Akademy 2019 is over.

September 21, 2019 ~ toscalix ~ 1 Comment

Akademy 2019 took place in Milan, IT, at the University of Milano Bicocca from 7th to 13th of September. I arrived on Friday 6th and left Milan on Tuesday 10th.

This year Akademy was a little bit different for me. I joined MBition recently to push Open Source and, giving the kind of activity and technologies we use, KDE is an community we can learn a lot from. We have many things in common.

MBition decided to sponsor the event at the Supporter level and my colleague Julia König came with me for a couple of days to learn more about these kind of events and this community in particular.

We attended to the welcome event, the sponsors dinner and the first days of talks together. During the second day of talks, I introduced the company to the attendees during the sponsors talk.

It was also great to see my former employer, Codethink Ltd, as sponsor once again.

Several of the talks were very interesting although in general I did not attended to many. I spent quite some time outside talking to old friends, some new young contributors and other sponsors.

In terms of talks, the highlight of the event was Lars Knoll, CTO of the The Qt company. The interview published a few days before his talk is worth reading. He presented the most relevant plans about the coming Qt 6.

One of the things that have improved in KDE is our communication with the outer world. And Akademy reports are just an example. Check out the report about the first couple of days (talks).

On Saturday several talks reported about the accomplishments and challenges of the goals the community have been focusing on the last couple of years. The new goals were presented on Sunday, the second days of Akademy.

On Monday 10th, part of the day was invested in the KDE eV General Assembly. Some BoFs also took place that day. You can watch the report published on The Dot.

As mentioned, I came back to Málaga on Tuesday morning but you can read the reports about the Hands on Sessions and discussions tat took place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Last but not least, do not miss the interview with Leonardo Favario, Project Leader at the Italian Digital Transformation Team. It is a good one.

Thank you to the organizers and sponsors as well as the rest of the people who made Akademy a great event, in record time. It would be a great sign for MBition to be able to come back next year.

KDE is looking for a place and a team to host the event next year. If you are interested in gaining some traction locally to your Open Source efforts and are willing to meet a whole bunch of crazy, smart and friendly developers, think about applying to organizase Akademy 2020 (download the brochure).

I would like to finish this article sending my condolences to the family and friends of Guillermo Amaral, now that it has been made public that he passed away, victim of a cancer he fought hard.

Guillermo Amaral. Pic from one of his videos.

Guillermo was a great person. He had magnetism and an unique sense of humor. I cannot say but good things about him. He did great stuff.

Life is not fair.

Going to Akademy together with MBition

September 5, 2019September 5, 2019 ~ toscalix ~ Leave a comment

I will be at Akademy 2019 in Milano, IT for a few days. I am not going alone, Julia JK König. from MBition, will be there with me during the first two days.

MBition is still in the learning phase as organization when it comes to Open Source, but the enthusiasm among my colleagues, including the leadership team, with the posibility of becoming contributors in the near future makes me confident about our Open Source journey.

One of my initial goals is to help the organization to learn about how Open Source communities operate, what are their motivations, what do they do, their governance, etc. As I have written before, I would divide the Open Source communitiesin three big groups:

Community driven Open Source projects.
Consortium driven projects.
Company driven projects.

In order to learn about community driven projects, I think KDE is a great place to start and not just because I am involved in the project. There are several additional reasons. The most obvious ones are:

MBition is a C++ and Qt house, just like KDE.
KDE has a significant experience in areas were MBition is currently working on.
MBition (and Daimler in general) collaborate with Universities in intership programs. KDE is one of the most successfull Open Source projects when it comes to mentoring programs.
MBition HQ is located in Berlin, GE, and KDE eV is registered there.
I am not the only current or former KDE contributor at MBition. Motivation is king.

MBition decided not just to attend to Akademy but also to become a Supporter, by the way.

See you there.

A summary of my participation at OSS EU / ELCE 2018

October 28, 2018 ~ toscalix ~ 1 Comment

ELCE 2018 has been a key event each of my 3 years at Codethink. It is an interesting conference from the technical and business point of view. This year the event was collocated again with several others, like the Open Source Summit Europe (OSS EU). It took place in Edinburgh, UK, I city I find particularly beautiful and enjoyable.

CIP, the Linux Foundation Initiative for Civil Infrastructure, has the event as a key milestone. The group organises a booth and a face to face meeting of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) the day before the event starts. So for me ELCE is a day longer. The other main task for me at this event is supporting Codethink business development and community engagement actions, since I represent the company at the Linux Foundation.

During the CIP TSC face to face meeting, I did a short presentation of one of the projects I am putting effort on lately: BuildStream. I also described the project among several people I know during the event, asking them to try out the integration tool and provide me feedback. The tool has matured quite a lot the last few months and I am interested in collecting feedback from experienced developers and software integrators.

Lukas Bulwahn is leading an interesting effort to create a safety Linux related initiative at the Linux Foundation, including a Safety Critical Systems track at the event. I attended the last day of the conference to these talks. My colleagues Ben Dooks, senior kernel developer and Codehtink’s CEO Paul Sherwood, presented there a couple of topics we have been working on lately. I found the track interesting and learnt a few things. I hope such track consolidates and more automotive companies participate in the future.

Codethink sponsored the event and had a booth to recruit new developers. I backed up my colleague Tim a couple of times during the first two days of the event which allowed me to talk to a couple of of potential hires. It is always interesting to find out what motivates others about the company your are working for.

During the second day of the event I took some time to visit some booths and learn about what other companies are doing, as well as attending to a couple of talks. I also had several interesting meetings and conversations with old friends and former colleagues, visited again the Edinburgh Castle, this time at night, and managed to try a few whiskies from the Highlands. Not everything was to be work, right?

kernelci.org is an initiative I feel attached to since it was born during my time as Director at Linaro, promoted by engineers from my department, specially Kevin Hilman. Time has demonstrated that the project has helped the Linux Kernel tremendously. I hope kernelci.org get a successful second life under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.

At Akademy 2018 a group of KDE people agreed to put effort in showcasing KDE software at embedded events to demonstrate that Plasma Mobile is a credible option as HMI for automotive R&D environments. At ELCE 2018, we showed Plasma Mobile and a couple of applications on top of a YOCTO based system on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 7″ touchscreen. Showing the same technologies across different form factors (a mobile, a Pinebook, a laptop with openSUSE and the mentioned RPi3) was impressive. Sadly my RPi3 worked only the first day because it burned. I guess I have taken it to too many events. RIP my dear….

I would like to highlight how excited I got when I saw the KDE booth at this event, the fantastic work that Adrian, Jonathan, Kenny and Paul did there and the significant impact KDE had. Getting out of the comfort zone is never easy, but usually worth it. I am looking forward to show further progress at FOSDEM and the Embedded World early in 2019.

Except surprises, this will be the last event of the year for me. It is time to prepare next year’s agenda. I will see you all at FOSDEM 2019. Thanks Codethink for sponsoring my participation at ELCE 2018.

Back from Akademy 2018. What an event!

August 22, 2018August 23, 2018 ~ toscalix ~ Leave a comment

A few days back I wrote about Akademy 2018 and my expectations and duties at the event. This is a report based on that previous post.

Akademy 2018 in Vienna, Austria, has been the best one in I’ve attended to in recent years. We event got a record number of sponsors, Codethink among them, and some of them for the very first time, which is always a good sign. The organization went smooth, the location was comfortable and several talks were very good. As a point to improve, I would mention the location of the Sunday party (sorry, social event), which was small for so many people.

Codethink as sponsor

This Akademy there were more first timers than in previous editions. Most of them knew nothing about Codethink. So being a sponsor allowed me to talk for 3-4 minutes to the audience, right before the closure, about what Codethink does, specially about the FOSS projects freedesktop-sdk and BuildStream. I will write more about them in the near future.

Representing Codethink also allowed me to attend to the sponsors dinner. I have attended to several of them before, either as a KDE eV Board Member, as the local organiser or as a sponsor representative (SUSE and now Codethink). This one worked very well. I was sit by the openSUSE Leap release manager Ludwig Nussel, former colleague of mine, Chris Lamb, Debian Lead and Alan Pope from Canonical, which allowed us to have interesting conversations about topics like reproducible builds, telemetry in distros, automotive systems, upstream events, etc. I also had the opportunity to introduce BuildStream to them.

