboots, but those are pretty rare since I usually just suspend-to-RAM.
          – Make /var/log tmpfs, too. This is an agressive optimization, but I think it’s acceptable for a laptop.
          – Disable scheduler on disk sda, force syslog to write to /var/log in RAM.
          – Set syslog to log warn and above only.
          The hard part is getting rid of a .xsession-errors that keeps growing (and getting written to). KDM can be configured to write the file elsewhere (and that’s documented) but you still need to hack the Xsession script to stop X from (re-)creating that file. I kept meaning to write down what I did, but .. good intentions and all.

          Speaking of good intentions: I’ll be at FOSDEM, mostly at the KDE booth (everyone at the booth has also written “but I hope to attend some talks, too” on the schedule, so we’ll see. It’s been quite some time since I remember sitting with Anne-Marie at the bar across from Manneken Pis, ordering all the beers we couldn’t pronounce.

          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          Little bits of news about Gwenview

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          Some news from Gwenview world:

          New mailing-list

          One year ago, I decided to replace Gwenview mailing list with a forum.
          The idea behind that move being that forums were more adapted for user support.

          Gwenview forum is doing quite well: there are more users helping each others
          there than what used to happen on the mailing-list. I assume this is because
          there are more users on KDE forums.

          One thing happened during this cycle, though: a new contributor, Benjamin Löwe,
          joined and has been very active on Gwenview. Therefore I decided it would be a
          good idea to create a developer mailing-list: gwenview-devel.

          Gwenview 2.10.0 is dead, long live Gwenview 4.10.0!

          Until now Gwenview has always been using its own version number, which was
          the same as KDE SC version number, except the major was 2 instead of
          4. For example, the version of Gwenview which came KDE SC 4.9.5 was 2.9.5.

          This made sense to me because the version of Gwenview shipped with KDE SC 4.0.0 was
          the first major rewrite of Gwenview: so I bumped the version number to 2.0.0.

          Even if it made sense to me, people were often confused by these two version
          numbers. Furthermore, Benjamin pointed out that since we used 2.y.z in
          the “FIXED-IN” Bugzilla field, our fixes did not show up in KDE SC release
          changelogs. Therefore I decided to bump the version to 4.10.0. No more confusion!

          More reviews

          Benjamin and I have been busy fixing as much bugs as possible for the 4.10.0
          release. I am quite happy that almost all the latest commits have gone through
          review before landing in the KDE/4.10 branch.

          I believe doing more reviews will help improve the quality of Gwenview code and
          avoid regressions. To this end I decided to start asking for review for my own
          code as well. Gwenview has been mostly a one-man project until now, so I
          committed directly to master. Now that the bus factor has been
          multiplied by 2, it is possible to get all code reviewed before it lands in
          master.

          That’s it for now, time to plan 4.11!

          (PS: I am going to FOSDEM, see you in Brussels!)

          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          FOSDEM: Open Science and Open Chemistry

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          I will be talking about the Open Chemistry Project at FOSDEM this year in the FOSS for scientists devroom at 12:30pm on Saturday. I will discuss the development of a suite of tools for computational chemists and related disciplines, which includes the development of three desktop applications addressing 3D molecular structure editing, input preparation, output analysis, cheminformatics and integration with high-performance computing resources.

          Open Chemistry

          On Sunday Bill Hoffman will be speaking in the main track about Open Science, Open Software, and Reproducible Code at 3pm on Sunday. Bill and Alexander Neundorf will also be talking about Modern CMake in the cross desktop devroom on Saturday.

          FOSDEM is one of the first conferences I attended (possibly the first, I can’t remember if I went to a science conference before this). It will be great to return after so many years, and hopefully meet old colleagues and a few new ones. Please find me, Bill or Alex if you would like to discuss any of this work with us. I fly out tomorrow, and hope to get over jet lag quickly. Once FOSDEM is over we will be visiting Kitware SAS in Lyon, France for a couple of days (this is my first trip to our new office).

          Then I have a few days in England visiting friends and family before heading back to the US.


          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          On Open Innovation and Open Governance

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          Heya,

          As I wrote in my blog yesterday, on Thursday the 15th I’ll be leading a discussion session about open governance in the Open Innovation track at the ‘Summit of new thinking’ in Berlin.

