Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. Uyuni is a fork of Spacewalk that leverages Salt, Cobbler and containers to modernize it. Uyuni is the upstream for SUSE Manager (the main difference is support: with SUSE Manager you get it from SUSE; with Uyuni you get it from the community) and our development and feature discussion is done in the open. Last week we released Uyuni 2020.03, with much improved Debian support, coming from the community: we have got client tools (both the Salt stack and the traditional stack) for Debian 9 and 10, and bootstrapping support! In addition to that, Uyuni 2020.03 brings many other new features:

• Package pre-downloading for Debian and Ubuntu
• Automatic generation of bootstrap repositories
• Provisioning API for Salt clients (previously only for traditional clients), which allows to provision and re-provision Salt minions
• Recurring actions scheduling, e. g. schedule highstate to happen every so often, repeatedly
• Content Lifecycle Management filters for RHEL 8 appstreams so that you can convert modular repositories to plain repositories by applying a combination of filters. It will also work on RHEL derivatives, of course: CentOS, Oracle Linux and SLES Expanded Support.
• Yomi: Yet One More Installer is a Salt-based installer for SUSE and openSUSE operating systems. More architectures (e. g. ARM) and Linux distributions will follow soon!
• Hub XML-RPC API: the first component of our multi-Server architecture, to support hundreds of thousands of clients
• SUSE Container as a Platform 4 (SUSE s Kubernetes distribution) cluster awareness. Nodes in a SUSE CaaSP 4 cluster will by default not install updates, patches, run commands, etc from Uyuni Server on the normal schedule but default to doing that using skuba, CaaSP s tool in charge of updates and reboots. Further enhancements are coming to this feature soon.

While this version of Uyuni provides a much better experience for Debian sysadmins, we still have a lot of room for improvement:

• Run Uyuni Server and Proxy on Debian (currently only supported on openSUSE Leap, sponsored by SUSE)
• Autoinstallation with preseed (currently only AutoYaST and Kickstart are supported)
• CVE auditing and errata (patch) concept. Uyuni currently treats all .deb packages equally as normal updates.
• Use Salt from Debian (currently using the openSUSE version for Debian 9 and Debian 10, because it s more recent and it includes a lot of patches and backports from upstream)
• Building Debian-based images (e. g. using Kiwi)
• Package and system locking (the kind of locking used on CaaSP 4 systems)
• And probably more I cannot even remember at this point

Do you want to help us with development, or just with feedback? Join our community on IRC, Gitter or the mailing lists. And check our user documentation, developer documentation and presentations. We are also participating in Google Summer of Code 2020. Hurry up and submit a proposal to provide Uyuni for Debian, and/or enhance Debian support!

FOSDEM is a free software event that offers open source communities a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. It is renown for being highly developer-oriented and brings together 8000+ participants from all over the world. It is held in the city of Brussels (Belgium). FOSDEM 2018 will take place during the weekend of February 3rd-4th 2018. More details about the event can be found at http://www.fosdem.org Call for Participation The Retrocomputing DevRoom is a first-timer at FOSDEM, with talks about use of older computing hardware and software in modern times. Presentation topics could include but are not limited to:

• Emulation of old systems to run videogames, legacy software, etc
• Open source software emulation/simulation
• Open hardware
• Operating systems/executives for retrocomputers/retrosystems
• Uses of retrocomputing today
• Other retrosystems topics
• Opportunities in retrocomputing
• Round tables

You are not limited to slide presentations, of course. Be creative. However, FOSDEM is an open source conference, therefore we ask you to stay clear of marketing presentations. We are not afraid of technical stuff: devrooms are a place for development teams to meet, discuss, hack and publicly present their project s latest improvements and future directions. If you will have special needs for your talk (e. g. because you will need to plug some sort of a system), please note that clearly in your proposal so that we can provide it. You can use the Wikipedia definition of retrocomputing as a reference definition to see if you talk qualifies, although it is not exclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing Important dates

• 25 Nov 2017: submission deadline for talk proposals
• 15 Dec 2017: announcement of the final schedule
• 4 Feb 2018: Retrocomputing dev room

Useful information Use the FOSDEM Pentabarf tool to submit your proposal: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM18 If necessary, create a Pentabarf account and activate it. Please reuse your account from previous years if you have already created it. Details on submission:

• In the Person section, provide First name, Last name (in the General tab), Email (in the Contact tab) and Bio ( Abstract field in the Description tab).
• Submit a proposal by clicking on Create event .
• Important! Select the Retrocomputing DevRoom track (on the General tab). If you do not select a track, then nobody, from any track, will look at your submission!
• Provide the title of your talk ( Event title in the General tab).
• Provide a description of the subject of the talk and the intended audience (in the Abstract field of the Description tab)
• Provide a rough outline of the talk or goals of the session (a short list of bullet points covering topics that will be discussed) in the Full description field in the Description tab
• Provide an expected length of your talk in the Duration field, including discussion. The default duration is 30 minutes.

