It's been a crazy month, and it's gonna keep getting crazier. June 11th I went to WWDC. Then, last weekend, I was in New York for the Origami USA convention. Now I'm headed out to Glasgow to speak at aKademy.
Then, in July it's off to the OpenNMS Dev-Jam, and immediately after that, LinuxWorld Expo, where we'll be in the .org pavilion.
Phew!
So anyways, if you'll be at any of those events (heh), drop me a line!
So recently, Planet KDE has had a huge number of posts about the Windows and Mac ports of KDE and I just wanted to put in my $0.02.
I'm the primary (or at least, most public) person working on the Mac port, and I am also employed by an open-source company, and I would just like to say I agree with Aaron's sentiment. I am both a Mac supporter and an FLOSS supporter and while I can't speak for the Windows port, I can say that I have no intentions of the Mac port trying to take anything away from the community nor from open-source software as a whole.
There are large parts of the Mac community who had no idea open-source software existed for a long time, but things like Firefox (and heck, Safari's KHTML heritage) have made it much more prominent, and have driven large numbers of people to try out things like OpenOffice, Ubuntu, and KDE and see that there really is great free software out there, which is not only free as in beer, but gives you the freedom of knowing that you will always have access to it in the future without vendor lock-in, private APIs, and restrictions.
Since I first started porting KDE to Mac OS X I've seen a lot these types of arguments, and in the end, it has always appeared that everyone wins when software is available on more platforms, whether those platforms themselves are free or not. As an anecdote, when I first got KOffice ported, one of the first "thank you"s I got was from some folks who study the bible and have macs, and loved KOffice's support for bidirectional languages. Microsoft Office on mac had no support for Hebrew, and KDE made it possible for them to do their research on their own computers.
...but I digress. Ultimately I do the port because I use and like macs (as well as Linux systems), and because KDE applications have a lot to offer. I like KDE, and I wanted to be able to use it everywhere, not just when I'm on my Linux boxes. That said, it's even better if my work is useful to other people, and it grows the community as a whole. My intentions started with "scratching an itch" and if it turns out that no one uses the Mac port but me, I'm fine with that. I know that won't be the case though, there are a huge number of people who are interested in it, and hopefully they will be able to join the community and make it even better.
On the other hand, I don't know how to solve the issue of culture clash. There are certainly large parts of the Mac community who are ignorant of the Open-Source Way™ and who expect a lot for nothing. We run into those types of folks in Fink pretty regularly, and if we can, try to educate them, but it's not always possible. The most I can hope is that they don't bother the folks in the greater KDE community too much. But hey, there are also very large parts of the Mac community who are very open to the ideas of free software and if we're lucky, we can grow the community even stronger.
If you have not seen the announcement yet, OpenNMS 1.3.3 was released. It includes lots of bugfixes, as well as a start on separating out the native C code so that packaging a pure-java release of OpenNMS will be easier. We hope to have that wrapped up by the 1.3.4 release.
I've released 1.3.3 into 10.4 Unstable, as well as the new iplike package for PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, I had to remove OpenNMS from 10.3 because the 1.3 series requires Java 1.5. I will probably go back and revert 10.3 to the latest 1.2 version, just so that something is available still.
I also spent some time reworking the OpenNMS front page to be more useful for finding information. It was a pretty big mess of random links without much navigation to help people get to the info they need. There's still more to do, but it's definitely easier to figure out where to go now. The only problem is, enough people can actually see the link to the demo site that the demo site is hitting tomcat's maximum connection limits. <grin> Hopefully that will get fixed up shortly, but hey, at least people are taking the chance to try it out now. :)
I finally had some time to finish up new KDE/Mac builds. They're current as of a few days ago, and should be finishing seeding shortly.
You can find out more on downloading them here.
There are still a ton of rough edges, but I see a lot of the groundwork kdelibs cleanup that's been going on has helped the mac builds too. Konqueror actually works pretty well, with https even! Some stuff has regressed however, it looks like a lot of the pretty SVG work that's gone on in kdegames has made things look a little goofy. Bits of KOffice work enough to actually do something interesting with them. fish:// still doesn't work, but I think that may be true on Linux as well. :)
Anyways, as always, bang on them and let me know what you think.
So we're in the process of trying to get OpenNMS 1.3.3 out the door. There are still a few bugs that are considered blockers but for the most part trunk is looking pretty nice.
One of the big things that's getting a lot of attention is packaging. I've autoconf-ized iplike and we're going to do other work to get all of the native code out of the main java build as much as possible. Not all of that can happen in the 1.3.3 timeframe, but at the least we want to chop things up so there's only a single opennms RPM, and then platform-specific packages for only the native code.
That should make updates considerably easier, and open up the door for nightly builds and other spiffy stuff. W00t!
Also, a reminder: I'm going to be in San Francisco this week, at WWDC. See you there!
