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• It is not the friendliness factor, it is the user familiarity factor that is giving a lot of bad name for Linux. Most of the Linux users are those migrating from Microsoft Windows and it requires a certain amount of time to get familiar with the new OS. 

• I have my own experience to substantiate this statement. I was not much of a computer user at all till I bought my laptop 4 years ago. I installed Ubuntu as dual boot with Windows XP. I instantly started liking Ubuntu, it was fun to use and all the compiz eyecandy was just overwhelming. To that day, I considered linux as an outcast or never really though about it at all.

• K-10 was created by the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) at NASA's Ames Research Center, as part of a project to build exploration rovers for future robotic missions to the moon and to Mars.

• K-10 runs Red Hat Linux, which NASA says was chosen for its large user base and application compatibility. According to NASA, "Linux's flexibility and scalability enable us to easily add, remove, and extend devices with minimal difficulty."

• The Scout is a fully autonomous vehicle that can also be teleoperated, or controlled by touchscreen and joystick.

• Its control system is based on a pair of Dell D400 laptops running Gentoo Linux.

• Low-cost, user-programmable humanoid robot targeting educational and research applications.

• The Choromet stands about 13-3/4 inches tall, and is capable of walking upright on two legs. It can also assume supine or prone positions, and stand up from either. 

• The Choromet is based on several technologies developed by AIST, including an operating system said to provide a user-space real-time Linux environment called "ARTLinux".

• Humanoid Robot called HOAP-1 (Humanoid for Open Architecture Platform) developed by Fujitsu is designed for wide range of applications in research and development of robotic technologies.

• Fujitsu miniature humanoid Robot runs on RTLinux. The basic simulation software and user-developed programs are designed to run on RTLinux.

• Fujitsu Automation.

• Owned by Switzerland-based Neuronics. The Katana Robotic Arm is typically used for handling, measurement, or testing applications in assembly, production, and laboratory automation, says Neuronics.

• Operating system that runs on Katana is Linux 2.4.25 with Xenomai hard real-time extensions. The robot is billed as an "intelligent" industrial robotic arm with safety features that "allow it to work directly hand-in-hand with human operators without the need for any additional safeguards or fences," says the company. 

• Neuronics Group.

• Aldebaran Robotics, of Paris, created Nao - a humanoid household service robot running Linux.

• "Nao" household robot will compete with robotic research prototypes in terms of functionality. The walking, talking, WiFi-enabled bot will stand 21.6 inches tall, and will feature 23 degrees of freedom of motion.

• Aldebaran-Robotics.
  

• ROB-1 is actually a robot with a built-in digital camera that you control from your Sony Ericsson mobile phone using Bluetooth.

• It is equipped with a VGA camera (640x480) that will transmit the video back to the mobile phone. The camera is a mini computer running on Linux, powered by a 200Mhz ARM processor and 2MB of memory.

• French transport and cleanliness robot specialist RoboSoft has used real-time Linux in a six-wheeled outdoor autonomous vehicle aimed at reducing human risks in reconnaissance, monitoring, and safety operations.

• RoboSoft says that despite its relatively small size, the RoboROC 6 boasts "incomparable crossing capabilities" thanks to its flexible, articulated design. 

• RoboSoft Advanced Robotics.

• The 17-inch, 4.5-pound humanoid robot can speak, learn, interact with its surroundings, and even recognize faces, according to creator Hanson Robotics.

• Linux is responsible for the robot's "physical brain," controlling its animation, while Windows XP is responsible for its "verbal brain," controlling its voice recognition and interaction with others.

• Hanson Robotics.

• Sony's AIBO (artificial intelligence bot) platform with a canid design and an open API (application programming interface), was among the most widely used platform in robo tournaments like Robocup. However, Sony announced in January of 2006 that it would discontinue AIBO.

• der neue Roboter (the new robot), the would-be AIBO replacement, also had a canid design similar to the AIBO. der neue Roboter is much larger than the AIBO and has 15 joints, including three for each leg, and three for the neck.
  

uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005 and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application. Every month, more than 50 million people use uTorrent and this number continues to grow alongside BitTorrent’s ever-increasing user base.