Please note neither FOSDEM nor the Retrocomputing DevRoom will reimburse any expenses you incur Recording of talks The FOSDEM organizers plan to have live streaming and recording fully working, both for remote/later viewing of talks, and so that people can watch streams in the hallways when rooms are full. This requires speakers to consent to being recorded and streamed. If you plan to be a speaker, please understand that by doing so you implicitly give consent for your talk to be recorded and streamed. The recordings will be published under the same license as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). Contact The Retrocomputing DevRoom is managed by Pau Garcia Quiles (retrocomputing-devroom-manager@fosdem.org). A mailing list of speakers, audience and the curious is available, please subscribe at https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/retrocomputing-devroom Hope to hear from you soon! And please forward this announcement.

I am boarding my flight to Brussels to attend FOSDEM. The Desktops DevRoom will be a blast again this year. While I have been in charge of it for 6? years already, the last two (since my twins) were born I had organized remotely and local duties were carried on by the Desktops DevRoom team (thank you Christophe Fergeau, Philippe Caseiro and others!). I am anxious at meeting old friends again. I will be at the beer event today. Video streaming will be available thanks to the Video Team. If you want to help, please contact us in the desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org mailing list, or directly at the devroom. Also, this year will be the first for me using the job corner to recruit: my company (everis) is recruiting globally for many open positions. Drop us a mail at fosdem@everis.com with your CV, desired position and location (we have direct presence in 13 countries and indirect in 40 countries) and I will make sure it reaches the right inbox.

FOSDEM 2016 is going to be great (again!) and you still have the chance to be one of the stars. Have you submitted your talk to the Desktops DevRoom yet? No? Remember: we will only accept proposals until December 5th. After that, the Organization Team will get busy and vote and choose the talks. Here is the full Call for Participation, in case you need to check the details on how to submit: FOSDEM Desktops DevRoom 2017 Call for Participation Topics include anything related to the Desktop: desktop environments, software development for desktop/cross-platform, applications, UI, etc

FOSDEM is one of the largest (5,000+ hackers!) gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium, Europe). Once again, one of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to:

• Open Desktops: Gnome, KDE, Unity, Enlightenment, XFCE, Razor, MATE, Cinnamon, ReactOS, CDE etc
• Closed desktops: Windows, Mac OS X, MorphOS, etc (when talking about a FLOSS topic)
• Software development for the desktop
• Development tools
• Applications that enhance desktops
• General desktop matters
• Cross-platform software development
• Web
• Thin clients, desktop virtualiation, etc

Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of distributing a desktop application with snap vs flatpak, or as general as using HTML5 technologies to develop native applications. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2016 schedule might give you some inspiration. Submissions Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 400 from other projects)
• Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
• Short bio (with photo)
• Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

How to submit All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17 To submit your talk, click on Create Event , then make sure to select the Desktops devroom as the Track . Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all. If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Deadline The deadline for submissions is December 5th 2016. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 4 & 5 February 2017 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, February 5th 2017. We will contact every submitter with a yes or no before December 11th 2016. Recording permission The talks in the Desktops DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too. In the Submission notes field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-By-SA-4.0 or CC-By-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example:

If my presentation is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, <NAME>.

If you want us to stop the recording in the Q & A part (should you have one), please tell us. We can do that but only for the Q & A part. More information The official communication channel for the Desktops DevRoom is its mailing list desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Use this page to manage your subscription: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/desktops-devroom Organization The Desktops DevRoom 2017 is managed by a team representing the most notable open desktops:

• Pau Garcia i Quiles, KDE
• Christophe Fergeau, Gnome
• Michael Zanetti, Unity
• Philippe Caseiro, Enlightenment
• J rome Leclanche, Razor

If you want to join the team, please contact desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

