Matthias Ettrich - KDE man. About cross-platform, Qt4, and of course - KDE!

Matthias Ettrich - the man who founded the KDE project in 1996, and whose voice we hear when Amarok first started, is now developing Qt in Trolltech. He can rightly be called KDE-man .

The interview he gave to the EFY News Network dates back to March 15,
Mattias states that:
“No one in their right mind would prefer Windows over Gnu / linux systems, based only on user experience.”

he also talks about Qt4, KDE4, and the future of open source.
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How was KDE born?

ME: The history of KDE begins with mailing lists related to Linux and X11 almost 12 years ago. In October 1996, I took part in the correspondence, and quickly gathered about 40 volunteers. We are engaged in the joint development of a graphical environment. Since those times, the project has grown significantly, both in the number of programmers and the number of users. And undoubtedly, the amount of code, and the variety of applications created by enthusiasts, has increased many times.

It was 1996. Linux was quite popular, and had a sufficient number of developers and users interested in the graphical interface, as opposed to early console hackers. In those days, Microsoft shocked the world of open source software with its Windows95. Now it's hard to believe, but then, many thought that Opensource would not be able to provide something comparable to win95. How deeply they were wrong!


What is your contribution to the development of KDE now?

ME: I haven’t been working on KDE for a long time. I mainly work on Qt. But since Qt is part of KDE, or in other words, KDE is based on Qt, I still consider myself a KDE developer .

So what is your role in Trolltech?

ME: Until this year, while working on Qt4, I headed the desktop software development department. Vice-president , programmer, part-time member of the management team, and also served on the board of directors. I did not want to lose what the work gave me, but after all these years, I wanted to return home. Since the summer of 2006, was engaged in the arrangement of a new development center Trolltech in Berlin. So now I am part-time head of the developers office, and at the same time I am a senior programmer in it. My heir to Oslo is also a KDE guy, Lars Knoll, the creator of KHTML. So, Trolltech will still be KDE friendly.

Firefox, OpenOffice, and many other open source programs are gaining popularity on the Windows platform. What is your view on KDE for Windows?

ME: When you say KDE, you can keep in mind at least three things: a development platform, a work environment, and a set of custom applications built on this platform. Best to use it all together. However, the KDE team has done a tremendous job to make portable not only the QT libraries, but also their own KDE libraries and technologies. This makes it possible to develop and use K-applications on the Windows platform. This gives developers a greater number of potential users, which in turn is an important motivational factor: now your friends do not need to install Linux in order to use your programs written for KDE.

And the more users there are, the more the developers, the creators of many open source projects, at first were just users. I hope that some programs will appeal to Windows users, and they may even join the development team. Do not forget, the strength of open source software is in the number of people who invest their work in it, and not in the number of users. Ideally, users turn into developers themselves, starting to refine their favorite program. In reality, not everything is so easy, but the minimum necessary for this is: a friendly community, able to give advice and help in the work, as well as a powerful and at the same time easy to understand development environment. KDE has succeeded both in one and in another, so we are confident in the bright future of the project.

Vista resembles a swan song, performed by Microsoft. In your opinion, is it not worth it now FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to gather strength and win the market?

ME: The problem with desktops has been solved for a long time. I mean: try to compare Windows Xp with KDE3, no one in their right mind would prefer Windows, against the background of GNU / Linux, based only on user experience. Problems with the web are also solved. Microsoft actually lost the war for network space - they could not sufficiently spread their proprietary web technologies . What remains? Some problems with multimedia licenses, which are also almost solved, poor compatibility of office formats, and a myriad of programs that run exclusively under Windows, to which everyone is accustomed, are also games.

What we want to convey to a wide range of programmers is: create a cross-platform software! This is no big deal here! Enough to use technology KDE / Qt or Java. And with Qt Jambi, you can even write KDE applications in Java. Microsoft Office still delivers a headache, there are not enough companies and activists brave enough to accept really open formats as standard and to resist the monopoly. .doc is a proprietary format that is de facto standard . This is shameful! This is the same as using specially patented inks that can be read only with the help of appropriately patented glasses. Who would use it for all his scientific, personal and working papers? No one. But then it is not clear why they do it with computers?