Ever since uTorrent was released, Mac and Linux users have begged the developers to release a version of the client designed to work on their computers. In 2006, when uTorrent was sold to BitTorrent Inc., the company announced that a Mac version was coming. In 2008, nearly two years after the announcement, it was finally released to the public.

With the the release of the Mac version, Linux users were the only ones left out in the cold, but this is about to change. The uTorrent development team has just announced that they are working on a Linux version of the client. Further details on the time line and an eventual release date are not available at the moment.

The Linux version is the most backed idea on µTorrent’s recently introduced Idea Bank. The Idea Bank is prominently featured on uTorrent’s website and allows users to submit and vote for ideas they want to see implemented. In just a few weeks the idea of a Linux version has been supported by 3254 people. This huge demand from users is one of the main reasons why the Linux version is now in progress.

"Since launching our Idea Bank on uTorrent.com there has been significant demand for a native client for Linux,” BitTorrent Inc. spokesperson Jenna Broughton told TorrentFreak. "We obviously want to do our best to deliver whenever we see a good fit between our goals and capabilities and what our users say they want.”

"We are committed to bringing a lightweight uTorrent client that embraces the usability and features of our Windows and Mac clients to Linux users,” Broughton said. The exact feature-set of the Linux client will remain a secret for now, but in common with other versions of uTorrent it wont be Open Source.

The release date for the client is unknown at this point but unlike the Mac version it should come out relatively quickly. "While the exact specs as well as the timing are still being developed, we expect uTorrent for Linux to be available for download later this summer,” we were informed.

Whether or not the uTorrent Linux release will ever reach the massive market share it has on Windows remains to be seen. The Mac version has been well received but it is by no means the most used BitTorrent client on the platform. Whatever happens, it’s definitely good to see that uTorrent will soon be available on all three major platforms.

Download µTorrent

The pharmaceutical giant last week opened to the public the designs behind 13,500 chemical compounds that it said may be capable of inhibiting the parasite that causes malaria.

Glaxo and others hope that sharing information and working together will lead scientists to come up with a drug for treating the mosquito-borne disease faster than the company could on its own. Other researchers "may look at these structures in quite a different way and see something that we don't," said Nick Cammack, head of Glaxo's Medicines Development Campus in Spain.

The move is one of the largest experiments yet by the pharmaceutical industry to apply techniques of open-source development to drug discovery, based on the idea that collaboration by volunteers will create products that aren't owned by a single company.

In software, the approach has spawned the Linux operating system, MySQL database and an array of other programs. Those community-born technologies now compete with products from Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and other traditional, commercial software makers. Open-source developers share programming instructions called source code that software companies traditionally kept confidential.

Similarly, large pharmaceutical companies tightly guard their formulas for drugs and other intellectual property. Any given chemical compound holds the potential to be a blockbuster drug—and a cash cow, like Microsoft's Windows software. But diseases like malaria afflict mainly poor populations, and drugs to treat them don't hold the promise for such a big payoff—making experiments like Glaxo's less risky.

The Glaxo effort builds off earlier open-source drug efforts that included a nonprofit organization called Tropical Disease Initiative and a project started last year that opens compounds from Pfizer Inc. to researchers at a nonprofit called Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative.

The Glaxo data will be hosted by three websites, two of which are government-funded (one in the U.S. and one in Europe). The third is a Silicon Valley company called Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. CDD, as it is called, was spun off in 2004 from drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. and has funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm.

CDD's Web service combines elements of a Facebook-like social network with an Oracle-style database. Any researcher who registers on the CDD site will be able to see graphical depictions of Glaxo's compounds and relevant chemical and biological data. The database will allow them to upload their own data to be viewed by other researchers.

The service is free of charge. If a researcher wants to combine the data with proprietary information, CDD alsooffers a fee-based, secure version of its site that allows researchers to lock up information they want to keep secret.

Developing a new drug is a trial-and-error process of testing which chemical compounds produce a certain effect on a biological target. In the case of malaria, the target can be the Plasmodium parasite that causes the deadly disease or human red-blood cells that it needs to survive. Over the past year, Glaxo has tested two million compounds, culling the 13,500 molecules that it says have some effect. However, narrowing down the compounds to a handful that might yield a drug is an increasingly complex process.Any compound that proves promising in the current effort will take years of testing and investment to turn it into a malaria drug.

