KDE becomes Cross-platform!

KDE one of the most used open-source desktop environment is going cross-platform. Phonon, which was developed by KDE community as a part of KDE 4.0 release. Now KDE community, with the help of Trolltech will be extending Phonon to all major desktop including Windows® and Mac® OS X.

The core KDE library, and some applications like KDEOffice,Amarok audio player are being ported. Windows KDE (still in starting stages) is available for download at KDE mirrors.

Trolltech's Qt® has been a high-performance, cross-platform software library available for both open-source and commercial developers. It is also the base library used by KDE. Initially only linux verion of Qt was available in GPL, but Trolltech has decided to make Windows version available under the GPL too with the introduction of Qt 4. With these changes, you will see KDEOffice and KDE PIM softwares on windows environment.

This appraoch of bringing KDE as a cross-platform is welcomed. But I am still doubt how effective this is going to be. Mac has one of the test UI and is much user friendly than any other environment will user accept a change from the default Mac OS UI to KDE? Another concern is will the linux adoption reduce if this "KDE adoption" become popular?

QNX "Opens" Neutrino!

QNX Software Systems, leading provider of superior realtime operating system (RTOS) software and services for embedded design announced its move revolutionizes software development practices by combining the best of the open source and commercial software domains.

Neutrino, the realtime operating system from QNX will be open sourced under a new hybrid software licensing arrangement. Neutrino is ward-winning, microkernel-based OS released in 2001. Now, the source code will be available for non-commercial use and anybody can access it! According to press release the first source release includes the code to the QNX Neutrino microkernel, the base C library, and a variety of board support packages (BSPs) for popular embedded and computing hardware.

The new hybrid model will allow free access to code but, but commercial deployments of QNX Neutrino runtime components still require royalties, and commercial developers will continue to pay for QNX Momentics development seats. So, what is QNX targeting at? Is it that they want to open up just for innovation and improving Neutrino and sell it off through their commercial license? We have seen many company follow this type of hybrid software model to take advantage of open source developer community!

Microsoft's open source licenses.

Microsoft seems to be trying to create a open source license after all the criticizing it had done in recent months. They appear to be working on a new license for their own open source code and software and get it approved by OSI. So Microsoft has submitted its so-called shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative for certification as true open-source licenses.

Microsoft initially started off with the relase of Windows Installer XML on SourceForge almost three years ago. After this Microsoft has released 650 internally developed software programs to the general public via its shared source program. At the same time don't expect Them to release Windows or other major revenue making software to be released under the shared source licenses. These shared source applications are hosted at Microsoft's CodePlex site, which is equivalent to SourceForge.They have come up with three licenses:

• Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
• Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL)
  
• Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL)
  

According to Microsoft,if the licenses are approved, should give the community additional confidence that the code they sharing is truly Open Source. But I wonder how the OSI team and the open source community will take this. This is mainly because of the recent behavour of the company with copen source community.They have claimed that Linux and other open-source products infringe on 235 of its patents. Apart from this they reached agreements with Novell Inc and other vendors like Linspire which brought a split within the Linux community.

So, If Microsoft joins the open source technology like Nokia, Apple and others, will we have a mind shift from Microsoft? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who once called Linux "a cancer"! And
now they seems to criticize and follow the open source line!