Aaron Seigo joined the KDE project in 2000 and is sponsored by Trolltech. Based in Calgary, Canada Aaron spends his time thinking about KDE project and its client-side software. Here he describes how porting KDE4 to Windows and MacOS will enable Kontact, the Open Source groupware application, to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Outlook in the enterprise.

On Friday, January 18th, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. gave the keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California about KDE 4, presenting KDE to the world and the world to KDE. Aaron started with an introduction to KDE 4, beginning with the history of the project and expressing how far KDE has come in the last 11 years. Then, Aaron explored what KDE is, and what the community is based on - freedom and openness. Freedom to do work, have fun, and connect with others. Further, Aaron moved on to KDE 4, and discussed the near-future plans and ideas. The vision of KDE 4 is based upon three principles: beauty, accessibility, and functionality. He ventured into the many areas that KDE has improved upon, and pointed to the roadmap for the KDE 4 cycle.

Aaron J. Seigo presents new graphical effects for KDE 4 desktop Plasma. He shows fade-in and fade-out effects on icons. Aaron also talks about how easy these animations can be implemented by using the Phase/Animator framework. It also makes animations consistent across the desktop and makes them easy to change.

During the Plasma development Aaron Seigo mentioned that the final version of Plasma will allow it to the user to drag&drop Plasmoids between the “task bar” and the desktop. While the coding style for such applets was already available the actual implementation was still missing in Plasma’s task bar.

Now that KDE 4.0.0 is tagged and out and that bit of worry and concern is behind him for the moment, Aaron J. Seigo takes a moment to talk about KDE 4.0. In particular, He addresses some of the common memes, in fairly random order, that he sees about KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0.

On January 17-19, the KDE community will present KDE 4.0 with a Release Event at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. The purpose of this event is to celebrate the anticipated release of KDE's new desktop environment and development platform. In addition to the KDE community, representatives from businesses, press and other Free Software groups will attend.

"...My vision of the world is different. I would like to see a world in which all the software in our computers — in our desktop PCs, our laptops, our handhelds, our phones — is under the our control and respects our freedom. In other words, a world where all software is free software..."

Pia Waugh is a leading advocate for FLOSS in her home country, Australia, and all over the world. In addition to running a consultancy in partnership with her husband, she is the vice president of Linux Australia, the president of Software Freedom International (sponsor of the annual Software Freedom Day events), and on the board of directors of the OLPC Australia program.

The premier annual Linux and Open Source conference in Australia, linux.conf.au, is once again hosting a LinuxChix mini-conf. We are now calling for presentations by women on both Free Software technical topics and other topics of general interest to women involved in Free Software or working in IT.