Friday, October 14, 2016

Twenty Years of KDE

One afternoon twenty years ago Matthias Ettrich and Martin Konold sat at a stone table in the cafeteria of the university Tübingen and talked computers. They talked Linux and they talked desktop. They talked about making Linux accessible to everyone. This was the moment where KDE was born. This afternoon they walked away with a mission. Matthias went on to write the call to action to found the KDE project, and Martin to create the very first KDE mailing list kde@fiwi02.wiwi.uni-tuebingen.de.


On October 14th 1996 the famous announcement arrived on the newsgroups comp.os.linux.development.apps, comp.os.linux.misc, and de.comp.os.linux.misc:

    New Project: Kool Desktop Environment. Programmers wanted!

The new project quickly attracted a group of enthusiastic developers and they pushed out code with a frentic pace. kdelibs-0.0.1 was released in November, containing the first classes KConfig and KApplication. In May 1997 the young project presented at the Linux-Kongress in Würzburg. In August Kalle Dalheimer published the famous article about KDE in the German computer magazine c't which attracted a whole generation of KDE developers to the project. On Jul 12th 1998 KDE 1.0 was done and released. The community had not only implemented a friendly face for Linux but also a bunch of applications while going, including a full web browser.


KDE did hundreds more releases over the years, continuously improving and maintaining the growing number of applications and amount of code. The community grew. It started to do annual conferences such as Akademy or the Desktop Summits and focused developer sprints such as the Osnabrück or the Randa meetings. KDE e.V., the organization behind KDE, which was founded as partner for the KDE Free Qt Foundation, grew with the community to be the corner stone of the organizational structure of KDE, using German association law as its secret superpower (read more about this in the book "20 Years of KDE: Past, Present and Future").

Millions and millions of people used KDE software over the years. Thousands of people contributed. KDE made appearances in Hollywood movies, it was subject of theses and scientific studies, and it won many awards. KDE's founder, Matthias Ettrich even received the German Federal Cross of Merit. The timeline of twenty years of KDE is an impressive demonstration of what Free Software is able to achieve.


Akademy 2014 group photo by Martin Holec (CC-BY)


KDE also was a breeding ground. Many people started their careers there. Hundreds of students went through mentoring programs such as the Summer of Code or the Season of KDE. Whole projects emerged from KDE, such as ownCloud and its sibling NextCloud, Kolab, or KHTML, which turned into WebKit and then Blink, powering most of web browsers on this planet today.

Today Linux has reached world domination in various, sometimes surprising, ways. KDE has contributed its share to that. With Plasma it provides a slick and powerful desktop which does make Linux accessible to everyone. This mission has been accomplished. But there is more. Following KDE's vision of bringing freedom to people's digital life there are amazing projects exploring new areas through Free Software, be it an application such as Krita to bring freedom to digital painters, or a project such as WikiToLearn to create collaborative text books for education. When KDE people meet you can feel the enthusiasm, the openness, and the commitment to change the world to the better just as in the days of the beginning.




I joined KDE in 1999 with my first patch to KOrganizer. I wrote a lot of code, maintained and founded applications, served on the board of KDE e.V. for nine years. Most importantly I found a lot of friends. Neither my personal nor my professional life would be what it is today without KDE. I owe a lot to this community. Thank you for the last twenty years.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Is my OpenStack ready for Cloud Foundry?

This year's first Cloud Foundry Summit took place in Santa Clara at the end of May. Beyhan Veli from SAP and I gave a presentation about the Cloud Foundry OpenStack Validator, a new tool we developed as one of the results of our collaboration with SAP on the BOSH OpenStack Cloud Provider Interface project.




The validator gives operators of OpenStack systems a simple tool at hand to check if their OpenStack installation is ready to run Cloud Foundry. OpenStack comes with a lot of options and flexibility, and not all configurations are equally suitable to run Cloud Foundry. The requirements are documented and there are instructions how to manually check them, but it requires quite some expert knowledge to get everything right.

The validator is supposed to encapsulate the expert knowledge and instructions. It checks all requirements automatically and gives operators a report with the information if requirements are met or what they need to change. Cloud Foundry makes it simple for developers to deploy their applications. We try to capture the same spirit of simplicity for operators of Cloud Foundry on OpenStack.

We are running a test pipeline for the continuous integration of the BOSH Cloud Provider Interface for OpenStack which is used in Cloud Foundry. This runs on SUSE OpenStack Cloud. It works smoothly now, but while getting there it would have been great to have the validator to have a simple check of the setup without having to go through manual deployment and testing and finding issues with the setup late in the process. We captured some of this experience in code, and it is much easier with the validator now.

