After sell out dates in Glasgow and Belgium the tour of my dramatic talk "Do you need to be brain damaged to care about desktop Linux?" is making a stop in Brno for the KDE Conference Akademy. In it I'll talk about the struggles of recoving from a head injury mixed with creating a beautiful and friendly Linux distro: Kubuntu. It'll have drame, it'll have emotion, it'll have a discussion of the relative merits of community against in-house development. Make sure you book your tickets now!

Today Qt announced some changes to their licence. The KDE Free Qt team have been working behind the scenes to make these happen and we should be very thankful for the work they put in. Qt code was LGPLv2.1 or GPLv3 (this also allows GPLv2). Existing modules will add LGPLv3 to that. This means I can get rid of the part of the KDE Licensing Policy which says "Note: code may not be copied from Qt into KDE Platform as Qt is LGPLv2.1 only which would prevent it being used under LGPL 3".

For quite some time now (OK, many years...) I haven't had time for Konqueror.
KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 have kept me quite busy.

It's time to face the facts: Konqueror needs a new maintainer.

This is a good time to publish the thoughts we had many years ago about a possible new GUI for Konqueror.

Here in the KDE office in Barcelona some people spend their time on purely upstream KDE projects and some of us are primarily interested in making distros work which mean our users can get all the stuff we make. I've been asked why we don't just automate the packaging and go and do more productive things. One view of making on a distro like Kubuntu is that its just a way to package up the hard work done by others to take all the credit. I don't deny that, but there's quite a lot to the packaging of all that hard work, for a start there's a lot of it these days.

I've been steadily chipping away at creating Python bindings for the many libraries which make up KF5. The current list of KF5 libraries which have bindings is:

When life gives you a sunny beach to live on, make a mojito and go for a swim. Since KDE has an office that all KDE developer are welcome to use in Barcelona I decided to move to Barcelona until I get bored. So far there's an interesting language or two, hot weather to help my fragile head and water polo in the sky. Do drop by next time you're in town.

Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers are having a Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers mañana, see you there!

The Konversation team has started porting the application to Frameworks 5 earlier this month, getting things to build and run on top of KDE's next-generation libraries.

Here's all the info you should need to help out.

At this stage of porting there are still hundreds of low-hanging fruit (porting away from deprecated APIs, porting to slightly changed APIs, etc.) that don't require extensive knowledge of either the codebase or even the problem space to tackle, so if you were looking to get your feet wet on Frameworks 5 or KDE development in general, consider chipping in!

In fact, one of the major risks associated with any porting is lowering the quality of the application by reducing functionality or just plain breaking things, and of course we'd like to avoid both. So you can even help out by just running the port and logging the things that don't work on KDE's bug tracker (handy link is on the wiki) as tasks for others to jump on.

We had a fun two hour meeting in #plasma yesterday to decide on the tasks for the next release. It's due out in October and there's plenty of missing features that need to be added before Plasma 5 is ready for the non-geek.