Stories from Google Code-in: KDE, MetaBrainz and Haiku

Google Code-in is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the second installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first post in the series.

This week we profile three more grand prize winners from Google Code-in 2015. These students came from all around the world to celebrate with us in June after successfully completing 692 tasks that resulted in significant contributions to the participating open source projects.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners and Mentors were treated to a cruise around San Francisco Bay.

Students were paired with mentors who guided them as they learned both new technologies and how to collaborate on real-world projects. While most students had some programming experience, many were new to open source. In the end, they learned new skills, connected with open source communities and many will continue to contribute to open source projects.

We’re proud of all of the participants and grateful to the mentors who helped them. We invited the contest winners to write about their experience and many took us up on the offer. Here are their stories:

First up today is Imran Tatriev, a student from Kazakhstan who decided to work on the KDE project because loved their philosophy and had experience with C++ and Qt. He was a finalist in Google Code-in 2014 when he worked with the OpenMRS project.

Imran’s work on KDE included contributing to projects such as KDevelop, Marble and GCompris. His biggest challenge was working on the KDevelop IDE’s debugger where he was tasked with highlighting crashed threads. Highlighting the crashed thread was trivial, finding the thread that had crashed was not. It took him five days to solve that problem and he credits his mentor with helping him to work through it.

In the end, Imran learned a lot about regular expressions, the architecture of large software projects, C++ and unit testing. What did he like most about his Google Code-in experience? Imran writes: “The most valuable moments were meeting wonderful and smart people.” He plans to continue working with KDE and apply for Google Summer of Code.

Next is Caroline Gschwend, a student from the US who worked on the MetaBrainz project. Both of her parents are computer scientists and she credits them with spurring her interest.

A homeschool student with a unique approach to education, Caroline loves to learn and voraciously consumes free online resources. She had this to say: “I think that free, online learning is an amazing benefit to our society. With access to a computer and the internet, anyone, anywhere, can learn anything.”

Caroline discovered Google Code-in through her mother who had, in turn, discovered the contest through Google for Education. Caroline dug in and decided it was right up her alley. She loved that it embraced beginners with open arms and introduced new people to open source. Ultimately, she decided to work with MetaBrainz because, as a classically trained violinist, MusicBrainz piqued her interest. Their projects are primarily written in Perl and Python and, while Caroline was fluent in Java, it was too interesting to pass up.

As with most students, Caroline found collaboration to be a big part of the learning curve -- from GitHub to Git and IRC. Her mentors and other community contributors on IRC helped Caroline through the process and, looking back, she found that collaboration to be her favorite part of the whole experience. She loved that the mentors helped her to produce professional quality work rather than focusing on quantity.

Google Code-in gave Caroline a chance to learn about collaboration, Inkspace, icon design, web development and more. She has continued her work in open source and plans to apply for Google Summer of Code.

The last student we’re highlighting today is Vale Tolpegin, a student from the US who worked on the Haiku project, an open source operating system for personal computers. He also participated in Google Code-in 2014 but didn’t feel his skills were sharp enough to attack the more challenging tasks, like the ones he tackled this time around for Haiku.

Vale took on a wide range of tasks from documentation to application development, his favorite being the creation of the Haiku Hardware Repository. The repository is a Django website that lets people search and share hardware tests to determine if a given machine will work with Haiku.

He ran into a sticky issue early on, spending nearly a week finding a race condition within an application maintained by Haiku. Vale found it frustrating, but his mentors helped him see it through to the end. That wasn’t the only big challenge he ran into and, ultimately, bested: he spent another week debugging a Remote Desktop Application, software which had a very large code base.

Despite the two time consuming challenges, Vale managed to accomplish a lot more during the contest, including building a graph plotter and fixing bugs in the Haiku package manager. Vale had this to say:

“After finishing GCI, I have continued to work with Haiku and the experiences I have gained will continue to have an impact on me for years to come. Participating in GCI has truly been a life-­changing experience!”

Thank you to Imran, Caroline and Vale for their contributions to open source and for sharing their Google Code-in experiences with us. Stay tuned, we’ve got two more posts coming in this series!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

KDE shines with help from Google Code-in students

Google Code-in (GCI) is a contest that helps encourage teens (13-17 year olds to be exact) to participate in the wide world of open source development. KDE, an organization that focuses on the development and distribution of free and open source software for desktop and portable computing, has been a proud GCI mentoring organization for the last four years. Dennis Nienhüser, one of KDE’s mentors, discusses his experience with the program below.

How does one become a contributor to Open Source? Some start with the wish to fix that certain annoying bug in their favorite software. Others want to extend it by adding a new feature. However one arrives, the path to completing a seemingly easy task is often not clear. Where's the source for that button? How do I make my changes take effect in the software? Finding the right path can be a frustrating journey many are not willing to endure. Google Code-in (GCI) aims to help out; pairing prospective teen contributors with mentors from established open source organizations ultimately builds a path to successful contributions.

