FOSDEM Interviews

FOSDEM writes "The first FOSDEM speakers' interviews are available on the FOSDEM website. The FOSDEM folks have produced 3 great interviews of Alexander Larsson from Nautilus (Gnome), Matthias Ettrich from KDE and Olivier Fourdan from XFCE."

I'm excited about going ;)

[agent dero]

FOSDEM is going to be a blast, I wish they would have posted interviews with more of the other speakers, like Marty Roesch who's doing the Snort talk, and the Gambas guy Benoit Minisini; or even some of the guys doing talks on the Linux kernel.

Unfortunately, there are going to be no BSD related talks, although I know the FreeBSD folks are going to have a booth, I think NetBSD and OpenBSD are showing up too (oh, and us MirBSD folks ;))

Overall, it'll be a weekend well spent if you find yourself in Bruss

Non-cached copies, etc.

[tomhudson]

Just in case the cache expires, it's also here, before he added a "disclaimer" of sorts [slashdot.org], and here, with his disclaimer after people started complaining [slashdot.org].

Some people consider this off-topic, but OSI is the site hosting the "Hallowe'en Documents", which makes it VERY on-topic.

Re:I'm excited about going ;)

[unknownalain]

As mentionned by the news, these are the FIRST interviews, which means there will be others, from all speakers !

Re:I'm excited about going ;)

[mirabilos]

FreeBSD(TM) doesn't even have a booth planned, and none
of the other BSDs (NetBSD(TM) didn't even plan to come,
like last year) has got even as few as one table.

FOSDEM this year is, sadly, going to suck.

But then, my #1 favourite US American is going to
visit a free country, let's have some beer you can't
get over there due to some age limit :)

Freedesktop

[bonch]

Whenever someone points out how fragmented Linux desktop is, people reference Freedesktop. But these interviews show that Freedesktop is barely making a difference. The KDE mentions a little bit of cooperation, and the XFCE guy outright stats that they don't pay a lot of attention to it.

With this kind of lazy attitude towards a desktop standard, it'll be another five years from now that people will be claiming "2010 is the year of Linux on the desktop!" I'm sorry, but it's true.

Re:Freedesktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Olivier Fourdan - We are not much involved in the freedesktop.org group. In fact,

we try to stay compliant with the freedesktop.org standards as much as we can but we take no part in the standards themselves. We have very limited resources, and being involved with the freedesktop.org would probably mean less involvement with Xfce (well, at least for me).

Where does he say "they don't pay a lot of attention to it?"

Re:Freedesktop

[asv108]

The KDE mentions a little bit of cooperation, and the XFCE guy outright stats that they don't pay a lot of attention to it. The exact words of the Oliver:

Olivier Fourdan - We are not much involved in the freedesktop.org group. In fact, we try to stay compliant with the freedesktop.org standards as much as we can but we take no part in the standards themselves. We have very limited resources, and being involved with the freedesktop.org would probably mean less involvement with Xfce (well, at least for me).

XFCE4 is compliant with many freedesktop.org standards, but their developers are not involved in writing the standards.

Don't let the facts get in the way....

[Chuck Chunder]

But these interviews show that Freedesktop is barely making a difference. The KDE mentions a little bit of cooperation

Er....

FOSDEM - In your point of view, how do you see the relationship between the KDE and GNOME community, but also FreeDesktop.Org?

Matthias Ettrich - If you mean "community" as in "developer community", there is a professional level of cooperation through freedesktop.org. While many KDE developers had some initial skepticism towards freedesktop.org, it has now gained broad acceptance.

and

FOSDEM - Are there any plans for KDE 4 to colaborate more closely with Gnome to establish a common framework for things like IO, database access, multimedia, configuration, usual desktop services like file open dialog, print dialog, systray icon, etc

Matthias Ettrich - Most of the things you mentioned are covered through continuous efforts done at freedesktop.org. In the area of multimedia there's even more cooperation, so I guess the answer is yes.

Re:Freedesktop

[erikharrison]

Umm, I haven't read Olivier's interview yet, but as a minor Xfce developer I can say that the project does the opposite of ignore fd.o. In fact, during the 4.0 development process, Xfce was ahead of Gnome in it's implementation. There was even some talk of thinking of Xfce as a reference implementation of a desktop built to fully utilize the standard.

fd.o is gaining momentum. I think the problem with fd.o is that it's low barrier to entry means that people want to standardize _everything_ almost to the point that no innovation can occur.

