Oh, joy, I'm coding :-) I'm doing a bunch of things, trying to decide on a largish project to tackle (that is not as scary as porting KRN to KDE2).

One of the things is a KDE style, I call Note, al­though it could be called flat.

Al­so, I'm try­ing to look at Qt de­sign­er, with some trou­ble, be­cause there is some­thing in one of the source files that to­tal­ly drives gcc in­sane, mak­ing it eat a bazil­lion megabytes of RAM.

The gen­er­at­ed XML files are very read­able. I am cu­ri­ous whether there is sup­port for run­time load­ing of them. I used to use that with Kde­vel­op's di­a­log ed­i­tor in­stead of the code gen­er­a­tion route, and it's much cool­er.

Ok, so there goes the idea of speedy reporting ;-)

I did present my thing af­ter the pre­vi­ous post, and I did it in front of a whole lot of peo­ple. It went well, even if a bit faster than I ex­pect­ed. The Q&A part was nice, and on­ly one ques­tion con­tained the word li­cense ;-)

Lat­er that same day, RMS gave his speech in the same place (yes, he had a big­ger au­di­ence ;-). It was his usu­al speech, ba­si­cal­ly the same thing you can read in the FS­F's web page.

Some nugget­s: "we cre­at­ed GNOME be­cause of the ter­ri­ble threat of KDE". There you have it GNOME guys and gal­s, you on­ly ex­ist be­cause of us, and to you GNOME fan­s, you can now con­sid­er GNOME a side ef­fect of KDE, be thank­ful and stop bick­er­ing ;-)

He did say KDE is il­le­gal, and I de­cid­ed NOT to ask him when had he be­come a lawyer and/or judge. He did­n't men­tion his lates "im­plic­it per­mis­sion is given" po­si­tion, ei­ther.

How­ev­er, af­ter fi­nal­ly se­ing him in per­son, I can un­der­stand why he has such ra­bid fan­s. He is kin­da in­spi­ra­tional. As long as you are un­der 25. I would con­sid­er any­one old­er that that, who still swal­lows it as un­crit­i­cal­ly as most of the au­di­ence did, im­ma­ture.

And yes, he did say that you can al­ways go flip burg­ers and code in your (ob­vi­ous­ly co­pi­ous) free time.

And yes, he did say that an­oth­er al­ter­na­tive is to work de­vel­op­ing cus­tom soft­ware, which is "90% of the soft­ware in­dus­try", and that would not be un­eth­i­cal.

I have a VERY big prob­lem with that ar­gu­men­t, which I should some day write down care­ful­ly.

The ba­sics are that the cus­tom soft­ware writ­ten for, say, a aero­space com­pa­ny would be just as use­ful for an­oth­er. In fac­t, it's that soft­ware's EX­TREME use­ful­ness to oth­er com­pa­nies what keeps the soft­ware closed.

Con­sid­er that it's so use­ful that a com­pa­ny is will­ing to pay for the en­tire de­vel­op­men­t!

And if that soft­ware would be use­ful for "the neigh­bour", then that soft­ware's li­cense presents the same eth­i­cal im­per­a­tives as any oth­er. You, de­vel­op­er of cus­tom soft­ware, are cre­at­ing soft­ware that is use­ful for "the neigh­bour", giv­ing it to oth­er­s, and for­bid­ding those oth­ers help "the neigh­bour" (or at least you are do­ing just the same as if you were a Word de­vel­op­er).

Now, I don't be­lieve free soft­ware de­vel­op­ment is eth­i­cal­ly su­pe­ri­or to pro­pri­etary soft­ware de­vel­op­men­t, but RMS does.

And since he does, he ei­ther has not no­ticed this, or he has two in­com­pat­i­ble po­si­tion­s. Your pick.

Or, of course, I'm to­tal­ly wrong. But I'd like some rea­sons why, if you be­lieve that. A good one would be "here is a way in which de­vel­op­ing pro­pri­etary cus­tom soft­ware for a com­pa­ny is dif­fer­ent from de­vel­op­ing pro­pri­etary soft­ware for user­s".