Glaxo says that it won't seek patents on any malaria drug that the compounds yield, and hopes other researchers will also donate their intellectual property to a patent pool for so-called neglected diseases like malaria. If the Glaxo compounds are used to develop a drug for other types of diseases, then the company "would consider" the intellectual-property issues, a Glaxo spokeswoman said.

Researchers including James McKerrow, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, have used CDD since 2007 to share data about diseases including malaria and schistosomiasis, a parasite that can cause liver and kidney damage. The group shared data on tens of thousands of compounds to speed up the process of picking a handful of compounds (for diseases such as malaria) that are the best options to try on animals, Dr. McKerrow said.

Barry Bunin, CDD's chief executive, believes that the work on neglected diseases is a precursor for big pharmaceutical companies to eventually use the open-source techniques for developing commercial drugs.

Some drug experts doubt that will happen. The reasons include the nettlesome problem of managing intellectual property and various uncertainties. Any given compound, for example, could wind up affecting more diseases than expected and turn out to be more valuable than expected. Glaxo, for instance, found that drugs that inhibited growth of the parasite that causes malaria were of a type that is also marketed to treat cancer.

"I think that's a potentially interesting model but I don't think for-profit institutions would participate," says Brendan O'Leary, general partner at Prism Venture Management, a venture-capital firm that invests in life-sciences companies.

Yet Glaxo'sMr. Cammack doesn't rule it out. He hopes the open-source work will influence Glaxo more broadly in the future, particularly given the challenges big pharmaceuticalcompanies face in launching new drugs. "The pharmaceutical industry needs to look at lots of ways of doing business in the future," he said.

"In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. "This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707 per cent year-on-year.

Growth in the mobile devices market was driven by double-digit growth of smartphone sales in mature markets, helped by wider product availability as well as mass market price tags. "Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India, also drove sales of mobile phones upward. We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China,” said Ms Milanesi.

The first quarter also saw some movement outside the top five mobile handset vendor rankings (see Table 1), Hong Kong-based manufacturer G-Five made its debut into the top 10, grabbing 1.4 per cent of market share in the first quarter of 2010. The rise of white-box manufacturers from Asia has also helped the "others" section, as a proportion of overall sales, increase its market share to 19.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2010, up 2.7 percentage points. "This is having a profound effect on the top five mobile handset manufacturers’ combined share that dropped from 73.3 in the first quarter of 2009 to 70.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2010,” said Ms Milanesi.

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

In the first quarter of 2010, Nokia's mobile phone sales to end users reached 110.1 million units, a 1.2 per cent decline in market share year-on-year. Although Nokia's midtier products sold well, Nokia lacks a high-volume driver in the high-end. "MeeGo based devices and other high-end products will not rejuvenate Nokia's premium portfolio until the end of the third quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and Nokia will continue to feel pressure on its average selling price (ASP) from vendors such as HTC, RIM and Samsung,” said Ms Milanesi. The reorganisation announced last week demonstrated that Nokia is trying to streamline the reporting process to deliver results quickly, which we believe shows its recognition of the pressure it faces from investors.

Samsung sold 64.9 million devices in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 26.3 per cent year-on-year. Samsung was one of the five vendors in the top10 vendors ranking to grow its market share, which increased by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year. Samsung saw healthy margins in the first quarter of 2010 and was also able to grow its presence in developing markets such as India and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

RIM’s mobile phone sales reached 10.6 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 45.9 per cent increase year-on-year. RIM is making its debut into the top five worldwide mobile handset manufacturers ranking. RIM's focus this quarter was centred on its ecosystem strategy, its tightly integrated control of store, OS and device played to RIM’s strengths.

Sony Ericsson sold enough units to remain in the top five mobile handset manufacturers, but its market share declined 2.3 percentage points in the first quarter of 2010. The channel held some inventory for Sony Ericsson in the first quarter of 2010 as some new products reached the channel late into the quarter. One of Sony Ericsson's most important future differentiators is its relationship with its parent company, Sony. This partnership, combined with Sony Ericsson’s ownership of the strongest portfolio it has had since 2007, place it well to lead the trend toward increasingly connected consumer devices.