Flatpak – Snap BoF

As part of my duties at the event I participated in the Flatpak – Snap workshop to introduce briefly the work Codethink is sponsoring on freedesktop-sdk and BuildStream:

freedesktop SDK 1.8 was just released before Akademy. flatpak-gnome and kde runtimes are based on it.
freedesktop SDK uses BuildStream as build tool. The integration team at GNOME too. So it was about time to talk about the project among KDE people. When it comes to build tools, the key selling point for BuildStream within KDE community is the advantage of creating a single set of definitions (recipes) and get different outputs like flatpaks, rpm-deb packages and hopefully in the future, snaps. Outputs depend on plugins that can be developed and maintained by contributors to BuildStream if they are not already available.
I am happy with the response BuildStream got and hopefully after the coming v1.2 release the project will support some KDE contributors in trying out the tool. It will be interesting also to support the KDE community in building the flatpak-kde runtime.

BuildStream

I introduced BuildStream to several developers. In general, very few knew anything about it which is not surprising since, except among the GNOME community, we have barely made any noise about the project. The coming release will help us to start mitigating this issue. The KDE community produces flatpaks, snaps, .deb and .rpm packages, has Yocto recipes… . A tool set that provides you all these outputs by maintaining a single sets of definitions, being simple to install, update and maintain, becomes attractive at first sight. The challenge is major, but a nice one to face.

Third edition of the Freedesktop Summit?

Several years ago, driven by Alison Lortie and sponsored by openSUSE, I organised the first freedesktop event ever. The following year I participated in the organization of the second one, that also took place in Nürnberg, Germany. During Akademy I talked to some people that might be interested in participating in a new edition. I did have some conversations around this topic at GUADEC too so, although it is still nothing but an idea, I will invest a few cycle to mature it. Who knows, maybe we can organise a third edition of the event next year.

KDE for automotive

As you know, I have been advocating at KDE for putting effort to showcase our software in automotive R&D and pre-production environments, knowing that Qt is the default graphic toolkit in the industry. Last year I provided a lightning talk about it which, together with the improvements in Plasma Mobile, triggered the interest of some developers at KDE, which are professionally involved in Qt companies working in embedded/automotive already. We had a BoF back then and we created a roadmap to shorten the gap between what we had and what would be interesting to show in such environments.

Andreas Cord-Landwehr and Volker Krause has managed to create two Yocto recipes together with the infrastructure to update them regularly. Both had a talk at Akademy. Andreas introduced the audience to Yocto and talked about the created recipes while Volker showed during a lightning talk the plasma mobile shell working on a RPi3 with the Raspberry 7″ touchscreen.

At the BoF we evaluated the technical, coordination and promo actions taken as well as the coming ones. The ultimate goal for the coming year is to showcase at different events KDE apps on top of Plasma mobile on automotive dev as well as to increase the attention of more KDE developers on embedded as a potential target market for KDE software.

I am excited about this progress. I believe putting some effort to move towards embedded can bring more attention and new energy to KDE.

KDE E.V. AGM

I participated at the annual KDE eV AGM (general assembly) on Monday August 13th. As you know the KDE eV AGM is a close doors one, so private. It was a good move to provide room during the event for the working groups to summarise the work they have done. These reports used to be done during the assembly. As consequence, the AGM was shorter.

There used to be a time in which the KDE eV AGM was long and tedious. Over the years we have put effort in making it shorter and more dynamic. Mission accomplished.

openSUSE

It was great to meet all timers but also new openSUSE contributors. I could take some time to talk about points that require some attention in the distro, learn about the improvements on the delivery process that has been implemented on Leap 15, some of the actions in progress and future plans. Finally I did not update the Leap version in my working laptop (a Slimbook) because I had more work than expected during the event. I will update it during the coming weeks. Overall I am happy with Leap 15 in my personal laptop (a Lenovo) so far.

