Hundreds of KDE contributors converged on Dublin in September for the annual KDE conference, aKademy. With two days of presentations, the general assembly of the membership organisation and a five day coding marathon, attendees were bombarded with news, ideas and beer. The main focus of aKademy this year was of course KDE 4, the next generation of the popular desktop, due to be released sometime next year. But with time given over to the OpenDocument movement, human-computer interaction research and the general assembly, aKademy reflected the diversity and maturity of the project.

KOffice has seen a huge surge in exciting feature development in the past year, putting it in the same league as free software giants such as OpenOffice.org and The GIMP, and even surpassing them in places. With version 1.6 due out this Sunday (October 15) it's timely that Krita, KOffice's painting application, is now leading an effort to develop a fairly boring feature, an open graphics file format.

Ever since the first technology preview of Qt4, and probably even before, KDE 4 has been the subject of wild speculation. The KDE Project actually discussed starting the KDE 4 branch as far back as August 2004 in a birds of a feather session. Two major releases later and the developers are finally buried deep in their libraries, overhauling and rethinking the basics of their desktop environment.

A quiet revolution is taking place on a young mailing list, one that overturns years of false enmity and makes perfect sense to most free software users. Having competed for the free desktop crown since 1997, collaborating on code but never on promotion, KDE and GNOME have launched an initiative to market and promote the free desktop together.

With a customer list that includes Opera, Skype, German Brockhaus Encylopaedia, Google Earth, Adobe Photoshop Album, and the KDE Project, Trolltech is obviously a successful company. It has grown each year since it was founded by selling products that compete with free-of-charge alternatives such as Java and .Net. It now sponsors several free software developers who share all of their work with the community under the GPL. Let's take a closer look at a company that makes money from free software.

As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works.

Usability has always been a controversial aspect of free software development, but one that is becoming increasingly important along with the uptake of GNU/Linux distributions in businesses and homes. Developers' discussions about usability are often marked by shrill accusations and defensive responses. Implementing usability suggestions can mean giving up months of feature-building. But according to a few developers and usability experts working on KDE, bringing usability experts into the hackers' work processes can be a big help.

Andreas Brand is a sociologist researching ways of recruiting and organising teams of volunteers on the Internet. He has been studying KDE as an example of an open source project based upon collaboration without hierarchies. As part of his work he has conducted interviews with KDE developers, participated in several open source conferences, analysed the KDE home page, and distributed a questionnaire among volunteers. We asked him about his thoughts on the KDE development model.

Should KDE port its applications to Windows? A debate has flared up in parts of the KDE community, filling inboxes and blogs with arguments long and short. The question is really whether the KDE community should encourage this, since it is already happening. In the tradition of dialectic, I present the key arguments for and against this venture in style of a Socratic dialogue.

Persuade me, Glaucon, if you will of this need for KDE to port its applications to Microsoft Windows.

A small Philadelphia-based company may be about to revolutionise the world of Windows application development, not by creating a new proprietary technology, but by bringing proprietary Windows features to Linux. Working with Qt, Trolltech's cross-platform toolkit, MinGW, a minimalist set of GNU utilities for Windows, and Wine, a free implementation of the Windows API, SourceXtreme, Inc. has developed the ability to write Windows programs without ever using Windows.