The first quarter of 2010 was Apple’s strongest quarter yet, which placed the company in the No. 7 position with a 112.2 per cent increase in mobile devices sales. "Growth came partly from new communication service providers in established markets, such as the UK, and stronger sales in new markets such as China and South Korea,” said Ms Milanesi. "The second quarter of 2010 will be a very important one for Apple. We expect that Apple will present its new iPhone in June during its Worldwide Developer Conference, which will be the first to feature the latest release of the iPhone OS that includes welcome improvements for developers and users, such as multitasking.”

In the smartphone OS market, Android and Apple were the winners in the first quarter of 2010 (see Table 2). Android moved to the No. 4 position displacing Microsoft Windows Mobile for the first time. Both Android and Apple were the only two OSs vendors among the top five to increase market share year-on-year. Symbian remained in the No. 1 position but continued to lose as Nokia remains weak in the high-end portfolio.

Smartphones accounted for 17.3 per cent of all mobile handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6 per cent in the same period in 2009.

As seen with the iPad and web books based on Google's Android platform, mobile OS ecosystems are developing and will move beyond smartphones to continue to deliver consumer value and a rich user experience,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Table 2
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

Mobile e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will continue to drive demand for smartphones and enhanced phones that feature full qwerty hardware keyboards. "To compete in such a crowded market, manufacturers need to tightly integrate hardware, user interface, and cloud and social networking services if their solutions are to appeal to users,” said Ms Cozza. "Just adding a qwerty keyboard will not make a device fit the communication’s habits of today's various consumer segments.”

Additional information is in the Gartner report "Competitive Landscape: Mobile Devices, Worldwide, 1Q10." The report is available on Gartner's website at www.gartner.com.

European IT and telecom ministers called for the introduction of open standards and interoperability in government procurement of IT on Monday, sparking applause from the industry.

The ministers' statement, part of a broader declaration concerning Europe's digital agenda, comes as the European Commission tries to draw up a framework for how governments should in the future procure software that runs their online public services.

Public sector IT procurement represents a massive chunk of the overall IT market in Europe. Historically, only the largest software vendors have been considered by city, local, regional and national government departments. As a result, citizens are forced to use software programs compatible with those companies' offerings when performing administrative tasks such as submitting tax returns, renewing their ID cards or applying for a dog license online.

One part of the Commission, led by Commissioner Neelie Kroes, is pushing hard to open up the public procurement market, and to break the stranglehold of vendors of proprietary software, including Microsoft. Meanwhile, another part of the E.U. executive, responsible mainly for internal IT procurement, is busy drafting guidelines dubbed the European Interoperability Framework (EIF).

But advocates for open and interoperable computing claim that the EIF has been watered down due to intense lobbying by the proprietary software makers, to such an extent that the document will have no impact on the market.

The EIF is important because it will serve as a "metaframework" for all national guidelines on how public offices should purchase information and communication technology (ICT) services.

The declaration by ministers Monday should strengthen Kroes' hand, as she prepares to publish her game plan for Europe's digital agenda next month.

Government departments across the E.U. should "embed innovation and cost effectiveness into eGovernment through the systematic promotion of open standards and interoperable systems," the ministers said in their declaration.

Kroes welcomed the statement, describing it as "a milestone, a crucial building block for a truly European Digital Agenda."

"We do not seek to dictate the design and scale and direction of future ICT. But we are determined to create a new set of conditions for ICTs and the Internet ecosystem of the future," she said.

Trade groups were quick to praise the declaration too.

"Europe will be best served if it spends less time looking backwards on preserving the status quo and current business practice, and more time on encouraging new opportunity and innovation", said Graham Taylor, CEO of the Open Forum Europe (OFE) -- a trade group that ranks Google, IBM and Oracle among its members.

Developers from Google's Android team are due to meet the Linux kernel devs in the hope of working out their differences and closing an awkward chapter in the history of Linux.

Google open source programs manager Chris DiBona told us it would be a "multi-year" process. "I think it's going to take more than a couple of days to sort things out."

He noted, though, that reintegration would not be too hard because Google has deliberately stuck very close to the main Linux kernel with Android.

That suggests the issue is more political than technical, for two main reasons.

One is that Android has entered the rats' nest that is the mobile phone industry, and Google must now balance any desire to respect the wishes of the Linux community for compatibility with the more diverse, competing - and not always logical - interests of those now adopting Android and its own plans.

