Submitted by “If you follow technology trends, you have probably heard of the semantic desktop — a data layer for annotating and sharing the information in your computer. But what you may not be aware of is that the semantic desktop is not a distant goal, but scheduled to arrive at the end of 2008. And, when it does, the idea will probably be implemented through the work done by the Nepomuk project, and, most likely, by KDE first.”
by making libswf and the gnash tools to be at least Flash 9 compliant and 64bit so I can trash Adobe’s junk that even brings Opera 9.51 to a crawl with > 100% CPU throttling consistently.
Pardon my ignorance but… what the hell does KDE have to do with Gnash or libswf?
Both factions are open-source and have a vested interest in seeing FLASH not suck on the Linux platform for further general consumer expansion.
Does long-term vision just simply not exist within the greater LINUX Community?
I think most people in the FOSS community would prefer to see Flash replaced with something else like HTML 5 video tags and advancements in JavaScript.
The rest of the world just doesn’t care as long as they got something that works. Therefore, Flash will stay for a while and a working alternative to the closed plugin would be nice.
That said, it’s quite off-topic…
So? Both Corel and Nintendo produce closed source software. What’s the common goal for both?
KDE is a Free Culture project. Hence, KDE is not only interested in developing free source code, but also improving other free aspects of life. That means working with Wikimedia http://ev.kde.org/announcements/2008-04-04-kde-and-wikimedia.php but also helping free file formats. That’s why KDE was/is part in developing Open Document. That OTOH also means that non-free file formats are not that important to KDE. In case of Flash: Supporting Flash/swf has lower priority than SVG+JavaScript.
Yes, it does. That’s why it’s supporting free file formats.
But — you may be pleased to hear it — KDE is part of FreeDesktop.org and FreeDesktop.org in turn develops swfdec.
BTW: “greater LINUX Community”? That community is too small for KDE. As I said above, KDE sees itself as a Free Culture project. That — on a lower level — means that not only Linux is important to KDE but also FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and other operating systems.
Edited 2008-08-30 00:36 UTC
stroke your own ego, elsewhere. I’m well-versed in the LINUX, OS X and more communities.
NeXT, DEC Alpha, OSF/1, HP-UX, SunOS etc.
The point is that this free community uses that crutch every time it has no answer and all it’s free love won’t make it double or triple it’s consumer market share without embracing certain key [albeit in this case extremely annoying and a big pain the rear] technologies.
Embrace it, and offer an equivalent that surpasses it, release it into the wild and see how quickly Adobe drops Flash for this “free love” solution.
SVG is great and since Adobe is a key member of it’s moving forward it’s quite clear they are stalling.
SVG needs additional building blocks to match Flash.
Again. I consider Flash to be the PowerPoint of the Web that has turned every website into a royal pain in the rear.
there are huge numbers of common interests between various projects in the F/OSS sphere; KDE can’t work on every single one of them, and right now we are not well equipped to work on gnash as we don’t have anyone around who has the knowledge, desire and time to do so. thankfully the gnash project is doing what they can, just as we are.
i do hope to find time to wrap gnash in libplasma so we can mix gnash containers with other fun on the Plasma canvas … but that’s the extent of plans that i’m aware of.
btw, commenting on a story about an absolutely huge and important project that’s filling an topical area that nobody else is producing workable solutions for with “why aren’t you doing something this completely other topic?” is kind of lame. =)
In their emulation of Mac OS X the guys at KDE have grown a reality distortion field of their own.
It flickered a bit when they released 4.0(They don’t have Steve Jobs, after all), but now it is all up again.
“No, panel still doesn’t autohide, but look, meta-data and floating widgets!!
No, we haven’t figured out how to use meta-data successfully yet, but we will very soon! Stay tuned!”
And the major distributions buy this and make KDE4 their default desktop. Really amazing.