OStatic

Following in the footsteps of KFC, the KDE Project is rebranding and getting rid of the full name K Desktop Environment. Unlike KFC, KDE won't be offering crispy chicken and stale biscuits. What KDE will be offering is distinct brands for the software that was previously referred to generically as 'KDE'. Instead of offering KDE 4.4 in 2010, the project will be releasing the KDE Software Compilation 4.4.

Seth Godin has some advice to marketeers and businesses that open source proejcts should take to heart as well. Godin writes today about embracing the lifetime value of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.

Godin writes Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it's important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.

Even though it's a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed Weightless, the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.

Amarok is already speedy when processing large media collections, but this release includes a tweak to take it up a notch. In the past, Amarok would scan an entire directory -- including sub-folders -- when the main directory had changed. Now Amarok can just breeze through the main directory if the subdirectories haven't been modified, making it even faster. And it's plenty fast already: I've passed a 57GB collection through Amarok in just a few minutes.

In a year that's been pretty rough on commercial conferences, community run events like FOSDEM, SCALE, SouthEast LinuxFest, LinuxFest Northwest and this past weekend's Ontario GNU Linux Fest are thriving. Why is that? Community conferences win out for a number of reasons.

Attending conferences is a big part of my job, and over the years I've started to take note of what events are worth attending and which events aren't. By and large, it's the smaller community events that are worth your time and money.

Obama's inauguration must have brought out the optimist in tech journalists. In the last week, Ron Miller and Charles Babcock have written to implore Microsoft to open source Windows. While inspired and with some solid reasoning, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Here's why.

Mike Gunderloy's post on FOSS Factory got me thinking about what Linux needs to gain mass market acceptance. After thinking about it, I've come up with a list of four things that the Linux community needs that aren't (as far as I know) yet in the works.

This isn't a list of impossible goals -- all of these things are attainable if the Linux industry and community were to decide that they are priorities. That's not to say that they'd be easy to accomplish, but the Linux community has proven good at working together when it's important.

This is a 1.0 that I wasn't sure would ever come. No, I'm not talking about the Duke Nukem game that's been vaporware for the last decade or so. I'm talking about Wine 1.0, which is slated for release on June 6th of this year. That's a mere 15 years after development was started.

Wine, if you're not already familiar with it, is an application that allows Windows apps to run unmodified on Linux and other *nix operating systems.

Anyone observing the open source community will tell you that open source is growing at an amazing pace. Specifically, the number of applications and the maturity of those applications are growing at an amazing pace. I could have told you that last week, but using anecdotal examples and data I have on hand from the openSUSE project. Now I can tell you that based on a study of 5,122 active and popular open source projects.

A lot has been said the past few days about the fact that Wal-Mart has dropped the $200 Linux-based PCs being offered in its retail stores. What's really interesting is what's not being said, and how much is being read into this.

Amanda McPherson, marketing director of the Linux Foundation, tackles the Wal-Mart topic (and manages to throw the word shadenfreude around a little bit...) with some interesting insight:

This piece by Bruce Byfield sparked my interest a bit, because the topic of world domination, is one that keeps me up at night. Specifically -- how can Linux edge closer to a majority market share, particularly on the desktop?

When you're trying to provide a system that is appealing to former Windows users, you generally find that a lot of people expect features that are often only available from proprietary drivers, codecs, or applications. So, the question is whether Linux vendors and projects should supply proprietary software in one form or another to address those needs, or to insist only on free software.