Lat­er that night, we had our speak­er­s' and or­ga­niz­er­s' din­ner.... where there were about 50 who were not any of those things.

That din­ner kin­da sucked, in the food sense, but the or­ga­ni­za­tion of the whole thing was just too good for one bad menu choice (rice & chick­en) to be con­sid­ered :-)

Then (con­sid­er­ably amount of beer in me) I went to the hotel, and over­slept next morn­ing, miss­ing Julio San­ta Cruz's stuff (sor­ry julio), saw an­oth­er one I can't re­cal­l, said good­bye to ev­ery­one, missed RM­S's sec­ond speech (if I had seen it, I would have ar­rived home way too late), and left.

All in al­l, fun, in­for­ma­tive, some good stuff to be seen, saw a lot of peo­ple I had on­ly known by email, and a lot of peo­ple I had not seen in a long while and missed (the guys from UNER, UTN and UN­L!).

I got WAY too tired from this, so I came to work in a zom­bie fash­ion on mon­day, closed a course, and stayed home yes­ter­day... and that's pret­ty much it :-)

Went to a couple of sessions yesterday, one about kernel past and future (a chance to brag about answering 130 questions by yes/no when the punishment about missing was starting from scratch ;-)

That got me think­ing... I have not com­piled a ker­nel in years! And I am not pre­cise­ly a low end us­er. Looks like mod­u­lar­i­ty re­al­ly work­s, no? ;-)

In a cou­ple of min­utes there is an­oth­er in­stall de­mo (I don't know what dis­tro yet) and af­ter lunch I will do my KDE 2 thing. Hope it goes well...

Ok, so I am finally in Rosario for the Jornada Linux!

There is, they say, 1700 peo­ple signed in. To­day, since it 's a work­ing day, on­ly about 400 are here.

The Corel peo­ple are show­ing their in­stal, with, let's say, less than stel­lar re­sults (as in 1 hour in­to the de­mo and still no in­stal­l).

Checked the place where I am su­posed to give my talk about KDE2 to­mor­row... it a damn sta­di­um. 400 peo­ple can fit there. Now I'm scared :-)

Checked in­to a lit­tle ho­tel called Colo­nial, just 5 blocks away from the con­fer­ence... nice, cheap, clean. No el­e­va­tor, though, and I car­ry the biggest, heav­i­est bag you can imag­ine (it con­tains clothes for three days, man's kit (shav­ing/etc), and a full tow­er sys­tem :-)

Met with some of the guys I know, César from LU­CAS, a cou­ple guys from LUGLI, a la­dy from the MAG­IC (that a min­is­tery :-)

In an hour or so, I will at­tend César's talk about i18n. Should be in­ter­est­ing.

And no, I have not met RMS yet, be­cause he will ar­rive to­mor­row (even af­ter I gave my talk, so he will not be there ;-)

It's 2:30 AM, and instead of being arriving at rosario for the 1ra Jornada Linux, I am here in my office polishing the slides.

I am ei­ther too re­spon­si­ble, or the ex­act op­po­site :-)

Any­way, mak­ing the slides made me see a whole bunch of things that are al­ready very cool in KDE 2.

For ex­am­ple, snap­shot har­vest­ing is just too easy. split kon­qy, and drag the im­ages in­to the fold­er :-)

KP­re­sen­ter is pret­ty sol­id (ex­cept for em­bed­ding :-P)

In fac­t, I am now de­cid­ed that kon­queror is my new de­fault brows­er.

It's sta­ble enough for re­al use, it can be made to have sep­a­rate pro­cess­es for dif­fer­ent win­dows, and... it does ja­va and plug­ins bet­ter than net­scape it­self! So, I'll keep it ;-)

Now, I will fin­ish this, and go find a bus, so I will be in Rosario around 8AM.... just in time to go with­out sleep­ing in­to the ac­tiv­i­ties. Oh, the fun ;-)