KDE 4.0 Release Event

This past week was the KDE 4.0 release event taking place at the Googleplex in Mountain View, where around 200 KDE enthusiasts had celebrated this major desktop release as well as discussing the roadmap for KDE and some of the major advantages of the K Desktop Environment.

The biggest news coming out of the KDE 4.0 release event was Trolltech's CEO, Haavard Nord, announcing that the Qt will be adopting the GPLv3 license. However, other major happenings at this event were the KDE release schedule and much information on the Macintosh and Windows versions of KDE 4. As we shared in a separate news entry, KDE 4.1 is planned for release in July while coming every month will be a maintenance/bug-fix release. KDE 4.0.1 is already planned for later this month. The KDE 4.1 release will include much polishing and other improvements to make KDE 4 ready for use in production environments. It was reiterated at this event that KDE 4.0 is designed for power users wanting to be on the bleeding edge, system integrators, and third-party developers while the rest should be looking forward to KDE 4.1. The Mac port of KDE 4.1 will be much more polished as well.

At the KDE 4.0 release event were also a variety of BoF sessions and presentations from other projects, such as by Linux MCE. For those that are interested, Google Videos of the various speeches are now available for viewing online. Overall, it was a great event (props to Google and KDE e.V. especially) and over the coming days, there will be a few more tidbits of information from the KDE 4.0 release event.