Akademy was over all of a sudden. I was all set to do the conference closing, with my KDE e.V. board-hat on – the e.V. supports the community, and it is the community that makes the conference, with talks, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and all that good stuff.

Much to my surprise I was called up by Luigi before my time slot and forced to give an acceptance speech for an Akademy award. I’ll summarize here:

Thank you very much.

At the risk of this sounding a bit like a eulogy: there’s not many of us dinosaurs left within the community from the early days of KDE. I wrote my first bit of Open Source software in 1990, I think, with the hubris of wanting to create a simple text editor for UNIX systems. At some point I even understood some termcap. Writing software and teaching software filled my student-years until Dan Pilone told me to send a patch, and some years later I ended up at aKademy (this was when capital-K was in vogue).

My KDE participation over the years has wandered all over the place, but a hill I keep returning to is: KDE should be everywhere, and should be the kind of cross-platform software that runs on whatever computing device someone has. Rarely have I articulated that outside of the desktop, though; mostly I meant “minority Free-Software operating systems” and not “multiple form factors and low-power devices too”. I’m glad to see it happen, even if I do sit back and think “nah, that’s not for me.”

So where did I wander this week?

  • kapidox, fixing a footcannon.
  • Calamares, preparing a release (ok, not actually KDE).
  • maintaining an “extra-cmake-modules”-alike for a different software stack (I think shared CMake modules are a good thing; ok, not actually KDE).
  • e.V. board things, and talking to the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
  • reviewing various Plasma merge-requests that I have some ideas about.
  • FreeBSD packaging, reducing the dependency footprint of KDE Frameworks.
  • Debugging a glib20 test failure (ok, not actually KDE).

So after 20 years with KDE, I still don’t have a “beaten track” to follow, and wander all over the place to see where I can help. Or to paraphrase Calvin, methinks the most capricious zephyr hast more designs than thee. Thankee.