          Edit: The video of my talk is up…

          #SON12: Jos Poortvliet – Open Governance done right: creating rules without ruling from newthinking on Vimeo.

          Open Innovation

          I’m actually looking forward to that: the ‘open innovation’ thing was what once got me professionally interested in Free Software communities (while studying Organizational Psychology) and I still consider it an exciting topic. I did my thesis on open innovation but 10 years ago there was barely any research done in the area of open source governance and when I asked questions to my professors, blank stares where the result. These days, things are different (see for example this interview): the Academic world has seen what open source organizational methods can do and there is quite a bit to read about it.

          Open Governance

          The idea behind Open Innovation is to involve the entire organization with innovation and improving things. Both big and small – we’re not just talking about creating ‘The Next Big Thing’ but also improving current products, structures, processes and more. Think about it as bottom-up innovation.

          That only works if you have the right governance: the right structure and rules. Innovation is the first thing you stifle if you make mistakes in how you set up an organization. And you can’t just create a ‘department of innovation’, stuff a bunch of folks in a room and tell them to innovate. It just doesn’t work that way. Innovation comes from interaction: people talking to people. Sales together with Engineering, that kind of stuff. Creating an organization which is conductive to innovation is not easy.

          Open Source communities of course excel at this: their organically grown structures and informal rules let people ‘do what they want’ and freedom is the foundation of innovative cultures. But these ways of working have their limitations – you can’t be informal forever, not if you grow big. At some point, some guidance has to be there to prevent things from clogging up the wheels of innovation. Things like personal conflicts, fights about creative directions, strategic disagreements. And this is, again, where governance comes in. My session is sub-titled “creating rules without ruling”, as in my opinion, it is more about writing down existing but implicit rules than creating new ones.

          Qt Open Governance

          Interesting in this regard is the Open Governance the Qt project is working on: building such structures ‘from scratch’ is not easy. You have to find out where you agree, yes, but while writing things down, implicit things become explicit and that goes for (potential) conflicts then too. But being able to do this in a fresh community, before ideas get entrenched! Having a chance to set direction in a ‘soft’ way. Terribly exciting!

          Meet me, talk to me!

          If you want to share thoughts with me on this topic, meet me at QtDevDays or at the Summit of New Thinking – or other events in the future (how about FOSDEM?).

          In a while, Crocodile!

          Edit:
          A few video‘s has been created for the conference. Esp the first one is funny 😉

          Check ’em out:
          What is Open Innovation? (Chinese Whispers Game)
          Open Innovation Track Day 1
          Open Innovation Track Day 2
          Rule No.1 for innovation: Have fun!
          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

          Linux

          FOSDEM 2013

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          Hey guys,
          I’m Mayank Madan( A GCI 2012 student). With this post, I wanted to tell you about FOSDEM 2013.

          Some people may not know what is FOSDEM(Free And Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) . It is a non-commercial, volunteer organized European event created around free and open source development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in open source software movement and enable them to meet and promote the awareness and use of open source software.

          In FOSDEM 2013 KDE will be a part of Cross desktop devroom alongwith GNOME, Enlightenment, Unity, Razor and XFCE. Devrooms are the places where development teams can meet and showcase their projects and discuss.

          There are some talks that are in collaboration with other desktop environments like GNOME and Razor. For example:

          KDE Libraries for Qt Application Developers
          Qt application developers are often not aware or are uncertain what dependencies an interesting library might have. This talk will introduce 2 KDE initiatives to address those needs. Inqlude, a repository for Qt libraries, and KDE Frameworks 5, a reorganization of KDE‘s libraries into a modular structure with fewer, cleaner and better documented dependencies.

          GNOME – Better, Faster, Snappier
          GNOME 3 is not considered as faster and snapier as its previous versions. The aim of this talk is to highlight the part of the stack which are considered as most critical to this venture and propose solutions to the problems in improving performance of the stack.

          Razor-qt – The Other Qt Desktop.
          This talk introduces Razor desktop environment to those who havent heard of it and invites contribution to the project.

          Well, you can actually help KDE in this noble purpose by signing up here to help at KDE‘s booth at FOSDEM. It will be a great contribution for KDE.

          Freedom To Innovate!

          Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE