SEUL: Re: RedHat and KDE (fwd)

[Roger Dingledine <arma@seul.org>]

Doug asked me to respond to this, since I have a better perspective
on SEUL than he does.

Dan Shafer <dshafer@cnet.com> wrote to Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>:
>Thanks for the pointers, Doug. Yeah, as I learned after Thursday's
>broadcast, there really is a deep religious war there. I can see both
>sides' viewpoints.
>
>I'm really interested in the SEUL project. Since you're involved, I
>wonder if you could give me a kind of quick update on where it stands,
>when it's likely to be "soup," and (importantly) how it fits in with
>other initiatives like KDE and GNOME. If you have time.
>
>Doug Loss wrote:
>> Dan,
>>
>>    I don't know this for a fact, but it's probably the reason you
>> didn't find RPM archives at the KDE site.  RedHat is hosting the
>> site for and promoting the development of GNOME, the other major
>> X-Desktop project.  GNOME isn't as far along as KDE, but it looks
>> to me as if it has greater long-term potential than KDE.
>> KDE/GNOME is one of the major religious wars in the Linux
>> community these days, so I souldn't be surprised if the KDE folks
>> refused to provide RPM archives due to RedHat's tilting to the
>> other side.

http://www.redhat.com/redhat/qtlicense.html provides a good description
of Redhat's views towards the QT debacle currently. It's true that the
KDE people aren't "playing by the rules" within the Linux community,
but on the other hand they have a working integrated gui that's
available right now. The general hope among the Linux community is that
eventually GNOME will be far enough along that it can replace KDE.

>>    If you want KDE RPM archives look at Project Independence
>> <http://independence.digitalvoodoo.org>.  Go to the software
>> repository and look for the x-desktop/kde section.  While you're
>> there, look around in general; it's pretty neat.  You might also

Independence's primary site is actually
http://www.independence.seul.org/ -- the digitalvoodoo site is their
mirror. You should also check out http://www.linux-center.org/mandrake
for KDE rpm's -- the Mandrake distribution is effectively Redhat 5.1
packaged with KDE 1.0. Independence has just started organizing its
packages into something that can be installed as a distribution; Mandrake 
is much farther along than that.

>> look at SEUL <http://www.seul.org>, the Simple, End-User Linux
>> site.  This project (which I help on) is dedicated to, well, see
>> the name.  Also, find out about the Linux Standards Base (LSB)
>> project, which is trying to lessen the differences between the
>> various distributions of where various standard files are located
>> and how directory structures are laid out.

As for SEUL's current status: we have perhaps a dozen active
members, and we're slowly moving forward. You can get an idea of our
current tasks from <http://www.seul.org/what/todo.html>. Most of what
we're working on currently is non-technical in nature, since we want
to be able to reach our audience.

Besides those dozen active members of seul proper, there are also a
number of subprojects and affiliated projects, some of which are listed
under <http://www.seul.org/what/links.html> in the "advocacy projects"
section. Also note www.geda.seul.org, www.freehdl.seul.org,
www.freecase.seul.org, www.independence.seul.org, and www.wxftp.seul.org
for projects that we think are a good idea. (They're projects managed by
non-seul people, with help from seul and on the seul infrastructure.)

As to "when it's likely to be soup", I presume you're asking how long
until we're done? We will never be 'finished'. We've been making good
progress lately, but we don't have as many active volunteers as we
want (we've got plenty of passive volunteers), and there will always be
more to do. Check out <http://www.seul.org/docs/whylinux.html> for what
is currently our most popular item for reading.

We fit in pretty smoothly with other initiatives like KDE and GNOME.
They're interested in creating an integrated desktop environment, with
all applications using the same toolkit and user-interface guidelines.
They're also interested in developing those applications themselves (or
at least modifying them), so they fit better into their environment.
We're interested in allowing such projects to gain acceptance, and helping
make it easier for people to move to using them. This means we're working
on things like end-user linux advocacy and awareness (seul-pub),
market/user research and testing (seul-seg and seul-research), and
standardization efforts and coordination of other similar projects. Because
we stopped trying to create a new distribution, we can act as a more
neutral project, and thus hopefully we're in a better position for
coordination and mediation. 

Anyway, I hope this started to answer some of your questions. Please
let me know if you have any more, or if I was unclear with any of
these.

Thanks,
--Roger (SEUL Sysarch)