The architecture of the validator is quite simple. It uses the same interfaces as BOSH and Cloud Foundry to access the underlying cloud infrastructure, so it closely resembles what is happening in production. Most of this goes through the Cloud Provider Interface. Some lower level checks directly use the OpenStack APIs.

Tests are written in RSpec, which gives a nice concise way to describe and run the checks which are run by the validator. The validator is provided as a standalone tool, which can simply be run on the command line and will print out a report with what checks it has run, if they have succeeded, and what needs to be done if something is missing. In the end it will answer the question, if my OpenStack is ready to run Cloud Foundry, and this hopefully will be a big green yes.

There is ongoing work to improve the validator, to add more checks, and make it more complete in checking the requirements of the full stack, from OpenStack, through the Cloud Provider Interface, to Cloud Foundry. This will be a continuous improvement process with new checks being added as they are found to be relevant when setting up OpenStack based Cloud Foundry installations. To make this easier and also allow to add custom checks, there likely will be some kind of plugin interface to add new checks to the validator.

As it is using the abstract Cloud Provider Interface it might also be interesting to use the validator with other cloud infrastructures, and we need to evaluate how it plays with other approaches of validating cloud infrastructure. The project is open, the code is published as open source, and we are welcoming feedback and discussions about its future direction.

It was the first time I attended a Cloud Foundry Summit, and I really enjoyed the event. It covered a broad range of topics, inspiration, user experience, deep dive into the technical foundation, science fiction, and much more. Good information, great inspiration, and meeting lots of awesome people, it was an excellent event.

The next summit will be in Frankfurt, Germany, in September. I'm looking forward to see you there.

This blog entry was first published on the SUSE blog.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Students, join the Summer of Code!

If you are a student, you have a unique opportunity right now. Join the Summer of Code, submit a project proposal until March 25th, and work with the people from an open source community during the summer. You will get paid for three months, you will become part of a community, and you will have the chance to make an important step in your career as a software developer. Google is organizing and sponsoring the program and hundreds of mentors from all kind of open source projects all over the world are ready to help you to do your next step in open source. I really would have loved to have such a program when I was a student. You are living in good times.

I have been a mentor for KDE and openSUSE for many years and have worked with many amazing students. This year we made an extra effort in openSUSE and set up a new web site to help mentors and mentees to find together. It collects a lot of information about how you can succeed as a mentor as well as a student, and provides a portal for all the openSUSE project ideas people from the community have come up with. KDE also has a list of exciting KDE project ideas. Pick one or, even better, come up with your own.


There are so many interesting projects and lots of good students looking for working on them. While I try to help with the overall organization a bit, I limit myself to mentoring maximally one student during the summer, so that I can do a decent job with that and don't get stretched to thin. I have put up a couple of ideas in both projects, KDE and openSUSE. If you would like to help with mentoring one, you are more than welcome. This way we could be able to provide mentoring for more projects. If you are willing to help please get in touch with me. It is a great and rewarding experience to be an open source mentor.

The KDE project, where I'm looking for a student, is Inqlude, the Qt library archive. It's a nice project mixing an interesting set of technology, some Ruby, a bit of HTML and CSS, plus some C++ and Qt, and last but not least the opportunity to do some user interaction design. You will certainly learn something, and as it's a pretty small project within the universe of KDE, you will be able to make a significant impact during the summer and beyond.

In openSUSE we have a couple of projects around Machinery, our pretty new systems management tool for inspecting, inventorying, validating, and migrating Linux systems. It comes from openSUSE, but it also runs on and supports other flavors of Linux. It's Ruby, and one of the interesting aspects is that we are doing serious test-driven development, code review, automatic tests on all levels, and more what constitutes the craft of software development. You will learn a lot there. Mauro and Andre are available as mentors there as well.

There is one more project, I find really interesting. That's reproducible builds for openSUSE. The reproducible builds project coming from Debian aims at making it possible to prove that a binary is actually built from the sources it claims to be built from. This can help to make build systems more efficient, but more importantly it helps to protects against malicious modification of binaries during the build process. This can have a huge impact. Bernhard has started to do some work on it and by joining this you could make a real difference for free software by making sure users can trust in the software they run.

I'm repeating myself, but this is a wonderful opportunity for mentors and students alike. Don't hesitate, get your proposals together, and join the summer of code.

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