For years, Mozilla has been saying they are no longer focused on Thunderbird and its place is outside of Mozilla. Now it seems they are going to act on what they said: Mozilla seeks new home for e-mail client Thunderbird. The candidates they are exploring are the Software Freedom Conservancy, The Document Foundation, and I expect at least the Apache Software Foundation to be a serious candidate, and Gnome to propose. Some voices in KDE say we should also propose the KDE eV as a candidate hosting organization. What follows is my opinion, not the official opinion of the eV or the board s, or the KDE Community s opinion. Take it with a grain (or more) of salt. I am not so sure. I am trying to think what the KDE eV can offer to Mozilla to be appealing to them and if my analysis is correct, we are too far and Thunderbird would pose many risks to the other projects in KDE. (I am blurring the lines between KDE eV , KDE community , KDE Frameworks , etc as it has no relevance for the discussion) Thunderbird is an open source project/product with a lot of commercial users and has (still has?) many paid contributors. IMHO what Mozilla is looking for is an organization with a well-oiled funding machine, able to campaign for money (even if in a tight circle, something like ours Patron program), and accept and process funds in a way that directly benefits Thunderbird. I e. hiring developers to implement X or Y, or work on some area full-time, or at least, half-time. KDE does not work like that. KDE has few commercial users (other than distros, if you want to count them as commercial users). Other than Blue Systems, I don t think we have any developer working for KDE. Also, the eV is not exactly a well-oiled funding machine. We have been talking about that for years. And we do not hire developers directly to work on X or Y (at most, we pay for part of the expenses of sprints). All of that makes me think we are not the right host for Thunderbird. But it does not stop there! Let s say Thunderbird comes to KDE and suddenly we are offered USD 1 M from several organizations who want to be Patrons of Thunderbird , or influence Thunderbird, or whatever. First problem: do we allow funds to go to a specific project rather than the eV deciding how to distribute them? AFAIK we do not allow that and at least one KDE sub-project has had trouble with that in the past. Then there is the thing about Patrons of Thunderbird : no such thing. Either you are a Patron of KDE, including Plasma Mobile, OwnCloud, and whatnot, or you are nothing. You cannot be a Patron of Partial KDE, namely Thunderbird . Influencing, did I say? The eV is by its own rules not an influencer on KDE s direction, just an entity to provide legal and economic support. Quite the opposite from what Mozilla does today for Thunderbird. Even if funders would not mind all that, there is the huge risk this poses for all the other projects. With as little as USD 200K donated towards Thunderbird (and USD 200K is not much for a product with so many commercial users, which means a healthy ecosystem of companies making money on support, development, etc, and thus donating to somehow influence or be perceived as important players), Thunderbird becomes the most important project in KDE. How would we manage this? In any sensible organization, Thunderbird would become the main focus and all the other KDE projects would be relegated. Even if we decide not to, external PR would make that look like it happened. For all those reasons, I think KDE is not the right place for Thunderbird at the moment. It would require a big change in what the eV can do and how it operates. And that change may be for good but it s not there now and it will not be by the time Mozilla has to decide if KDE is the right place. All that, and I have not even talked about technology and what any sensible Thunderbird customer would think today: what is the medium and long-term roadmap? Migrate Thunderbird users to Kontact/KDE PIM? Port Thunderbird to Qt + KF5, maybe including moving to QtWebEngine? Will Windows support be deteriorated by that change? Or maybe the plan is to cancel KMail and Akregator? Those are second-thoughts, unimportant right now. Update If you want to contribute to the discussion, please join the KDE-Community mailing list.

Want to give a talk at a 6,000+ guest conference with more than 6,000 guests? Do you feel you can deliver better than any other the other 250 speakers? Here is your opportunity! The FOSDEM Organization has graciously given devroom organizers a little extension. We are therefore extending our own deadline for the Desktops DevRoom: the new deadline is December 14th. There will be no further extensions. Check the details on how to submit in the Call for Participation: FOSDEM Desktops DevRoom 2016 Call for Participation Topics include anything related to the Desktop: desktop environments, software development for desktop/cross-platform, applications, UI, etc See you in Brussels!