To increase motivation, GCI is organized as a contest. Pre-university students 13-17 years old from all over the world can choose from a large pool of code, documentation, research, quality assurance and user interface tasks. The pool is created by the mentors of the participating open source organizations who continue to add to it throughout the contest. A task is a set of work in one of the above five categories that can be completed in a short time, taking approximately a few hours to a day to complete. In addition to self-contained tasks, task series are also created where similar work is split into several tasks or related work is split into sequential tasks. This way all sorts of work can be converted into manageable pieces for open source newbies.

However, GCI is not meant to be a way of distributing work. It’s more of an ongoing communicative event — students and mentors exchange ideas, collaborate, and task after task gets closed. The core of the contest involves choosing a task (or several tasks) and completing it during the seven week contest. Afterwards, the number of successfully completed tasks is summed up. One completed task earns the student a certificate. Three or more qualifies the person for a groovy t-shirt certain to make their friends jealous. Students who are among the 20 top performers win a trip to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California.

A successful GCI for a student means finishing tasks -- fortunately they're fun to work on. Maybe even addicting! Why else would someone work on tasks from dusk till dawn? Our industrious students added documentation videos for all sorts of KWin effects, updated KGeography to show recent changes, and polished KStars features. A new touch typing course for the US English keyboard layout and keyboard layout files for more languages were created for KTouch. Python support of KDevelop was extended in a series of tasks, and Amarok got several new testers to verify bugs. The Trojitá email client got a couple of usability improvements. All sorts of new features found their way into Marble, among them are extensions of KML support, polishing of the new Cloud integration and initial support for tours. Inner and outer planets of the Solar System are now shown as well as the Moon with its phases. There were 115 Marble GCI tasks alone, a considerable portion of the 259 total closed tasks for KDE. At the end of the contest Mikhail Ivchenko from Russia and Benjamin Kaiser from Australia each completed over 40 tasks and were selected as KDE’s two grand prize winners, earning them a trip to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

A big thanks to all of our hard working students and mentors.  We are hopeful KDE will be able to participate in GCI again later this year!

By Dennis Nienhüser, KDE Mentor

Are you interested in participating in Google Code-in this year? Keep an eye on the program website for important dates and information.

Nine years of Google Summer of Code and KDE: Still Going Strong

Bringing innovation and teaching together, the KDE community takes the spirit of Google Summer of Code and keeps building on it to reach even more students. For the ninth year, the KDE community is participating in the Google Summer of Code with 50 student projects. KDE also has three women participating this summer in the Outreach Program for Women run by the GNOME Foundation. As in previous years, the KDE community has organized the 'Season of KDE' for motivated students whose proposals didn't make it in either Google Summer of Code or the Outreach Program for Women.


With so many students and a request for them to blog regularly about their progress, 
Planet KDE has many Google Summer of Code related posts written by this year’s students. This allows the wider KDE community to follow the work done by the students and comment on it. But this is not the only way the students share what they are doing. At the Akademy conference in Bilbao, many students were present, presenting their work in their own session or as part of the Student Programs Presentation. Students also update the KDE wiki with the status of their projects. 



The Google Summer of Code students are working on a wide variety of KDE projects, from components of the basic shell (network management) to the core of that shell itself (dynamic switching between shells based on form factor changes) to end user applications. Some projects move out of the desktop sphere, with a web shop for the popular Krita painting application, as well as a project report tool showing development statistics on KDE sub-projects. 



Projects are pushing the boundaries of technology, bringing in openGL and collaborative text editing in KDE applications, and exploring unique interfaces for features like the human-friendly query parser for the Semantic Search technology in KDE. 


Since the first Google Summer of Code in 2005, the KDE community continues to push the boundaries of technology. Students discover how the process of collaboration and open innovation results in a great experience, and the IT world gains valuable new participants. And the students in turn get a chance to shine while making a valuable contribution to society!

By Jos Poortvliet, KDE Marketing team

A summer of freedom with KDE

Guest post written by Jigar Raisinghani, KDE Google Summer of Code 2012 student

KDE, a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations, started the Google Summer of Code 2012 with 60 student projects, of which 59 were successfully completed. Great efforts made by the students along with proper guidance and assistance by the mentors resulted in this impressive result. Students coming from different countries, backgrounds and interests worked together as a community developing a variety of applications including games, Office suite, social networking, and so on.

This year Google Summer of Code again helped expand KDE both in terms of members and code produced. The outcome of the program was tremendous, resulting in the development of many applications. Lets take a quick look at the 59 projects.

• For the music player Amarok, Zhengliang Feng integrated spotify, Lucas Lira Gomes introduced functionalities for social music, Riccardo Iaconelli helped improve the user experience, Phalgun Guduthur worked on implementing the semantics and Matěj Laitl worked with statistic synchronization of pluggable devices. 

• Calligra, the office suite, was worked on by 9 Google Summer of Code students. Smit Patel integrated the bibliography engine along with UI to manage citations in Calligra Words. Shrikrishna Holla implemented wraparound mode, Shivaraman Aiyer added perspective drawing and Francisco Fernandes introduced a sandpainting brush in Krita. Paul Mendez modified shape animations in Calligra Stage, Nityam Vakil improved Open Formula support while Jigar Raisinghani built Pivot Tables for Calligra Sheets. Brijesh Patel improved the saving of charts to Open Document and Abhishek B S improved Formula shape. 

• From the Accessibility team, Yash Shah helped improve the speech recognition in SIMON using computer vision and Vladislav Sitalo implemented SPHINX support in SIMON.

• During the summer, the photo management program, digiKam, received attention from A Janardhan Reddy who developed a video slide show generator, Smit Mehta implemented an UPnP/DLNA plugin, Dominic Lyons improved integration of Photivo and Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun introduced face recognition. Islam Wazery revamped the import tool, Dodon Victor ported KIPI-Plugins and libkipi to KDE XML-GUI and Abhinav Badola built the support for video metadata. 

• For the 2D game engine, Gluon, Vinay Rao implemented a saving/loading game engine state, Shreya Pandit introduced context action based layout and improved the UI in Gluon Creator and Ganeshprasad T P integrated Bullet. Claudio Desideri designed a website that lets game designers using Gluon collaborate on their games and he then integrated it with KDE applications.

• The text editor, Kate’s VI’s, input was further improved by Vegard Øye, and Maximilian Löffler worked toward making scripting possibilities more user friendly. 

• On the game development side, Viranch Mehta ported kde game to QML/Qt Quick, Roney Gomes worked towards porting games to a more modern graphics framework and Avnee Nathani ported KDiamond to Qt Quick. 

• For the IDE, KDevelop, Miquel Sabaté improved the Ruby support and Miha Čančula added functionalities to the template system. 

• On the education front, Percy Camilo Triveño Aucahuasi with a nearly two year effort, designed and implemented a replacement for KmPlot. Samikshan Bairagya added features to make KStars more usable to beginner astronomers and Rishab Arora improved data storage, logs and added DSO catalogs to KStars. For Marble, Bernhard Beschow introduced an OpenGL mode, Cezar Mocan improved the atlas by introducing Natural Earth Vector Map and Ander Pijoan implemented OpenStreetMap vector rendering with tiling support. Martin Küttler introduced a new interface for Cantor.

• For the cloud storage, ownCloud, Deepak Mittal spent the summer collaborating inter ownCloud instances and Alessandro Cosentino introduced a feed aggregator. 

• With Plasma Desktop, Sinny Kumari provided advanced features and enhancements for Plasma Media Center, Martin Klapetek integrated social services with KDE Workspaces, Luís Gabriel Lima ported Plasma widgets from C++ to QML, and Giorgos Tsiapaliwkas worked towards getting the plasmate released. Davide Bettio ported Plasma calendar to QML, Arthur Ribeiro ported the plasmoid’s user interface to QML, Antonis Tsiapaliokas integrated KWin with Plasmate SDK and Amandeep Singh introduced Focus tracking in KWin. 

• On the social side, Pankaj Bhambhani built facebook integration for microblogging client choqok, Lasath Fernando introduced the message filtering plugin system in Telepathy, and Eli MacKenzie introduced modularized, server aware IRC protocol handling for Konversation.

• Lisa Vitolo extended Solid API for partitioning and built a Dolphin plugin for using it, Anant Kamath improved hard disk health monitoring and ISO file management features in KDE, Felix Rohrbach wrote the OCS specific JSON parser in Attica and Mailson D. Lira Menezes introduced tile based rendering in Okular page view. In a project continuation from last year’s program, Cyril Oblikov implemented asynchronous errors handling during file transfer.

The first time students see Google Summer of Code as an opportunity to gain experience and contribute to the open source community while the sophomores (second timers) clearly demonstrate the success of the program in retaining students. Students have the opportunity to interact with experienced mentors and mentors get to interact with enthusiastic students, a relationship resulting in a lot of code being written and a beautiful summer for all. Most of the code generated as part of the program is either integrated, under review or being worked upon. The students, as they write themselves, are satisfied by the outcomes of the program in terms of fun, experience and the hefty paychecks. I hope the students stay with the community, keep contributing in the future and, if possible, participate again in the Google Summer of Code program.

By Jigar Raisinghani, Google Summer of Code 2012 Student

Doc Summit Wrap up: 4 Books written in 3 days!

In mid October a Document Summit was held at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California where documentation teams from 4 open source projects, KDE, OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS and Sahana Eden as well as a few documentation ‘free agents’ gathered to a write 4 books in the course of three days and take part in a two day unconference. Below, one of the dedicated documentation volunteers and the FLOSS Manuals founder/organizer recount their experiences over the course of the week.

This past month, Google took a big step toward giving documentation its due with a five-day Google Summer of Code Document Sprint. The event was inspired and driven by FLOSS Manuals, an organization of volunteers (of which I'm one) that has received increasing recognition for its documentation projects and the related community-building they stimulate.

It was predicated on the realization at Google (and at least among pockets of open source developers) that free software needed more than good coders to be successful. It needs communities of people caring for each other and guiding each other through the best use of the software, and part of this community effort is good documentation.

To understand the five-day conference itself (which I wrote about extensively on Radar), you have to know something about FLOSS Manuals and its intense "book sprint" process. FLOSS Manuals was started by artist Adam Hyde several years ago to fill the gap in free software's documentation. From the start it focused not on small articles or wikis but on full manuals. Adam developed the book sprint as a way to pull together a community and get something done quickly that everybody could point to as an achievement for their community.

Five to ten developers, power users, and core supporters meet in a workplace for three to five days and write, sharing their work. Remote contributions are encouraged, and outsiders often weigh in with key points. It's a chaotic process that converges suddenly on the last day into a 80-page to 150-page book, and it leaves a high-endorphin sensation among the participants that propels them toward other community-related activities. Books are frequently translated into other languages, are available both on web sites running FLOSS Manuals software and in print, and are kept "live" so that people can contribute to them later.

My Radar articles contain my own lessons from the Google/FLOSS Manuals sprint. The four projects that participated took back not only a book but guidelines for keeping it alive and capitalizing on the educational and promotional activities that a book permits.

By Andy Oram, O’Reilly Editor

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The Google Summer of Code Document Summit was the first of its kind - a special mix of formats with an unconference and book sprint tied together. This promised to be not only intensive and productive but exhausting!

We kicked off the first day of the summit with a one day unconference facilitated by Allen Gunn. It was a great way to get started, we covered many interesting topics related to free documentation. At the end of the day everyone was tired yet inspired. We also started to really come together as a group quite quickly under Allen’s guidance and there were many smiling faces and intensive discussions on the bus back to the hotel.

Day two - start sprinting! Well, the start of an ambitious process - 4 parallel book sprints. Zero to book in 3 days with 4 concurrent projects. I had a pretty good feeling it was going to work, having now done 30 or so sprints, but facilitating 4 sprints concurrently is extra tricky. Thankfully Anne Goldenberg (on the board of the French FLOSS Manuals) was there as I am training her to facilitate Book Sprints. I briefed Anne and she started working through the sprint with the OpenStreetMap team and I began facilitating Sahana and KDE while Allen helped here and there a lot for the first day especially with the generation of the table of contents and oiling the engine for OpenMRS. We also divided the "free agents" (people not affiliated to projects) to the groups.

Well, the rest is more or less the Book Sprint process. Writing, reviewing, discussing, workshopping and using the various tricks and methods developed over the last 3 or so years with this methodology. All went pretty smoothly. We finished 4 great books in 3 days. I think the final word counts were something like 25,000 words or so for each of OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS, and Sahana Eden; 10,000 or so words for KDE.

Laleh Torabi designed some wonderful covers for the books and Tuukka Hastrup was there working on a special new development for Booki (the platform we use for Book Sprints). Tuukka finished the beta and implemented it about 35 seconds before we were planning to use it and he didn’t even sweat!

After dinner on the 3rd sprint day we invited Sahana Eden up to the front of the group and they used the new Booki feature to export the book directly to lulu.com (a print on demand service). Thats right, one push of the button and their book was IMMEDIATELY for sale as a paper book online - it was magic!

The last day was feedback and a debrief unconference facilitated by Allen and then... you thought it had ended? No! The Google Open Source Programs Office team had agreed to get paper books printed so we distributed 20 each of the four *beautiful* books to the mentor summit the next day. All bound and shiny...they looked amazing and set off quite a buzz.

Many thanks to everyone involved. Especially the fabulous Google Open Source Program team.

By Adam Hyde, FLOSS Manuals

With this Document Summit, Google had the opportunity to support 4 important projects and the overarching need for good documentation of free and open source software.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Desktop Summit 2011 visits Berlin

The Desktop Summit 2011 was held in Berlin, Germany, from 6-12 August 2011 and was the second joint conference of the GNOME and KDE communities. Almost 800 attendees gathered in Berlin to review progress, share ideas and work together on various free software projects relating to desktop and mobile user interfaces. While many participants were from Europe as expected, other contingents came from Brazil, India, the United States and beyond. The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. sponsored travel and accommodation costs for more than 80 attendees.

Desktop Summit organizers, mostly volunteers, worked for nearly a year to coordinate all the details that made the event successful. More than 50 volunteers pitched in to help the event run smoothly for the week. The collaborative spirit of Free and Open Source technology was an essential factor in how the group worked together.

There was a pre-registration event and two evening parties providing opportunities for people to spend time together without the stress of project deadlines. Other social activities included the traditional soccer and volleyball matches and as participants mostly concerned themselves with having fun (as well as a bit of beer drinking), it was not clear which of the KDE or GNOME teams won. There was an ice cream dessert gathering and unofficial curry cook-outs with food, drinks and conversation--both work and fun.

At the Summit, the City of Berlin announced the winners of its open source competition “Berlin – Made to Create”, a program promoting open source and open standards ideas and solutions. At the same session, the GNOME and KDE communities also announced their outstanding contributors.

From Tuesday to Friday, 85 Birds of a Feather (BoFs) sessions and countless informal hacking sessions took place. Two hacking rooms and the hallways were full of people working on projects. BoFs ranged from small working groups to popular and multi-faceted projects to the introduction of new projects. The GObject Introspection Room shows the kinds of work undertaken at the Summit: a dedicated space with 12 to 20 people at any time, it ran the duration of the Summit, and was primarily focused on bug fixing GNOME API bindings. The KDE community also participated by working on bindings between GObject libraries and Qt/C++ and smoothing out other cross-desktop issues.

The KDE Release Team got together to talk about their strategy for Git versioning migration and the move to Frameworks 5. The BoF session was well attended, and included release team members and downstream packagers. In a short time, the team gathered feedback and came up with a plan for adding predictability to the release team's work and output, and for making the work within the team more effective and sustainable. Working remotely, this would have taken considerably longer and would not have achieved such good results.

The fifth Text Layout Summit was held concurrently with Desktop Summit 2011. At present, there are several font and text shaping technologies and no unified system library. As a result, complex text layout scripts such as Arabic or Myanmar are not well supported, and Western/European fonts often lack advanced text formatting capabilities. As FOSS applications are intended for use by all nationalities and languages, this is a serious shortcoming. Text Layout Summit 2011 made substantial progress toward a common approach, especially with Graphite, which is focused on the minority languages of the world.

The Desktop Summit is an important enabling event, making it possible for teams to learn, share and make substantial progress in their Free and Open Source projects. During the GNOME and KDE Annual General Meetings (AGMs), the respective projects recognized the achievements of members, made important announcements and reflected on the lessons learned over the past year. New Executive Director Karen Sandler led the GNOME AGM, with the recent release of GNOME 3 being a central topic. Many perspectives were contributed, including design, marketing, bug fixes and quality. The location of the 2012 GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC) was revealed. With three impressive bids to host GUADEC, La Coruña, Spain, was chosen! The GNOME community looks forward to seeing its members next summer.

At the KDE e.V. AGM, President Cornelius Schumacher presented the work of the Board and KDE e.V. activities of the past 12 months. KDE e.V. organized or helped to organize several successful international conferences such as Akademy 2010 in Tampere, conf.kde.in in India, Camp KDE in San Francisco, and financially supported 21 contributor sprints. Cornelius Schumacher also explained the e.V.'s role in supporting and representing the KDE community in legal issues like domain handling, trademarks and similar areas.

Speaking for both organizations, Lydia Pintscher said, "We consider Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin to have been a huge success for the collaboration among free software desktop communities. We learned a lot during the first Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria and were able to improve on many big and small things that made a real difference for the conference. We are looking forward to seeing the results of this work and to increased future collaboration."

By Carl Symons, William Carlson, and Stuart Jarvis

KDE's Summer of Achievements

KDE took part in its 7th year as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code. Thanks to Google's generous funding and KDE's mentors we were able to work with 51 students over the summer, once again making KDE the largest organization taking part in Google Summer of Code. Choosing the right students was hard but the selection turned out well. The students coded in nearly all areas of KDE from Calligra and Rekonq to Amarok and KStars. Their projects turned out very well, and we've once again been impressed with the talent and dedication of the students. All 51 students passed their mid-term evaluation and 47 successfully passed their final evaluation. Valorie Zimmerman, KDE Administrator for Google Summer of Code, says: “KDE got forty-seven completed projects, which is tremendous. Our focus though is not on the code itself, but on the students and their involvement with KDE. However, their projects enrich KDE immensely, and you’ll be seeing their code integrated into our codebase over the next few months. “

Similar to previous years, KDE received many more great student applications for Google Summer of Code than we were able to accept into the program. To welcome these remaining students to our community and to give them mentoring, support, and a project to work on, we ran Season of KDE again. It is a program similar to Google Summer of Code where students receive a certificate and limited-edition t-shirt for completing their project successfully. The response was overwhelming this year and we had to close applications after 100 submissions. Nearly all of them were matched up with a mentor and project to work on. The students still have a few more weeks to work on their projects but results are looking fantastic so far.

Lydia Pintscher, KDE Administrator for Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE, says: “What makes me proud about this is the fact that KDE as a community is able and willing to teach newcomers to Free Software on a scale like few other projects while delivering high-quality results in terms of code produced and students mentored. What makes me even more proud is the overwhelming success of Season of KDE even without the monetary incentive but just because people want to work on something amazing in an amazing community.”

For more information on each student’s proposal and their blogs about the project can be found on our Status Reports page. We have also posted blogs on our Google Summer of Code Achievements: chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three.

By Valorie Zimmerman and Lydia Pintscher, KDE Google Summer of Code administrators

Season of KDE 2009... and 2010!

At KDE, we benefit each year from new contributions and contributors thanks to Google Summer of Code™. However, we always have more great proposals from keen students than our allocation of projects from Google. Season of KDE (SoK) was set up in 2006 to provide some of the benefits of Google Summer of Code to those students whose projects did not get selected.