It's an industry where a maze of chip makers, handset manufacturers, and carriers have competing hardware, software and service demands, and retain an obsessive paranoia about keeping new launches secret from each other and the world. Keeping new features secret is harder when everybody shares the same code or kernel.

It's a maze Java's been bogged down in for years.

"Android is very complicated," DiBona said of the ecosystem earlier during the Summit. "I firmly believe over time a lot of the technology we've been working on [in Android] will make it into the mainstream kernel, we have to do better."

The other could be the personalities involved, who might not care for the politics of the phone industry compared to the purity of the kernel.

Appearing on a panel ahead of DiBona was Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Novell fellow and Linux developer who booted Android from the Linux kernel last year by deleting the Android drivers. Kroah-Hartman said that at the time nobody cared about the Android code and that, ultimately, Google had forked the kernel with a "sometimes bizarre" security model.

Judging from earlier comments Kroah-Hartman has made, he meant no one cared about making sure the code was merged with the main Linux tree. The world certainly cares about Android.

More than 30 phones ship on Android, with more planned, while the Linux is found on tablets and e-book readers such as Barnes & Noble's Nook.

Android had 7.1 per cent market share in the US smart-phone market January - up 4.3 per cent since October according to comScore. Since October, Android has grown faster than Apple's iPhone, up 0.3 per cent to - an admittedly already robust - 25.1 per cent, while Windows and Palm both shrunk.

If it was hoped Google would be brought to heel by being ejected from the Linux tree, it was a hope that was never realized. "Just because our code was booted out of the fork doesn't mean we aren't releasing code all the time - we are," DiBona had told summit attendees.

As far as DiBona is concerned, not all the features in Android will be relevant to mainstream or enterprise Linux kernel users because they are geared towards handsets - such as specific Qualcomm chip sets.

The dilemma of success

This has been an awkward chapter in the history of Linux. Summit speakers and Linux people around the event down played the problem, either calling it "a little fork" or saying "forks are good".

Google's operating system is helping propel Linux to new devices and even greater market share - advancing the common cause. It has done so, though, at an apparent price to unity of the kernel and in a way that's been played out in the public arena.

But attendees saw this as an issue and wanted clarification, with questions to DiBona during his session and speakers in an earlier panel about future of the kernel kept coming back to the Android fork.

James Bottomley, Linux SCSI subsystem maintainer and Novell distinguished engineer, said during the kernel panel forks are prevalent in embedded systems where companies use the fork once then "throw it away".

"Google is not the first to have done something like this by far, just the one that’s made the most publicity," Bottomley said.

"Hopefully the function of this collaboration summit is there is some collaboration over the next two days and we might actually solve it." ®

According to Seigo, the large-scale changes that began two years ago with the release of KDE 4.0 are mostly complete now. "We've reached the stage with the 4.4 release that happened in January where we've got this nice feature set on the desktop and we have applications available for it and some nice refinements in the look and feel. That's where we are. But where are we going? That's always the difficult question. Once you've arrived at a place,what are you going to aim for?"

Seigo's answer to his own question is that KDE is currently moving in three directions: adding functionality to the desktop in both small features and within specific applications, extending the concept of the social desktop, and the introduction of KDE on to every possible hardware platform. Each is a small story in itself.

Fine-tuning the KDE Desktop

In contrast to some of the earlier releases in the KDE 4 series, Seigo says, now "we have the features that people expect [and] we've given people a lot of new things they can do." The next step, he says, is "putting an emphasis on fit and finish -- working on performance, really ratcheting down the screws on stability."

Something of this direction can already been seen in the current 4.4 release, with the addition of new features such as the ability to group many windows into tabs in a single one. However, tabbed windows are only the beginning, Seigo says.

He suggests that future releases will make the taskbar aware of tabbed windows, and allow users to save them for use in a latter session. Similarly, he sees the recently-added geolocation feature as a first step towards a KDE version that will automatically change the contents of the desktop according to where you are -- for instance, opening one set of icons and files when the computer starts at your office, and another when it starts at home.

In addition, many of the changes to the desktop are occurring within specific applications. For example, KOffice has received funding from Nokia to develop a document viewer for the Maemo 5 mobile platform. Nokia," Seigo says, "is investing a lot, not only so it's fast, but also so it has import/export filters for Open Document and Microsoft Office format, so if you create a document in OpenOffice.org, it will work perfectly on your phone."

