I was at the beach today and somehow this came to my mind.

When the Apache Software Foundation was born back in 1999, its sole purpose was to support the development of the Apache HTTP server. One foundation, one project, more or less like the KDE eV and KDE until very recently.

Over the years, many more projects have been born inside the ASF (Tomcat, Xerces) , or have been “adopted” by the ASF (Subversion, OpenOffice).

For many years, KDE eV has been focused only on KDE.

Recently, Necessitas, the port of Qt and the Qt SDK to Android, joined under the umbrella of the KDE eV: mailing list, git repositories, announcements, etc.

Today I had this vision: should KDE eV go further and become “the Apache Software Foundation of the Qt-related world”?

A few projects that in my humble opinion would fit very well under this new umbrella:

  • MeeGo
  • The community ports of Qt to iPhone, webOS, Haiku, etc
  • PySide (the Python Qt bindings that nearly killed PyQt are being killed by Nokia, what an irony)
  • A Qt “target” that compiles to an HTTP server that generates AJAX, like Wt does but implemented in terms of Qt (yes, I know about QtWui, creole, etc — all dead)
  • … others you propose?

I think that would also make the Akademy’s more interesting, because we would have a lot of conferences on many totally different topics. Lately, when I see the program of Akademy, I feel like “same, again” (maybe because I’m subscribed to many mailing lists and I keep an eye on everything? I don’t know).

What do you think? Should the KDE eV widen its scope and accept other Qt-related projects, even if they are not directly related to KDE?

17 Thoughts on “A wish a day 12: Should KDE become the Apache Software Foundation of the Qt world?

  1. Please don’t truncate your posts via RSS.

  2. Dyrver Eriksson on Monday 05th September 2011 at 00:10:50 said:

    As long as KDE core functions and the Calligra-suite is kept alive and awesome by the eV or by other means I’m a happy camper really. 😀
    Other than that, only I can think if which probably already is.. Gluon-Games perhaps?

  3. Well, I think any projects are welcome, but we cannot force any one. But I do not see why KDE e.V. was “KDE focused”, do you mean KDE SC? No, it is not, there are Calligra, Amarok, ownCloud etc. Necessitas is now KDE, too, what is the problem?

    • There is no problem 🙂

      ownCloud and Necessitas are the only two projects I can think of that are quite KDE-unrelated.

      Calligra, Amarok, KDE SC, etc are all “KDE SC”.

      Another one I’ve just remembered of: Krazy. While it would be very useful for any Qt-related project, it is almost an unknown out of KDE.

      • The kdesupport stuff: libqimageblitz, strigi, qca, attica, polkit-qt, soprano, taglib… Mostly of them do not use KDE-libraries. KDevelop-PG-Qt is also Qt only, but used for KDevelop.

        • QCA was born out of KDE (under the Delta/PSI project) and has been “adopted” by KDE. It’s exactly what I’m proposing.

          Other than that, I’m afraid most of those libraries are not used at all out of KDE.

      • synchrotron is another (albeit a very small one).

        and let’s retain historical perspective here: those 2-3 projects are all new comers within the last 2 years. this is a new direction, one that i think wasn’t really imaginable before.

        we’re very open to more projects joining. i suppose the questions are:

        * is there a reason to start an outreach campaign to achieve a widening of our reach?

        * what can we offer these projects other than a great community to become a part of? (iow: what’s _their_ motivation)

        * what kinds (if any) strains / costs with successfully increasing our reach bring? (these need to be acounted for in relationship to the benefits)

        interesting ideas though …

        • is there a reason to start an outreach campaign to achieve a widening of our reach?

          I think the only “campaign” we need is a “hey, we are open to non-KDE projects which are Qt-related, or share our spirit”

          *what can we offer these projects other than a great community to become a part of? (iow: what’s _their_ motivation)

          I’d rephrase that as “let’s see what ASF offers to their projects that we don’t”.

          Maybe it’s infrastructure (hosting, mailing list, etc), legal advice, a big conference (ApacheCon), an easy way to receive money through the ASF, etc.

          Maybe it’s only the feeling of being part of something bigger.

          I don’t know.

          * what kinds (if any) strains / costs with successfully increasing our reach bring? (these need to be acounted for in relationship to the benefits)

          For starters, it would increase the eV costs in infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, etc).

          On the other hand, it will make KDE eV bigger, which means some company that would never donate towards KDE SC may donate towards, say, Necessitas.

          BTW, one of the obvious candidates to be adopted by this “reborn KDE eV” would be Qt. There has been some discussion in the qt5-feedback mailing list lately of how sorry the state of repositories, mailing lists, etc is. Maybe we can ask our sysadmins to quickly setup mailing lists and repositories for the V8 integration, for the “new QRegExp”, etc?

      • “Calligra, Amarok, KDE SC, etc are all “KDE SC”.”

        they aren’t actually “KDE SC”. the software compilation is precisely what gets packaged up and released together in the main modules.

        what all these projects are is “KDE” 🙂

        • Calligra, Amarok, KDE SC, etc are all “KDE SC”.

          they aren’t actually “KDE SC”. the software compilation is precisely what gets packaged up and released together in the main modules.

          That’s why there were quotes around “KDE SC” 🙂

          They are not really KDE SC but they are closely tied to KDE, and Calligra, and Amarok developers are very involved in KDE development. That’s why I said “KDE SC” in quotes: strictly speaking they are not KDE SC, but somehow “they are”.

  4. Greetings, I’m not familiar how Apache works or generates income, money or interest from devs. But I think KDE have to consider that, not as a goal but as means to continue.

  5. Well, comparing KDE to Apache isnt right. KDE isnt ‘a single project’ like Apache http server.
    KDE includes tons of applications and libraries.
    Probably biggest number of Qt-style libraries are developed and maintained by the KDE project.

    • Emil,

      I am not comparing to the Apache HTTP Server but to the Apache Software Foundation, which includes the HTTP server, Tomcat, Subversion, Jakarta, Struts, APR, and much more.

      Sure, KDE SC includes a lot of Qt-style libraries, but until The Great KDE Frameworks 5.0 Split completes (and we are still to see the result), it will be a “monolith”: either you take it all, or you don’t.

  6. It is a nice proposal and I think it is already kind of happening naturally. One important difference, though, is that ASF is not tied to a single technology (Qt for example): several projects are Java-based, but not all of them. I don’t know yet if this is a strength or a weakness, to be honest.

  7. Every since the migration to git, and the legal and technical details that made it take long than expected, I’ve wondered if maybe KDE shouldn’t expand to a any git based project that wants guarantees that gitoritus/github cannot give. It would be fun to see some GNOME projects officially hosted at a .kde.org site. We now have the infrastructure and processes that they could use: so long as we can get enough server power it wouldn’t cost much.

    Of course the real reason I want to see this is to shut up a lot of the users fighting nonsense when both projects benefit from collaboration.

  8. Pingback: Links 7/9/2011: Linux World Domination, China Picks IBM’s GNU/Linux Mainframe | Techrights

Leave a Reply to aksfjasdfl Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Post Navigation