Season of KDE provides students with experienced mentors and a well defined project, just like Google Summer of Code. SoK does not provide payment to students, but as 2009 participant Nikhil Marathe puts it, "Open source happens because of passion and T-shirts, not money :)." Even so, even students have to eat and so SoK participants often have other jobs and can only work on their projects part time. As a result, SoK projects may have smaller scope than Google Summer of Code projects or happen over a longer period. KDE benefits from new additions to our software and our community, and students get a SoK t-shirt, a certificate, some Google goodies and a great experience. SoK can also be a springboard to future Google Summer of Code success, with several past SoK participants going on to secure Google Summer of Code acceptance. Equally, SoK has provided opportunities for students to continue a Google Summer of Code project from previous years.

In 2009 we had a lot of interest in Season of KDE and four students have successfully completed their projects. We asked them and their mentors about their experiences.

Nikhil Marathe was mentored by Google Summer of Code 2008 KDE student Martin Grässlin to bring window tiling features to the KDE window manager, KWin. An ICT student in India, Nikhil first became familiar with KDE software back in 2004. Having a dedicated mentor made becoming a contributor "a bit easier." Academic commitments slowed progress a little, but the project was a success and Nikhil believes that "If everything goes well tiling should be available by KDE Software Compilation 4.5" (due in July 2010). For Martin, flexibility is a nice feature of SoK as it allows the student to "take all the time needed to implement a great feature." He would like to see SoK style mentoring made available all year round, po barrier of entry for new contributors. Martin sees SoK as "a good chance to win a permanent developer."

Screencast of KWin window tiling

Nikhil is still contributing to KDE software and finds the community "very vibrant" and the KWin team "very friendly." He feels he gained personally from taking part: "My code reading skills improved tremendously - I understand new code much much faster due to the experience." Working as part of a team was also helpful: "The social skills experience was very valuable - I would say that the second most important reward from working on FOSS is the friends you make worldwide." Nikhil's proposal for Google Summer of Code 2010 was accepted so he will continue to work on KDE this summer.

Vera Lukman was mentored by Boudewijn Rempt on a project to develop a new pop-up palette for KDE's painting application, Krita. Having a quick selection widget for colors and brushes that pops up at the mouse position should make it easier for artists to quickly access commonly-used tools and colours. A student in Canada, Vera found out about KDE "by accident while browsing the list of organizations" for Google Summer of Code. Her first contributions to KDE came as part of SoK and working on Krita met her desire to "learn C++ and be a part of the development team of a painting application."

New popup palette providing quick access to colours and brushes in Krita

Vera's project objectives were completely realised during SoK and, from Boudewijn's point of view, Krita "gained a great contributor and a very useful feature." For Boudewijn, the flexibility provided by SoK is very useful: "We could have a break in development when school/mentor's job demanded that." It worked well for Vera who joined the other developers for a recent hacking sprint and has found that "working with great people encourages me to learn and contribute more to the project." Beyond KDE, SoK "opened a lot of opportunities," and she attributes her current internship position to taking part in the scheme.

Shaun Reich worked with Aaron Seigo and David Faure on displaying job progress in icons. As his high school never had a computer science or programming class, he explains that "everything that I know thus far is what I have learned on my own." First trying Linux around a year ago, Shaun didn't initially use KDE software but heard about it, gave it a go and was hooked. His project aimed to provide contextual information on running jobs within a file manager by modifying icons for items that are being moved, copied or deleted. This makes it less likely that the user will accidentally modify or delete a file that is in an active state.

Shaun continues to contribute: "I love coding for KDE - I dream of a day where I can have a career in it." Season of KDE gave him the chance to have a "closer relationship with developers, a lot more experience with the development process and some very useful intimacy with a lot of KDE code." Shaun's Google Summer of Code 2010 proposal was accepted so he doesn't have to worry about taking a summer job which will take time away from KDE development.

Our final participant, Gopala Krishna, is an Information Science Engineering student in India. He has been familiar with KDE software since the days of KDE 3 and has now experienced both Google Summer of Code and SoK. He made his first KDE contributions for Google Summer of Code in 2008 working on a project to draw Unified Modeling Language diagrams in KDE's Umbrello application using Qt 4's Graphics View framework. The size of the project meant he didn't complete everything, but Season of KDE 2009 gave him the perfect opportunity to finish off most of the outstanding features, mentored by KDE's Jonathan Riddell. For Gopala, taking part in SoK was "almost the same as doing the project as a part of Google Summer of Code" and he benefited from "extra attention, encouragement and motivation." While his studies have kept him busy for the last few months, he hopes to continue contributing to KDE when he has some free time.

Improved drawing in Umbrello as the result of Google Summer of Code and SoK projects

In summary, Season of KDE has proved a successful complement to our participation in Google Summer of Code. It allows us to help a greater number of new contributors take their first steps in hacking on KDE software and becoming integral parts of our team. While we cannot provide the financial support of a Google Summer of Code project, we can provide high quality mentoring and a friendly community and both students and mentors are able to arrange the projects to fit into their busy schedules.

