I am at the KDE
4.0 Release Event. Tons of KDE developers and users are here, as well as a couple of Trolls. Some people I know, most I am meeting for the
first time. Google is hosting the event, which is just down the street
from where I live. I think I live the closest from everyone else.
Today is mainly breakout sessions and hacking. So far I have attended
a FreeBSD BoF (birds of a feather) with Adrian de Groot. A tour of the
Google facilities starts in fifteen minutes. Tomorrow will have
the actual release celebration. Speeches and presentations and stuff.
Silly me, it seems I've volunteered for KCalc duties. There are a tiny
handful of apps that need some loving or they will be dropped from
the KDE 4 release. KCalc was one of them. Since this is an app I use
frequently I stepped forward. I hope there won't be a trigonometry
quiz on this!
The first major problem I see is the interface. I am currently
converting this to Designer UI format. The other major problem is the
use of GMP. It's license was recently changed to LGPL3, which
some people say is incompatible with KCalc's GPL2+.
I've made to software releases this week, that have been a long time
in coming. The first is QBrew 0.4.0, the second is HârnMaker
0.5.0. Both have been ported to Qt 4.3, with corresponding UI
improvements. You can access them at
http://www.usermode.org/code.html
For years GPL advocates has been spreading the idea that a second
party can relicense a copyrighted work. Because of this, it is a common
belief in many Linux communities, that it is permissible to "file off"
certain unrestricted licenses and replace them with the GPL.
Recently a few Linux developers, on advice from the FSF's lawyer, did
just that with the Atheros driver in OpenBSD. This is in violation of
copyright law, and nothing short of bald faced plagarism.
A quote from Theo de Raadt:
In
their zeal to get the code under their own license, some of these
Linux wireless developers have broken copryright law repeatedly. But
to even get to the point where they broke copyright law, they had to
bypass a whole series of ethical considerations too.
I'm not bringing up this story to tweak the noses of GPL developers,
but rather to urge the community of Free Software developers to behave
morally and ethically when dealing with other people's code.
Thanks to my employer, I now have a subversion repository for
QBrew. Public read-only anonymous access is at
https://cvs.ics.com/svn/qbrew,
using account "qbrew" and password
"qbrewguest". You will need a
Subversion client.
The Phase widget style is still being maintained in KDE, but since it
is now a "pure" Qt 4 style, I am making a snapshot available for
it. There are still some TODO notes in the code, but it is complete
and usable. You can find it on my software page.