FOSDEM 2016 is going to be great (again!) and you still have the chance to be one of the stars. Have you submitted your talk to the Desktops DevRoom yet? No? Remember: we will only accept proposals until December 6th. After that, the Organization Team will get busy and vote and choose the talks. Here is the full Call for Participation, in case you need to check the details on how to submit: FOSDEM Desktops DevRoom 2016 Call for Participation Topics include anything related to the Desktop: desktop environments, software development for desktop/cross-platform, applications, UI, etc

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium, Europe). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to:

• Open Desktops: Gnome, KDE, Unity, Enlightenment, XFCE, Razor, MATE, Cinnamon, ReactOS, etc
• Closed desktops: Windows, Mac OS X, CDE, MorphOS, etc (when talking about a FLOSS topic)
• Software development for the desktop
• Development tools
• Applications that enhance desktops
• General desktop matters
• Cross-platform software development
• Web

Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of development with Qt on Wayland over X11/Mir; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2015 schedule might give you some inspiration. Submissions Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 400 from other projects)
• Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
• Short bio (with photo)
• Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

How to submit All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM16 When submitting your talk, make sure to select the Desktops devroom as the Track . Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom. If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact pgquiles at elpauer dot org. Deadline The deadline for submissions is December 6th 2015. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of January 30th and 31st 2015 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, January 31st 2015. We will contact every submitter with a yes or no before December 18th 2015. Recording permission The talks in the Desktops devroom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too. By submitting a proposal you consent to be recorded and agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license. If you want us to stop the recording in the Q & A part (should you have one), please tell us. We can do that but only for the Q & A part. More information The official communication channel for the Desktops DevRoom is its mailing list desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Use this page to manage your subscription: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/desktops-devroom Organization The Desktops DevRoom 2016 is managed by a team representing the most notable open desktops:

• Pau Garcia i Quiles, KDE
• Christophe Fergeau, Gnome
• Michael Zanetti, Unity
• Philippe Caseiro, Enlightenment
• J rome Leclanche, Razor

If you want to join the team, please contact pgquiles at elpauer dot org

It is now official: KDE will be present again at FOSDEM in the 2016 edition, on the 30th and 31st of January, 2016. Talks will take place at the Desktops DevRoom, on Sunday the 31st, but not exclusively: in past years, there were Qt and KDE-related talks at the mobile devroom, lightning talks, distributions, open document editors and more. KDE will be sharing the room with other desktop environments, as usual: Gnome, Unity, Enlightenment, Razor, etc. Representatives from those communities will be helping me in managing and organizing the devroom: Christophe Fergeau, Michael Zanetti, Philippe Caseiro and J rome Leclanche. I would like to extend the invitation to any other free/open source desktop environment and/or related stuff. Check last year s schedule for an example. Closed-source shops (Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc) are ALSO invited, provided that you will talk about something related to open source. We will publish the Call for Talks for the Desktops DevRoom 2016 soon. Stay tuned. In the meanwhile, you can subscribe to the Desktops DevRoom mailing list to be informed of important and useful information, and talk about FOSDEM and specific issues of the Desktops DevRoom.

We are less than 10 days away from the deadline for the Desktops DevRoom at FOSDEM 2015, the largest Free and Open Source event in Europe. Do you think you can fill a room with 200+ people out of 6,000+ geeks? Prove it! Check the Call for Talks for details on how to submit your talk proposal about anything related to the desktop:

• Development
• Deployment
• Community
• SCM
• Software distribution / package managers
• Why a particular default desktop on a prominent Linux distribution
• etc

http://www.elpauer.org/2014/10/fosdem-2015-desktops-devroom-call-for-talks/

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, LXQt, Windows, Mac OS X, software development for the desktop, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop). Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of development with Qt on Wayland over X11/Mir; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2014 schedule might give you some inspiration. Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects)
• Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
• Short bio (with photo)
• Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

The deadline for submissions is December 7th 2014. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of January 31st-February 1st 2015 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, February 1st 2015. Please use the following website to submit your proposals: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM15 (you do not need to create a new Pentabarf account if you already have one from past years). You can also join the devroom s mailing list, which is the official communication channel for the DevRoom: desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org (subscription page for the mailing list) The Desktops DevRoom 2015 Organization Team

Qt and KDE will be present at FOSDEM, the largest open-source event in Europe. One more year, we will be sharing the Desktops DevRoom with Gnome, Unity, Enlightenment, LXQt and Hawaii (a Qt Quick desktop environment). We recently published the schedule for the devroom, which will be also available in the printed booklet available at the front desk. For the 2014 edition, the FOSDEM organization wants to achieve 100% recording of presentations. That means every presentation, in every room (devroom, lightning talk, main conference, etc) must be recorded. That s hundreds of talks. While the FOSDEM and devrooms organization teams comprise a lot of people, we are far too busy already with the organizative stuff and cannot spend time doing the actual recordings. Good thing is, you can help! Do you want to join the FOSDEM Video Team and receive the t-shirt? We are now looking for volunteer cameramen (and camerawomen, of course ). FOSDEM will provide you with equipment and training, you only need to start recording, focus, make sure nobody gets between the camera and the speaker/stage, etc. You do NOT need to record the whole track, even one talk recording would help. More details on what will be required from you are available in this e-mail from Wouter. Please contact me (pgquiles at elpauer dot org) if you are interested in recording one or more presentations from the Desktops DevRoom.