Another example is the new direction for Krita, KOffice's rasterized graphic program. For a long time, Seigo says, the sub-project wasn't sure "If they were a drawing app, or maybe a photo retouching app, or what-the-hell were they?"

At a recent developers' sprint, Krita enlisted design expert Peter Sikking, who has also worked with the GIMP, to help the sub-project find direction.

"At the end of this experience, they decided that what they really were was a natural process drawing application," Seigo says -- that is, an application that simulates as closely as possible such aspects as brush strokes and color-mixing. "Other things like photo editing are plugins now, something that you add afterwards."

"The other exciting area of development right now is in business support," Seigo says. "Things like groupware. KDE is working a program called OpenChange which is doing a compete reimplementation of MS Exchange," Seigo says. "They were actually at the Samba conference this year, and I always refer to them as the Samba for Exchange. KDE is being ported to the new Akonadi framework [for personal information management], so in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to choose your server of choice, including Exchange. That's really a first for us."

KDE and the Social Desktop

The second major direction is the increased use of the social desktop. According to Seigo, this trend began with introduction of Nepomuk, the social semantic desktop that maintains a database of files and their tags.

Nepomuk is primarily an academic project, but, thanks to sponsorship from Mandriva, KDE was one of the first to implement it in a desktop.

"That's reached the stage now where you can tag files, annotate them, search for them, and create a timeline to see the order in which you've used things in the file manager," Seigo says. "That's nice, but it's really the tip of the iceberg. The end goal is to connect all this metadata with people and the way people work."

KDE already includes widgets for keeping track of people via OpenDesktop.organd to access the KDE Knowledge Base, but future developments could see tools for keeping current with both friends and KDE contributions, and even seeking answers to hardware problems from others who own the same hardware.

Seigo calls this trend "freeing the web from the web browser," adding that "it's a shame the web is stuck with the web browser." In direct contrast to Google's Chrome OS, which replaces the desktop with the browser, the goal of KDE is to distribute access to web resources throughout the existing desktop.

"That means using web technologies in our desktops," Seigo explains. "It's really erasing the boundaries between what is local and isn't local, and, most importantly, in the spirit of free software, putting the control and the choice into the hands of the users."

New Hardware Platforms and Their Influence

The largest current direction for KDE is the extension on to new platforms. KDE has already released Plasma Netbook, a netbook-specific interface that Seigo describes has "about 99% the same stuff under the hood" as the traditional desktop.

Now, KDE is expanding to other hardware platforms as well. "We've got mobile going right now," Seigo adds. "We're working on a mobile interface that is designed to be a phone/PDA-type interface. Our target platform is MeeGo, and we're working on things such as the Jax10 device, which is Intel-based. We're also working on a media center. So, at the end of the day, we'll have this collection of shells that go from desktop to netbook/tablet to mobile."

One result of this hardware integration that is already having an effect is the influence of netbooks and mobile devices on the traditional desktop. Screen size, available RAM and hard drive size all place limits on interface design, although the hardware distinctions between portable devices and workstations is starting to narrow.

Even so, differences remain. As an example, Seigo points out that a mouse is too precise a tool for a mobile device.

"This leads to things like having clickable widgets," Seigo says. "so that if I have a list of things, I might be able to click it with my finger. And because we use the same technologies for the primary user interface, we now have clickable widgets o the desktop as well. We probably never would have invested the time in doing clickable widgets if we were just focusing on the desktop."

Other Changes, and Lessons Learned

Other changes are happening that are external to the software. Realizing that KDE no longer referred only to a desktop, but to a community engaged in building related technologies, the project announced a rebranding last fall in the hopes of better reflecting what the project is about.

The near future should also see a change from SVN to Git for version control. Seigo anticipates that the greater accessibility of GIT will lower the barriers for contributors.

Some KDE projects like Amarok have already switched to Git, and, according to Seigo, "They're moving at an amazing pace, and the main reason is that the number of contributors have gone up." Seigo does expect "a week where everyone's going, 'What the hell am I doing?'" because KDE has over five millions lines of current code, and some 58 gigabytes of archives to transfer. But "hopefully, when we all move over, KDE development will go even faster."

