I'm leaving for Tenerife in the Canary Islands this evening where I'll be presenting on KDE4, teaching KDE development and meeting with some of the local movers and shakers. Why the Canaries? We have some 35k desktops in education there serving 250-300k people. They use Free software desktops day in, day out and have for some time now. This is not a particularly isolated success, but it's a very nice one and I'm looking forward to seeing it all first hand.
This is, incidentally, why I find all the punditry about how the Free software desktop is failing or is a failure to be the work of ignorance. Not only is the Free software desktop and KDE in particular doing better than ever before in the real world terms that matter such as market growth, which speaks to the lack of knowledge out there on the growth that is happening, but to rail against this very real trend because a single kernel developer quits or because of any number of other reasons shows ignorance of the open source methodologies (people come and go all the time, sometimes not pleasantly) or about how basic market economics work.
In more positive thoughts, Linux Journal has a cover story on the Green Phone and QTopia which has has the last few bits that already weren't GPL'd released under the GPL today. In the same magazine I'm also mentioned (hooray! =) as well as LinuxMCE. Nice ...
I finally got a chance recently to look at Johan Thelin's book Foundations of Qt Development. It's really nice to see how many Qt4 books there are out there right now, and Johan's is a really good addition to the library. It's thorough and clear; great work Johan! =)
A friend of mine is working on a KDE4 book aimed at first-time KDE/Linux users so we should have some nice more "traditional" documentation sometime after 4.0 comes out. Neat.
Anyways, I still have a number of things to do before I can head out in a few hours so I should get off the keyboard here. I haven't had a chance to get the screencast together that I wanted. Apologies. Latest will be after I get back, or the 24th.
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4 comments:
It's always interesting to see stories like this from other parts in the world. Currently the schools in the US are very heavily Inundated with Microsoft software.
Here in Croatia the government has been using pirated MS products for quite some time and when MS came to collect, they had to sign an very damaging contract with them just not to get sued. Now all our schools, colleges etc. are using MS products almost exclusively.
On the other hand, I'm looking to get into KDE development, would one of these QT books be a good source to start? Why aren't any KDE4 development books? :)
Sorry again for the blog chasing. Could you ping me regarding DevDays?
Regarding free software, I wonder that Amsterdam's final decision will be?
link
(Though I live in Sweden, it's still good news. :)
@dado
Check techbase.kde.org, for example:
Getting Started with Coding
Tutorials
A KDE development book would be great though.
@Aaron
I hope you will have a great time in Tenerife!
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