In your opinion, what is better as a user environment: KDE4, Windows Vista or MacOsX Leopard? And why?

ME: From the user's point of view, they are in the same weight category, so that a detailed by-element comparison could be made. But since each person evaluates a separate functional in different ways, it would be a lot of many-sided conclusions who is better. It's a matter of taste.

For me personally, two things are most important. First of all : how easy is it to write programs that really use the full potential of the presented platform? Do not forget that these shells that you see on the screen are only the tip of the iceberg. And secondly: Is it free, in a universal sense? Can I get the source code? Can I study it and learn something for myself? Can I change it and share it with others? Imagine what would happen to the world of computers if it were not for open source software? How much secret knowledge would be hidden behind closed doors? People would study programming without even seeing a real full-fledged program, and not being able to learn it. It's just like trying to become a writer without reading a single book.

Many consider Plasma to be the main innovation in the KDE4 interface, and much has been learned from MacOsX. In any case, the interface designers were not engaged in blind copying, but had some ideas of their own. What were the main goals for the interface creators team?

ME: There is no need to look at poppies, looking for new ideas and inspiration. KDE3 had a widget system, SuperKaramba, which may have been inspired by the Konfabulator, or maybe not. The bottom line is that all this is not new. There have always been small programs for X11 desktops - the predecessors of today's widgets. The KDE panel has had them in its composition since the first day of its existence. Innovation in Plasma is the ease of creating your own plasmoids. And this is not a Makovsky chip, but rather the fact that technologies like SVG and scripting are ready and just cry out to be used.

If we discard the Plasma and other decorations, it was stated that KDE4 uses 40% less memory compared to the third version. The statement remains valid? How did you achieve this? Usually an increase in the number of chips and decorations is very demanding on the gland.

ME: Usually, if a program is running slower than it should, or eating too much memory, then there is no easy solution to this problem. Because, if it exists, it should have already been implemented. That's the beauty of open source. Anyone who is not indifferent can debug the program and fix errors in it. When developing Qt4, we reworked many internal aspects of the system, while not forgetting about memory absorption and performance. In total, these thousands of changes and improvements gave an impressive effect.

Still, I would not say so radically on the fact that KDE4 is faster than 3. For the same tasks, maybe yes. But I am sure that the developers will definitely find where to use the released CPU time. For me personally, the most important thing is: system boot, user login time and program launch - in many ways we have achieved quite good results at the moment.

Qt4 is called a cardinal step up Qt3. What are the improvements?

ME: Qt3 was released in 2001, Qt4.0 - in 2005! Soon we will release 4.4. The main improvements of the fourth branch are: New graphics subsystem, with the ability to render SVG images. All visual effects, with anti-aliasing and semi-transparency are possible precisely because of it. Multithreading has been significantly improved, so that we can fully feel the potential of multi-core processors, which have become the norm in recent years. I already talked about performance and memory usage. New widgets using CSS styles. New toolkit, IDE integration, interface development tools. All this is open source, and on all platforms, incl. MacOsX and Windows.

Introduced a new, fast Javascript engine . In future versions, a multimedia API will appear - Phonon, and widget rendering built on Webkit. And with Jambi, it all becomes available to Java programmers .

What to expect after KDE4. Are you working on other projects?

ME: Besides Qt4.4, I am working on another project. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you about him, but I think you’ll hear about him soon.

You are not going to go to India? What would you like to say to the community of programmers in India?

ME: My little daughter is waiting for me at home, so I haven’t been traveling lately. On account of the wishes of the Indian community, it's nice to see how the free software community grows. India is a major commercial software development center, the birthplace of many software companies, and nothing prevents it from serving the same for open source software. Remember, our main goal in this arms race is to create more high - quality cross-platform software, make it portable, and independent of the OS.

Technology at your disposal. These are Qt and KDE, in combination with C ++ and Java. Imagine if large Indian software development offices using these technologies will begin to provide cross-platform solutions to their overseas customers. This will be a powerful impetus to the development of open source software!