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| KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League |
![KDE Official News]() Posted by Dre on Wednesday November 15, @09:33AM
from the it-ain't-what-you-think dept.
The KDE Team today announced its collaboration with industry leaders to
form the KDE League. The League will focus on facilitating the promotion,
distribution and development of KDE, with the goal of establishing KDE
as a desktop standard for PCs, workstations and mobile devices. The
League will not be involved in KDE development.
The League will be holding a press conference at 2:00 pm Las Vegas (PST)
time on Wednesday, November 15, 2000, in Room B in the media tent in the
silver lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). This is great news for KDE -- finally the marketing support that will help people learn about the technical excellence of KDE, without any changes in the KDE development model! The full press
release follows.
DATELINE NOVEMBER 15, 2000
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Open Source Developers and Industry Leaders Unify
to Create the KDE League
League Will Promote KDE as a Desktop Standard
November 15, 2000 (Las Vegas, Nevada). Developers of the
K Desktop Environment (KDE), the easy
to use, Open Source desktop environment, today announced the formation
of the KDE League, a group of industry
leaders and KDE developers focused on facilitating the promotion,
distribution and development of KDE.
![]()
The founding members of the League include leaders from a cross-section
of the computer industries:
Borland,
Caldera,
Compaq,
Corel,
Fujitsu-Siemens,
Hewlett-Packard Company,
IBM,
KDE.com,
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult,
theKompany.com,
Mandrakesoft,
SuSE,
Trolltech and
TurboLinux. The League
is an open organization and other corporations
who support the goals of the League are encouraged to apply for
membership.
The League will focus on promoting the use of the advanced Open Source
desktop alternative on PCs, workstations and handheld devices by
enterprises and individuals and on promoting the development of KDE
software by third-party developers. The League will not be directly
involved in developing the core KDE libraries and applications,
although League members are encouraged to contribute to the KDE
codebase in the spirit of KDE's wildly successful 'Bazaar-style'
development.
Instead, the industry leaders have united to provide financial, moral
and promotional support to KDE with three principal goals in mind.
First, to ensure that KDE remains a desktop standard for Linux and other
UNIX workstations and PCs and that KDE becomes a desktop standard on
handheld devices. Second, to help KDE compete effectively, on its
merits, with proprietary and other desktops prevalent today. Third,
to encourage third-party developers to develop for the KDE platform,
thereby providing KDE users with a wide assortment of software that
makes use of KDE's cutting-edge technologies.
"The creation of the KDE League marks a vital step forward for KDE,"
said Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE. "With the support of our
corporate partners, we can work together to ensure KDE gains wider
recognition, a greater number of applications and increased
functionality, while maintaining the open development model and
technical excellence that has made KDE the most popular Open Source
desktop."
Governance of the League will be controlled by a Board composed of
representatives of the core KDE developers and of each KDE League
member, with the developers and corporate sponsors sharing power
equally.
In conjunction with the announcement of the KDE League, IBM announced
that it is working with key Linux development partners such as
Trolltech, Mandrake and other League members to deliver components
of IBM's ViaVoice
on KDE. IBM's ViaVoice is
currently the only voice recognition software commercially
available for the Linux operating environment.
About KDE
KDE is an independent, collaborative project by thousands of developers
worldwide. The KDE team recently released KDE 2.0, which for the
first time offers a fully object-oriented, component-based desktop and
office suite. KDE 2 promises to make the Linux desktop as easy to use as
the popular commercial desktops while staying true to open standards and
empowering developers and users with quality Open Source software.
For more information about KDE, please visit KDE's
web site. For more information about the KDE League, please visit the KDE League's web site.
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Press Contacts:
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|---|
Andreas Pour
917-312-3122
pour kde org
Kurt Granroth
480-732-1752
granroth kde org
Chris Schlaeger
cs kde org
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Kasbar - The Next Generation
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The Fine Print: The following comments
are owned by whoever posted them.
( Reply )
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by reihal on Wednesday November 15, @09:46AM
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This is very clever, a much better idea than that foundation.
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by Anonymous on Wednesday November 15, @10:26AM
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I expect that this would cause lots of troubles at Slashdot.
I we will get lots of flames in a short time, just like when the Gnome Foundation was announced.
But what does this differ from the Gnome Foundation?
Both are non-profit organizations (altough some ignorant Slashdotters claim that they aren't).
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by Shawn Gordon on Wednesday November 15, @10:38AM
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There is a hug difference between the two groups. The Gnome Foundation is a steering committee that controls the direction of GNOME. The KDE League is simply a single source PR organization (essentially) to promote KDE itself, there is absolutely no control over KDE development.
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by Eron Lloyd on Wednesday November 15, @10:50AM
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Hello, Shawn. Even though it's still very early, could you give us a *hint* of what exciting things theKompany plans to bring to the table in regards to the KDE League? I know I for one am always wondering what next you are up to ;-).
Eron
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by bart decrem on Wednesday November 15, @11:33AM
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People keep saying this and it's blatantly wrong.
The GNOME Foundation is run by a board of directors which is elected by the members of the GNOME community. Elections just ended and we had our first board meeting yesterday.
The corporations who are supporting GNOME are on an Advisory Board which has no decision-making authority whatsoever.
So the GNOME Foundation is NOT run by the companies on the Advisory Board.
If you go to http://foundation.gnome.org, you can read more about this.
Let me know if I can further clarify this.
Congratulations on the launch of the KDE League.
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by Anonymous on Wednesday November 15, @10:28AM
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You KDE guys sure know how to write good marketings articles ;-)
Maybe Gnome should write their articles the same way, then there will be less flames from Slashdot.
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by Richard Moore on Wednesday November 15, @10:45AM
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Sadly, this is not the case - we've been very poor on the marketing side of things historically, despite our technical achievements. The league should help a great deal in this respect by allowing the developers to get on with coding, rather than having to waste time writing press releases/brochures etc. Keeping the league out of the development process itself means that we avoid the issue of creating a centralised authority which is something that would be totally against the KDE philosophy.
Rich.
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by Anonymous on Wednesday November 15, @10:59AM
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I don't understand.
KDE's marketing seems to be one of the best out there.
Look at all those KDE users/zealots!
Nearly all computer magazines who writes about Linux thinks that KDE is the only desktop for it.
Most distros install KDE as default desktop.
How can you say that the marketing is poor?
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Remember this
by Confused on Wednesday November 15, @11:15AM
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Now we have been asked "Will KDE ever create a KDE Foundation in the same sense as the GNOME Foundation?" The answer to this is no, absolutely not. KDE has always been and always will be controlled by the developers that work on it and are willing to do the code. We will resist any and all attempts to change this
It is quite a semantical difference here. I see very little difference between the above statement and what is really going on, despite the claims otherwise.
Face it, you guys got caught in a pissing match with the GNOME people, and now it is too late to get out of the "stream",
I love KDE, but fail to see the need for this given its position as the leading desktop envrionment. I think both groups should go sit in the corner for a while and think about what they have done.
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Re: KDE Announces Launch of the KDE League
by fura on Wednesday November 15, @11:22AM
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IBM ?
Does it mean, that we'll be able to get AIX binaries of KDE2? GNU tools sucks on AIX, and KDE is a pain to compile on AIX :-/
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