Once more, I m going to FOSDEM 2014, the largest Free/Libre/Open Source Software event in Europe (5,000 attendants every year). As usual, I will be in charge of the Desktops DevRoom, together with our friends from Gnome (Christophe Fergeau), Unity (Didier Roche), Enlightenment (Philippe Caseiro) and others. See you in Brussels 1-2 February 2014! BTW, have you already submitted your talk proposal for the Desktops DevRoom? The deadline (15th December) is very close! Do not wait any more!!! See the details here: FOSDEM 2014 Desktops DevRoom Call for Talks

Just a friendly reminder we are inviting people to submit proposals for talks at the Desktops DevRoom at FOSDEM 2014, which will take place in Brussels 1-2 February 2014. Here is the full text for the Call for Talks: http://www.elpauer.org/2013/10/fosdem-desktops-devroom-2014-call-for-talks/ Deadline is approaching! Submit your proposal ASAP!

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE/Razor, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop). Talks can be very specific, such as developing mobile applications with Qt Quick; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2013 schedule might give you some inspiration. Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects)
• Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
• Short bio (with photo)
• Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

The deadline for submissions is December 14th 2013. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 1-2 February 2014. Please use the following website to submit your proposals: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14 You can also join the devroom s mailing list, which is the official communication channel for the DevRoom: desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org (subscription page for the mailing list) The Desktops DevRoom 2014 Organization Team

Mark Shuttleworth recently critized Jonathan Riddell for proposing Xubuntu and others join the Kubuntu community. I thought I could make a few amendments to Mark s writing:

Jonathan Mark says that Canonical Kubuntu is not taking care of the Ubuntu community.

Consider for a minute, Jonathan Mark, the difference between our actions.

Canonical Kubuntu, as one stakeholder in the Ubuntu community, is spending a large amount of energy to evaluate how its actions might impact on all the other stakeholders, and offering to do chunks of work in support of those other stakeholder needs.

You, as one stakeholder in the Ubuntu community, are inviting people to contribute less to the broader project [all the X and Wayland -based desktops], and more to one stakeholder [Unity and Mir].

Hmm. Just because you may not get what you want is no basis for divisive leadership.

Yes, you should figure out what s important to Kubuntu Ubuntu Unity and Mir, and yes, you should motivate folks to help you achieve those goals. But it s simply wrong to suggest that Canonical Kubuntu isn t hugely accommodating to the needs of others, or that it s not possible to contribute or participate in the parts of Ubuntu which Canonical Kubuntu has a particularly strong interest in. Witness the fantastic work being done on both the system and the apps to bring Ubuntu Plasma to the phone and tablet. That may not be your cup of tea, but it s tremendously motivating and exciting and energetic. See Mark? I only needed to do a little search and replace on your words and suddenly, meaning is completely reversed! Canonical started looking only after its own a couple of years ago and totally dumped the community. Many people have noticed this and written about this in the past two years. How dare you say Jonathan or anyone from Kubuntu is proposing contributing less to the broader community? The broader community uses X and/or Wayland. Canonical recently came with Mir, a replacement for X and Wayland, out of thin air. Incompatible with X and Wayland. No mention of it at all to anyone from X or Wayland. No mention of it at FOSDEM one month ago, even though I, as the organizer of the Cross Desktop DevRoom, had been stalking your guy for months because we wanted diversity (and we got it: Gnome, KDE, Razor, XFCE, Enlightenment, etc, we even invided OpenBox, FVWM, CDE and others!). I even wrote a mail to you personally warning you Unity was going to lose its opportunity to be on the stand at FOSDEM. You never answered, of course. Don t you think Mir, a whole new replacement for X and Wayland, which has been in development for 8 months, deserved a mention at the largest open source event in Europe? Come on, man. It is perfectly fine to say yes, Canonical is not so interested in the community. It s our way or the highway . But do not pretend it s anything else or someone else is a bad guy. In fact, is there any bad guy in this story at all!? I think there is not, it s just people with different visions and chosen paths to achieve them. Maybe Mir and Unity are great ideas, much better than X and Wayland. But that s not what we are talking about. We are talking about community, and Canonical has been steadily destroying it for a long time already. If you cannot or do not want to see that, you ve got a huge problem going on.