But XDND? The icon's spec? The MIME spec? Xsettings? .desktop files? All pretty major fd.o accomplishments, all implemented by the 4 major OS Desktop Environments (KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Rox). In fact, the MIME spec is pretty facinating in that it's a case of an extremely minor player in the OS desktop, Rox, was doing one thing better than anyone else, and saw pretty quick adoption on all sides essentially just by presenting what they were already doing as a proposed standard.

Re:Freedesktop

[strider44]

That's just fud. All the guy from XFCE says is that though they follow the standards they don't create them. I don't see anything wrong with that. I really don't know how fud like that got +5 insightful, but maybe you should read articles more closely.

Re:Freedesktop

[strider44]

I knew it was a troll, and you'd have to be an idiot to miss that in my message, as my first sentence was "That's just fud". In case your amazing knowledge of acronyms has failed you, that stands for "fear, uncertainty, doubt". In other words, the guy is a troll, be it knowingly trolling or not. However, at least three other people didn't know it was a troll, being the three people who moderated the post without actually reading the interviews or verifying its authenticity.

However as a little lesson i

Re:Freedesktop

[lpontiac]

Linux is not the desktop.

Doesn't make sense? Then take a GNOME application that runs on Linux and try porting it to:

- compile against the KDE libraries on Linux
- compile against the GNOME libraries on Solaris

GNOME is a desktop platform, and KDE is a desktop platform, whatever the underlying base system and kernel. Linux is not a desktop platform.

Wow

[elid]

Wow, it really sounds great. Does anyone know if something like this happens in the US?

FOSDEM

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I know I could just read TFA but would it really kill you to tell us what the hell FOSDEM is?

Re:FOSDEM

[Dicky]

Lazy git!

FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, a free, grassroots, um, free and open source software conference which takes place in Brussels every February. It's an intensely communal event which gathers people from all over Europe (I'm part of a group which has gone over from the UK for the past few years) for a weekend of technical stuff, beer, socialising, beer, networking, beer, and of course Belgian beer. Amongst other things, they have a tradition of posting interviews with as many of the speakers as they can before the conference, a lot of the conference is webcast live or recorded, and the annual GNU Free Software award has been announced and presented there for the past few years, which normally means a bonus high-profile speaker :-)

In short, it's a blast, network conjestion excepted, and we'll be at Roy d'Espagne as usual on Friday night...

XFCE 4.2 rules ... why even bother with gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using XFCE 4.2 on my laptop for a couple months, and it's great. While I love KDE and use it on my main computer, XFCE 4.2 comes with a keramik theme style and nice default panel setup. the only problem with it I have is the terminal, I tend to use multi-aterm instead. still, I'm sick of the bloat of Gnome, and have tried to keep the programs I use mostly in the GTK only camp. Still, with PAN, bitchx, pine, and firefox, most of my needs are met on this pentium 266. I'll never use gnome now th

Re:XFCE 4.2 rules ... why even bother with gnome!

[Slack3r78]

You know, I have the mod points, but I'd rather respond than simply mod you down.

I've discussed this in the past, so I'll just link to my old post here - GConf is NOT Windows Registry. [slashdot.org]

If you'll sincerely cite GConf as an example of 'bloat' you either don't understand what GConf is, or you have a poor definition of what bloat is. The summary of the linked post is basically that GConf is just a centralized interface to configuration files that exist anyway!

XFCE is a great DE, but "Gnome sucks because the

Now I know

[CastrTroy]

Now I know why most people don't understand computers. Everything has to be an acronym. If you just spelled things out for once, you might not frighten away all the new comers. If we just cut out all the unnecessary jargon, people wouldn't be so afraid of computers.

Re:Now I know

[Anonymous Coward]

But then we wouldn't make the big bucks and get all the hot chicks...

Re:Now I know

[molnarcs]

Not to mention that some acronyms might have not so positive meanings in other language. You don't want me to explain what FOS means in Hungarian (my native language).

Re:FOSDEM is FUN!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://home.comcast.net/~bedpan/freakaleak.mpg [comcast.net] This video? Good quality. It may be a bit OT, but what did you film that with, a DVcam?