OStatic

I've noticed, as I get older, time seems to go exponentially faster. Unfortunately, this meant high school lasted an eternity, and I'm burning through my thirties at warp speed. Some events make me more aware of this than others -- it seems like it was only last week that Fedora 10 made its first mark upon the world.

But no, another release cycle has nearly come full circle, and today the Fedora Project announced the Preview Release of Fedora 11 (codenamed Leonidas). This preview will be followed by a release candidate (scheduled for a May 12 appearance), with the final version hitting the streets on May 26.

So what new features can we expect to see in Fedora 11?

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, even when you've been trained in the intricacies of searching every database known to man, you can still outright miss really obvious things in a simple Google search. When I was fresh out of library school, I resurrected one of the library's catalog terminals, an old Bondi Blue iMac, with Yellow Dog Linux and KDE. I spent days locking down the KDE desktop, so that if the browser displaying the catalog was somehow shut down (or crashed) it would automatically restart. I spent a few more days making sure that most patrons couldn't access anything but the browser (never underestimate the general public, or the havoc that stray keystrokes, however innocent, can bring).

It wasn't that the KDE Kiosk tool didn't exist at the time. I simply missed it. Yes, I was a bad systems librarian for missing it, and then spending days (happily, but still...) locking down the desktop and reinventing the wheel.

With the release of KDE 4, Kiosk sadly fell into a state of limbo. Now, however, KDE developer Ian Geiser wants to bring it back to life on KDE 4.

Google's Summer of Code (SoC) Program has united students interested in open source with projects and mentors for several years now. The intiative's goal is to foster interest in open source software while exposing students to real-world software development processes. It's easy to see, based on how enthusiastically some projects embrace the annual event, that the students aren't the only ones who benefit from the program.

This week, both KDE and GNOME announced that development teams under their respective umbrellas wishing to submit project ideas and mentor students this summer were able to do so.

This also means interested students can get a sneak peek at potential projects and mentors. The list of projects (and mentors) won't be finalized until mid-March, but seeing as students only have two weeks to submit their applications, an advance project screening might prove helpful.

In October, I wrote about Camp KDE. This event was planned to complement Akademy, the traditional developer gathering for the KDE team, giving those unable to attend the former event (and specifically developers in the Americas) a better opportunity to gather and discuss projects.

Late last week, the Camp KDE 2009 presentation selections were announced. In addition to the presentations, the meeting will feature the traditional keynote addresses and birds-of-feather meetings.

The GNOME Foundation executive director, Stormy Peters, recently wrote a bit about why the focus on the KDE versus GNOME debate is not the real issue. Many commenters on her post agree (while others actively demonstrate) that it is counterproductive.

Peters says the driving force behind both projects is what matters -- and that is to offer choices between free and proprietary desktop environments. The notion that one desktop environment will ever exist that suits every user is likely a myth. Peters proposes that the goal is to build ever stronger free alternatives, and if the projects compete, it is more along the lines of teammates competing for a Most Valuable Player title. She highlights that getting developers from different projects to talk is one of the driving reasons behind GUADEC and Akademy being held simultaneously this year, in the same location, and why they are hosted by the same organizers.

FOSSBazaar recently highlighted Evangelia Berdou's doctoral thesis on the differences between the contributions of paid open source developers and volunteer contributors.

Berdou examined parallels and disconnects between paid and volunteer contributors in the GNOME and KDE projects, using earlier incidents of such events (such as the Gstreamer/Fluendo SL summit). The hypotheses and analysis she presents are thought-provoking.