lsb 4.0

i'm off tomorrow to the lsb summit in boston. the free standards group graciously both invited kde to attend as well as arranged for the travel costs and coordination. ian murdock (yep, the dude who started debian) is leading the initiative in the lsb to make it real-world-relevant for desktop application developers. this is a big task but he seems to have a realistic plan for making it happen.

from the kde perspective, i'm really excited that we are getting involved "at the ground level" on this one, so to speak. building on the excellent work to get qt ready and acceptable for inclusion in the recently-released lsb 3.1, we'll be interacting from day 0 on the formulation of lsb 3.2 and 4.0 along with the rest of the desktop world.

this is quite a change from past years where we (kde) were more reactionary when it came to these sorts of things. we often only found out after the fact that something important was happening and were usually left running to catch up. this didn't make many friends inside kde as it often felt like we were being "left out".

a couple of years ago a number of us in the project decided to take a more pro-active stance and start building more healthy bridges to the outside world. i remember listening to the sage words of people such as matthias ettrich, waldo bastian, martin konold and george staikos among others on this topic at akademy 2004. i think the turning point came during the follow-up discussion to daniel stone's talk about freedesktop.org when we had quite a spirited discussion where it was pointed out that we needed to get more involved in order to have our voices heard.

fast forward through two very exciting and intensive years and here we are with an invitation to be a part of this process from the start. i've sent out emails to various kde lists for input as well as hosted a small teleconference (which OSDL very kindly provided the infrastructure for) so as to gather up as much input from the project at large so that i can be as representative as possible. kde's biggest strength is the community model, and i want to bring that with me everywhere i go.

i'm working on some kde4 stuff today, but i look forward to working with people from projects and companies from around the free software world over the next few days in boston .. and beyond.

(go on, say that last sentence out loud in the voice of buzz lightyear. you know you want to. well, at least i did. and now everyone in the coffee shop is looking at me weird. like they've never heard buzz lightyear before. sheesh. ;)