But, whatever changes are in store for KDE, Seigo suggests that they should occur with a minimum of problems. In particular, Seigo says that, because the KDE 4 series is designed to be more easily altered than previous release series, code bloat is less likely to be a problem, because fewer kludges are needed to work around hard-coded limitations.

Moreover, "in cases where there is bloat, we disable it at run time if your battery starts to run out or if your machine is too slow. You give up some of the bling, but you still have a fully functional, good system."

Seigo does express some concern about another user revolt like the one that happened with KDE 4.0. However, he blames the revolt partly on distribution's efforts to be the first with new software, and partly on inevitability.

"We have a very bad habit in free software in general that, whenever necessary development happens -- something that has to be done -- we're not good at creating new products around that," Seigo says. "We just say, 'Here's a new thing,' and we throw it out and see how it goes. The distributions really need to get better with how they deal with such things, because upstream can't realy stop and ossify our code. We need to do this every so many years, and the distributions have to learn to deal with it. And it's not exclusively a KDE thing; we saw the same thing with PulseAudio"

And when will the KDE 5 series roll out? Seigo says that the version number might change to keep it in sync with that of the Qt toolkit, but that, otherwise, a new development series is unlikely.

"We're maybe halfway through what we want to achieve with KDE 4," Seigo says. "The frameworks that we have are not being fully utilized, and wwe're not looking at things and saying, 'Dang, I wish there was something we could do.' We were really doing that with KDE 3, and we don't have any of that on our plate right now. We're kind of like a kid whose mother buys a shirt three sizes too big and tells him that he'll grow into it -- we still have lots of room for growth."

In a few years, KDE 5 will probably happen, but Seigo predicts that the change would be more like the one between the KDE 2 and 3 series, and not nearly as radical as that between KDE 3 and 4. "I think we've probably got a good decade of development in the framework we have right now," Seigo says.

Long-Time Open Source Contributor Collabora Joins Linux Foundation

Collabora’s team of open source development veterans will contribute to MeeGo project

SAN FRANCISCO, April 15, 2010 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Collabora Ltd., has become a member and will participate in the MeeGo project (http://www.meego.com).

Collabora is a globally distributed team of open source software consultants who are also active maintainers and contributors to a variety of open source projects. The company provides development, consulting and project management services, among others: http://www.collabora.co.uk/services/.

Collabora has a long history of contributing to mobile open source projects and developing applications for a variety of platforms that include GNOME, KDE, Moblin, Maemo – and now, MeeGo.

"The Linux Foundation provides a home for important projects such as the MeeGo platform,” said Philippe Kalaf, director and co-founder at Collabora Ltd. "We’re excited to join the Linux Foundation so that we can participate directly in upstream development of the MeeGo platform, attend online and face-to-face meetings and do what we can to invest in the project’s success.”

"MeeGo is one of the many projects that benefit from Collabora’s contributions,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs, The Linux Foundation. "We’re excited to have such a veteran group of open source experts join the Linux Foundation and collaborate on important projects such as MeeGo.”

Collabora is attending this week’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which includes day 1 keynotes from MeeGo leadership as well as project meetings on days 2 and 3. For more information about the Summit, please visit:http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit.

About Collabora Ltd.
Headquartered in Cambridge, UK with a network of developers worldwide, Collabora Ltd. is a software consultancy specializing in delivering the benefits of open source to the commercial world. Collabora combines years of open source software expertise with hard-won experience from working in the mobile and consumer electronics industries. They help clients effectively take open source technologies from the community to real-world consumers, re-using existing components to reduce time to market and focus on product differentiation. For more information please visit www.collabora.co.uk.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by hosting important workgroups, events and online resources such as Linux.com. For more information, please visit www.linuxfoundation.org.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Speaking in a keynote session at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, Dan Frye, vice president of open system development at IBM, provided his insights into some do's and don't when trying to work with Linux.

For IBM, one of the hardest lessons it had to learn was one about control. Mainly, there is none.

"There is nothing that we can do to control individuals or communities, and if you try, you make thing worse," Frye told the audience. "What you need is influence. It goes back to the most important lesson, which is to give back to the community and develop expertise. You'll find that if your developers are working with a community, that over time they'll develop influence and that influence will allow you to get things done."