KDE is participating in Google Summer of Code again in 2010 and we will also be launching Season of KDE 2010 to maximize the opportunities for new contributors to get closer to our community, improve our software, make friends and have a lot of fun. If you are interested in this opportunity please send an email to kde-soc-mentor@kde.org.

By Stuart Jarvis, KDE team

Camping Out with KDE

This year, the second annual Camp KDE was held from January 15-22nd. It was graciously hosted by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California in San Diego. Camp KDE is the young North American counterpart to Akademy, the main annual KDE developer and user conference.

The conference consisted of two days of general presentations; half a day of more in-depth technical presentations; half a day of training on CMake, CTest and CDash; a day trip; a day of general Qt training; and a day of Qt embedded training. The full schedule, with abstracts, is available now. Slides will soon be available here, and videos will be following shortly on blip.tv and YouTube.

Professor Philip Bourne gives the first keynote on open data

Things started off on Saturday with a keynote by Professor Philip Bourne of UCSD. Professor Bourne gave an absorbing and thought-provoking discussion of the the importance of open access to data in the academic world, drawing parallels between open data and open source. He discussed the business of academic publishing and the difficulty of sustaining such a closed, pay-for-play model in light of the millions of research papers published each year, as well as the increased difficulty of sorting through this enormity of information when the data is closed. These issues prompted him to create SciVee, a Web 2.0 site that allows users to view, annotate and tag research documents, slides, presentations, lectures and posters, as well as annotate add their own content. All content is freely available, and ratings and comments allow visitors to help the community find the best and most useful information.

Of particular note during Saturday afternoon's talks was Alexandra Leisse and Till Adam's presentation on career opportunities in Free and Open Source software (FOSS). These two have been well-known in the KDE community for many years, but what most of us didn't know is that Alexandra had been a professional and well-regarded opera singer and Till a rock star before both of them found careers using and supporting FOSS. The idea that you can take your interest in FOSS and turn it into a career is a wonderful and important thing to remember.

Till Adam was a German rock god before finding a career in FOSS

On Sunday the excellent presentations continued, kicked off with a keynote from Frank Karlitschek. Frank discussed the now-ubiquitous concept of the cloud and KDE's role in it. KDE's wide array of technologies such as cross-platform frameworks, network transparency through kioslaves, Akonadi, Nepomuk and the upcoming Silk, combined with our online-hungry community, positions it nicely to act as the user interface both for local computing and online services. Frank called for the KDE community to adopt a forward-thinking perspective, keeping this kind of online interaction in mind while ensuring that our high level of local functionality remains for those that do not have access to constant or high-speed Internet links.

The boys from Brazil mean business.

Monday's talks were a little more technical and finished in the early afternoon. With the talks over, conference attendees were left impressed by the high quality of the presentations we had seen over the past two and a half days. We went straight into CMake/CTest/CDash training, given by Marcus Hanwell and provided by Kitware. As Marcus talked we saw our last sun of the conference (entirely coincidentally!). The rest of the conference sunny Southern California failed us and left us with rain, rain and more rain.

Tuesday was the day trip. We went to Stone Brewery, producer of some of the country's most well-respected ales. Due to the downpour we canceled our plans to follow up the brewery tour with a trip to the world-famous San Diego Zoo, and instead had a nice group lunch at the brewery's bistro. In the afternoon we took shelter back at the event space (where electricity, chairs, tables and wireless were in plentiful supply) and hacked and talked. Some of us took a trip to famous Fry's Electronics, where nobody left empty-handed and some with loaded arms.

Wednesday was a full day of Qt training given by Till Adam and provided by KDAB. The large amount of time allowed multiple topics to be covered, which allowed some of the more difficult concepts to be explained and studied.

Thursday, Katrina Niolet of KDAB gave her fellow KDABians an instructional day of Qt Embedded training, and invited the rest of us to join if we wished (we did!). For most of us this was the first time we had ever laid a finger on a framebuffer. There was a lot of information to remember, but with many of us interested in programming for mobile devices, it was a great experience overall.

When we weren't training and hacking those last few days, we did slip in some fun times despite the rain. Restaurants were aplenty and lots of great food was consumed. Movies were watched, beers were drunk, karaoke was sung and general camaraderie was enjoyed. A few times our mascot Konqui and his female friend Katie even dropped by to surprise us!

Konqui prepares a sneak attack on the unwary Katie!

On our final night, those that remained went out for a group dinner at El Torito, where the special on margaritas made our choice of libations easy. It was a great end to a great conference, and a huge thanks to Google for helping to make it happen!

by Jeff Mitchell, Camp KDE organizer

Crossing the Desktops in Gran Canaria

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit ended just a few days ago, and now everyone is back to work sun-tanned and/or sun-burnt, but loaded with new ideas. The idea behind this summit was to organize GUADEC and aKademy, the yearly GNOME and KDE conferences, on the same spot so that developers from the two communities could get together and more freely exchange ideas.



