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The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are excited to announce the keynotes for the first ever co-located Akademy and GUADEC, over 100 talks as well as BOFs, keynote sessions, lightning talks and many opportunities to meet other developers and begin collaborating between projects.

This year the annual KDE community summit, Akademy, is being held in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain, from 3rd to 11th of July. It will be part of a larger event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit co-located with the GNOME community's annual summit, GUADEC.

Over the last weekend, the Plasma team held their second meeting in Porto, Portugal. The meeting was organised by Akademy Award winner Nuno Pinheiro inviting the Akademy Award-winning Plasma team to his home country. The meeting was kindly hosted by the Departamento de Engenharia Informatica (Department of Computer Sciences) of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto. The Plasma team (and most probably many of the KDE users) are grateful for being provided this opportunity to collaborate on the desktop.

Camp KDE, the KDE community event of North and South America, has finished. Similar to the European KDE meeting, Akademy, the first two days were based around a series of talks on various topics. After that we moved towards BOF sessions, local discussions and programming. We had a trip to the Appleton Estate, visited Rick's café and had a lot of fun. The following article details some of the things that kept us busy.

The program for the first two days at the Camp KDE meeting in Jamaica provided the attendants with a series of talks. In time, these will be available in video from but for now we have these short summaries of the talks. Read on for details.

In a warm Jamaica around thirty KDE developers have gathered for the first Camp KDE. The following article is an impression of the first days of this event, a short summary of what is going on here. Read on for the full report!

Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement, "The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework."

Having met so many of you at Akademy last year, I am now glad to notify you guys that we have approval from Bayero University Kano Nigeria to host the Free and Open Source Nigeria 2009 conference on 6th to 9th March. We want to invite KDE contributors and users including organisations and companies who want to come and give talks or workshops during the event. We are expecting more than 2000 participants from within and outwith the university. We will be glad to receive guests from all over the world, especially people with vast experiences in open source.

The inaugural Desktop Summit, uniting the flagship conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy, will be held in Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain the week of July 3-11, 2009. The conference will be hosted by Cabildo, the local government of Gran Canaria. The GNOME and KDE communities will use this co-located event to intensify momentum and increase collaboration between the projects. It gives a unique opportunity for key figures to collaborate and improve the free and open source desktop for all.

It has been a couple of weeks since Akademy 2008 finished. KDE's contributors are now back home, more enthusiastic than ever about our future. If you missed the talks videos are now online. This article covers what happened during the week and outlines some of the results.

During Akademy 2008, we sat down with Fabrizio Montesi who's working on JOLIE integration in KDE (and Plasma in particular). He explained the mechanics of the technology and what it can do for KDE. Read on for the interview.

If the rocky reception of KDE 4 has done anything, it has forced the KDE project to realize it needs to listen to users more closely. One of the first results of this realization is the new Community Working Group (CWG). Announced at Akademy, the recently concluded annual KDE conference, the CWG was described as designed "to act as a central point of contact by being available to communicate user needs and concerns to developers, and developer intentions and plans to users." The CWG is still being organized; to find out more about its plans, we contacted Anne Wilson and Juan Carlos Torres, two of the group's five initial members.

After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.

At Akademy 2008, KDE Release Team members Sebastian Kügler and Dirk Müller discussed the future of KDE's development process. Describing the challenges KDE faces and proposing some solutions, they spawned a lot of discussion. Read on for a summary of what has been said and done around this topic at Akademy.

LXer Feature: 17-Aug-2008

This week we have Akademy 2008 reviews, Windows gives a BSOD during the Olympics opening ceremonies, Linus doesn't like monkeys, Derek Knowlton journeys to Sin City to experience DefCon 16, Lawyers who should stay away from Linux and 10 of this, 5 of those, 11% of that..its numbers numbers everywhere!

This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks. The day opened with Kate Alhola from Nokia showing off the Nokia N810. As already reported, the talk was followed by handing out the devices to the audience. Her blog says she hopes to see lots of Qt and KDE applications in Maemo Garage soon.

An important topic at Akademy is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many hackers here.

During the Emsys-sponsored Mobile and Embedded day at Akademy 2008 Nokia distributed 100 N810 internet tablets among the KDE hackers, and gave another 50 for the project to decide who to give to.

Developers from Nokia and Mozilla have been working hard to port the Mozilla Platform and Firefox to Qt and there are now some solid results available. An experimental build of Firefox Qt is available, and you can download the sources from Mozilla's mercurial repository. The plan is to merge the Qt branch into the central Mozilla branch to make the port official. KDE Dot News spoke to developer Oleg Romaxa from Nokia who came to Akademy 2008 from Finland.

On Monday at Akademy, KDE's yearly world summit, the KDE e.V. held its general assembly, covering a wide range hot topics, regarding licensing and community scalability. While part of the meeting is dictated by intricacies of German association law, the AGM also provides a way of effectively solving issues arising in the KDE community and deciding on ways to move forward as an organisation. This year's KDE e.V. General Assembly endorsed a Code of Conduct, the Community Working Group and a Fiduciary License Agreement for KDE contributors.