Frye noted during his keynote that an early question that IBM asked internally about Linux was how it could control a chaotic development process. As it turns out, Linux development isn't a chaotic process, though it may appear that way to some looking from the outside.

Joining the Linux community as a participant in a broader ecosystem also proved to yield a key lesson for IBM.

"It's easy to form a community around yourself," Frye said. "It's much harder and more valuable to participate in a community that you do not control -- it took us time to learn that."

Fry recalled that a few years back, IBM wanted to push its own Linux scalability effort -- an initiative that didn't work out, as IBM did not get any community input for the project. The problem was that IBM didn't know how things worked in the Linux community, Frye said.

For example, he said someone would send a note on a mailing list about an IBM effort, and then the IBM people in turn would have a team huddle to determine a response. Frye noted that it would take IBM a lot of time to respond, and by the time it did, the interested community individuals would be long gone.

"We spent far too much time behind the IBM firewall, discussing things, and we tried to polish our external communications," Frye said. "So we banned internal IBM communication on the Linux kernel. Anyone working on the kernel at IBM was not allowed to talk to anyone else inside the company. All communications had to be external."

That effort led to IBM having more success in dealing with the community. In addition, IBM learned that it doesn't work to make large code donations, either. Frye stated that it's far more effective to start working inside of a community and then deliver incremental pieces of work.

While IBM discovered that it can't control the process, Frye noted that it is possible to work on the things that were important to IBM even within the community model.

"It is perfectly acceptable to scratch your own itch," Frye said. "You can work on the things that are important to you and your company, and things will work out."

The other lesson that IBM has learned is that it's the end result that matters in Linux, and not who runs a project or starts a particular effort.

"It does not matter whose code is eventually shipped," Frye said. "If your folks drop code and someone takes that code, rewrites it and makes it better, that is fine."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

The MeeGo project receives industry-wide support while it gets down to the business of writing code

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2010 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that companies from a broad range of sectors have committed to and are participating in the MeeGo project.

Participants today include leading device manufacturers, operating system vendors (OSVs), chipset manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and development communities. Supporting statements are attached from Acer, Amino, Asianux, Asus, BMW Group, Collabora, Ltd., CS2C, DeviceVM, EA Mobile, Gameloft, Hancom, Linpus, Maemo Community Council, Mandriva, Metasys, Miracle, MontaVista Software, Novell, PixArt, Red Flag, ST-Ericsson, Tencent, TurboLinux, VietSoftware, Wind River, WTEC, and Xandros.

This participation translates into millions of developer hours dedicated to cross-device compatibility, application portability and the user experience for MeeGo-based devices. Contributors are attracted to MeeGo because it extends reach beyond just smartphones to also include connected televisions, in-vehicle infotainment systems, netbooks and more.

The MeeGo project, which merges Intel’s Moblin™ and Nokia’s Maemo Linux-based platforms, was announced earlier this year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. An opening (http://meego.com/community/blogs/imad/2010/day-1-here-opening-meego-development) of the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and operating system base was made available last month, and the first release of MeeGo is expected in the second quarter of this year with applications available in both Intel’s AppUp Center and Nokia’s Ovi Store.

"The MeeGo project is being met with enthusiastic support from companies and developers who want to seize the market opportunity that exists for the next-generation of computing devices,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. "By working with a common set of tools and open technologies for building these devices, MeeGo developers will be able to easily reach the biggest addressable market available.”

As an open source software platform, MeeGo will help to reduce market fragmentation and complexity, while helping to accelerate industry innovation and time-to-market for next-generation devices, Internet-based applications, services and user experiences. MeeGo is designed for cross-device, cross-architecture computing and is built from the ground up for a new class of powerful computing devices.

Intel’s Imad Sousou, co-chairman of the MeeGo Technical Steering Committee and Nokia’s Ari Jaaksi, vice president of MeeGo Devices, will deliver keynotes at this week’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on April 14, 2010. MeeGo project meetings will also take place on days 2 (April 15, 2010) and 3 (April 16, 2010) of the Summit. For more information about the Summit program, please visit:http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/agenda

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by hosting important workgroups, events and online resources such as Linux.com. For more information, please visit www.linuxfoundation.org.

Trademarks: The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. MeeGo is a trademark of the Linux Foundation. Moblin is a trademark of Intel.

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