The series of keynotes that opened the event was particularly interesting with, among others, Robert Lefkowitz sailing between computers and philosophy and, of course, Richard Stallman dressed up as St. IGNUcius.



We were given the chance to darken our hacker-pale skin a tiny bit thanks to the green towel that was offered to each participant. GNOME and KDE hackers alike delivered many keynotes and talks, especially cross-desktop talks to help explore and overcome problems encountered in both projects). Hacking and chatting on the beach was another popular conference activity.



All in all, one always comes back from such an event with starry eyes and a dreamy mind about the exciting (very near) future of the two desktops, and their tightened collaboration. Stay tuned for a lot of hot things happening soon in a desktop near you, and let's hope that next year's event will bring us the same amount of excitement and sunshine!

By Manu Cornet, Software Engineering Team

KOffice Projects Rock KDE's Google Summer of Code 2008

By Boudewijn Rempt, Krita Maintainer and KDE Summer of Code Mentor

This year's Summer of Code has been very succesful for the KOffice project. Working under KDE's auspices, KOffice had the privilege of working with seven students.

Lorenzo Villani has been adding new features to Kexi web forms, while Carlos Licea has worked on making it possible to load KPresenter 1.x (.kpr) documents in KPresenter 2.0. Fredy Yanardi, two time Summer of Code student working with KDE, also tackled improvements to KPresenter, adding notes and presenter views. Lukáš Tvrdý has worked on a Chinese brush simulation for Krita and Fela Winkelmolen on a calligraphy brush for Karbon. Another of our returning students, Pierre Ducroquet, worked on adding ODF support to KWord. And speaking of ODF, Benjamin Cail wrote code to improve the graphics support in libwv2 and to allow direct importing of .doc files into KWord in ODF format.

Our choice of projects in 2008 was dictated less by a desire for flashiness; instead, we were determined to choose those projects most likely to add solid worth to KOffice. Compared to last year, life was easier for our students, when both KOffice and KDE were still under heavy development and every Monday was basically spent on getting the latest binary and source incompatible changes incorporated. This year, only KOffice was a rapidly moving target!

Most importantly, all the students worked directly in the KOffice trunk Subversion repository and their work has been released as part of the tenth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. You may also be interested in our end of term report, which also includes screencasts.

Many congratulations to all of our students and mentors for their tremendous efforts!

Updates from the Free Software Foundation Europe

By Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator, Free Software Foundation Europe

My name is Shane Coughlan and and I work for Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), a non-profit, non-governmental organisation with offices in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Sweden. You may remember me from my last FSFE update on this blog on the Freedom Task Force, which is the FSFE's legal training project which I coordinate. Google's Open Source Team invited me to send an update about some of the cool stuff we are doing, so I'd like to start by giving you a little background about who we are and what we do.

The FSFE is one of four sister organisations, the other three being the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the United States, the Free Software Foundation India and the Free Software Foundation Latin America. The FSFE works on European Union and United Nations software policy and we engage with issues like the European software patents debate. We also engage the community on these issues at many European software conferences. The Freedom Task Force focuses on providing education, training, consultancy and legal assistance in answering questions about Free Software licenses. On a day-to-day level this involves attending conferences and local meetings as well as dealing with incoming requests via email from both commercial and non-commercial community members.

One of our main activities during the last two years has been facilitation for the
European Legal Network. This is a group of Free Software legal and technical experts who share knowledge with the community. In the last year and a half we have scaled to cover nineteen European countries (a total of twenty-seven) and to have over one hundred and twenty members. During the month of September alone, we will have two physical meetings to discuss Free Software business processes and software patents. It's quite high level stuff, but we hope to provide participants insights into the resolution of long-term deployment questions and builds on the excellent work of organisations like gpl-violations.org.

Other wonderful news comes from the recent the Akademy 2008 conference, where one of our long-term infrastructure projects came to fruition. KDE e.V. — the organisation representing the KDE project in legal and financial matters — voted to adopt the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) as an option for its project contributors. The FLA is a legal document that addresses the issue of copyright fragmentation by providing consolidation in common and civil legal systems, and acts as a tool to assist with re-licensing and license enforcement. It's a baby of the FSFE legal project, drafted some years ago for FSFE's own fiduciary programme, and is available for other organisations to adapt for their own use.

That brings me to our biggest news for this week. The FSFE has just announced that we are translating the Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) into ten languages to provide copyright consolidation options to local projects across Europe. We're looking forward to providing tools to help people manage their code and we believe it's important to at least have reference documents in as many native languages as possible. Such tools are likely to become more important as Free Software grows, and FSFE is proud to make a contribution in this area. Kudos are also due to the kind folks at Google, who made a donation to support both our outreach and translation work earlier in the year.

If you would like to learn more about FSFE's work you can visit our website at www.fsfeurope.org. You might also want to learn more about the legal project specifiically or information about contributing to our efforts. If you want to become part of the FSFE family you might also want to join the Fellowship.

Thanks for reading, Happy Hacking, and I'll see you at the next conference....