In a perfectly orchestrated marketing campaign for a 100% free-libre tablet called Spark that will run KDE Plasma Active, Aaron Seigo writes today about the problems they are facing with GPL-violations. Apparently, every Chinese manufacturer is breaking the GPLv2 by not releasing the sources for their modified Linux kernel. Conversations and conversations with Zenithink (designers of the Spark), Synrgic (designers of the Dreambook W7), etc have arrived nowhere. To the point that CordiaTab, another similar effort using Gnome instead of KDE, has been cancelled. I have to say I am very surprised at the lack of the kernel sources. What is the Free Software Foundation doing? Why don t we seek ban of all imports of tablets whose manufacturers don t release the full GPL source? Apple got the Samsung GalaxyTab imports blocked in Germany and Australia for something as ethereal as patents covering the external frame design. We are talking about license infringement, which is easier to demonstrate in court. China may ignore intellectual property but they cannot ignore business, and no imports means no business. Let s get all GPL-infringing tablet imports banned and we will get more source in two weeks than we can digest in two years. Heck, I m surprised Apple is not trying this in court to block Android!

Apparently HTML5 applications are the best thing after sliced bread. HTML5 is the first platform any mobile vendor supports: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian. All of them. Windows 8 is said to promote HTML5 as the preferred application development solution. I used to look kindly at that. But about a month ago I started to get worried: is HTML5 good for everything? Long-lived applications In military, industrial, warehouse management, medical, etc is not rare that bespoke applications are developed and stay in use for many years (and I really mean many: 10, 20 or even more!) with barely an update. It s not rare that those applications only receive very small updates once very 5 years. Those applications, not Angry Birds, are what keeps the world running: troops know what supplies they can count on, iPhones are manufactured, FedEx is able to deliver your package and your doctor is able to check your health. But now that everybody seems to be moving to HTML5 webapps, what happens when my warehouse management application is a webapp and the additions in the newest browsers make the webapp no longer work? Are vain upgrades the future? Say my webapp is released in 2014 and it works fine with Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 26.0, the newest browsers when I release the application in 2014. Fast-forward to 2020 and Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 26.0 do not even install on Windows 10 computer! What s the solution? Should the customer pay for a huge update and redesign to make it work with Firefox 27.1 and Chrome 41.0 in 2020? A virtual machine with Windows 8 and Firefox 14.0? A portable Mozilla Firefox 14.0 on Windows 10 in 2020 to be able to use that line-of-business application that only requires a small update once or twice every 5 years? How are the virtual machine and/or Portable Firefox 14.0 different from or better than a fat client? What s the advantage? I d say none! Native applications usually do not have that kind of problems because APIs are much more stable. You can still run Win16 applications on Windows 7! You don t believe me? We may soon be developing for 76 browsers! While HTML5 may be fine for applications which are updated very often, it makes me feel very uneasy to see it used in environments where applications will be rarely updated, such as SCADAs, warehouse management, control system, medical records, etc. A solution is needed It looks like that choice of technology is going to make those applications much more expensive in the medium and long term, paying for adaptations to new browsers (sorry, I resist to call update or upgrade to something that adds zero value other than being able to run on a newer browser). Or maybe it s about time to define actual HTML5 profiles . ACID3 seems to be too weak of a profile: two very different browsers may pass ACID3 yet a webapp would work with one browser and fail with the other due to bugs, missing features/added features, etc. Something needs to be done.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks. Are you interested in giving a talk about open source and Qt, KDE, Enlightenment, Gnome, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, mobile development, applications that enhance desktops and/or web? We have extended the deadline for a few more days, until January 8th. If you want to submit a talk proposal, hurry up! I have to say I am very surprised to see very few Qt/KDE talk proposals. Is there nothing interesting the Qt and KDE world have to say to 5,000+ people?
There is more information in the Call for Talks we published a couple of months. If you are interested in Qt/KDE, come visit us at the KDE booth. If you add yourself to the KDE FOSDEM 2012 wiki page, we will be able to better organize the usual dinner on Sunday and/or smaller meetings for special interest groups .