Slimbook

I was happy to see Slimbook booth at the event. As you know I am a Slimbook happy customer. I had the chance to talk to other customers at the event and I would highlight how happy we are with the post-sale service they provide.

Did I mention I would like to have a 11″ SlimNoteBook. I definitely did to them.

Free Qt Foundation

I cannot get tired of telling everybody within KDE and specially outside the community how important is the Free Qt Foundation, not just for KDE and the Qt ecosystem, but also for the entire Free Software movement. I never loose the chance when I am among automotive professionals to highlight the enormous impact that this entity has on their businesses. There is still a lot to do to provide The Free Qt Foundation the attention it deserves. By the way, it is always a pleasure for me to talk to KDE e.V. representatives there, Martin Konold and Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer.

What a great contribution they do.

Thanks to the organisers

I will finish this Akademy 2018 report thanking the organization team who worked hard to make Akademy 2018 one of those hard to forget.

Thank you.

Automotive, what an opportunity for KDE!

October 26, 2016August 8, 2018 ~ toscalix ~ Leave a comment

During the last year I’ve focused a significant part of my effort on driving the GENIVI Development Platform, together with some Codethink colleagues and other GENIVI professionals and community members.

What is GENIVI Development Platform?

GENIVI Development Platform (GDP) is a project and an outcome.

As a project, it can be defined as the delivery side of the GENIVI Alliance. Today is a fairly standard Open Source project, done in the open following many of the most common practices any FLOSS developer would expect.

As an outcome, GDP is a Linux base distribution (Poky) derivative, built with Yocto, that integrates the software that GENIVI community (automotive professionals) develop as Open Source software.

It still a small project but the quality of the platform and the number of people involved has grown this last year significantly.

GENIVI Alliance is a consortium of +140 companies so obviously most of the overall effort is done by paid developers. Changhyeok Bae (community member) together with Tom Pollard and Robert Marshall (Jonathan Maw before him) from Codethink Ltd, constitute the maintainers team, who are responsible for the integration, testing and release of GDP.

These guys are supported by people like myself, doing coordination, marketing, documentation, IT services, infrastructure, testing and many other key tasks which provides the project a level of robustness and scalability that any serious attempt of this nature requires nowadays.

I am interested, where can I get more?

You can find more general information about the project in the following resources:

GDP Project wiki
Communication channels:
- Mailing list
- IRC channel: #automotive in irc.freenode.net
Slides and videos from talks about the project.

GDP-ivi9 is the current stable version although we have moved so fast this last year in terms of the software shipped, that I recommend you to try the following:

If you are interested in a solid base system, try GDP 11 RC2
If you are interested in checking the latest UI and demo applications, try GDP 11 RC3
If you are interested in building from scratch you own images with the latest software, do it directly to GENIVI’s rolling release, called Master for now. You can get the latest software there. It should most ly work since we put stabilization effort on it, following the openSUSE Tumbleweed mindset in this regard.

Currently GDP supports RPi2 & 3, Minnowboard MAX and Turbot, Renesas Porter and Silk and Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c. GDP ships Qt 5.6 at the moment, since it is based in Yocto 2.1…

…which makes GDP a great target for KDE software, specially for Plasma.

GDP and KDE

Putting the effort on having KDE well supported in Yocto would provide the project a third life, landing on an industry that is heavily investing in Open Source with a key piece of software, with no clear competitor today in the open.It would revamp the interest of many KDE developers in porting their apps to embedded/mobile environments and would bring attention to the project from Qt professionals all over the world. Currently KDE is significantly better than anything else that is open in automotive. It would just require the effort to include it and maintain it in Yocto, which is not small, and adapting Plasma a little initially, not much.GENIVI launched a Challenge Grant Program that might help to put some funding in the equation 😉

Whatever effort done to put Plasma on Yocto (so GDP) would also be picked up by GDP’s competitor, AGL UCB (Auto Grade linux Unified Code Base), the Linux Foundation automotive group Linux (again, Yocto) based distribution. So there would be at least two players for the cost of one.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Qt companies would jump in on this effort too. In order to play in the open filed today, they need to Open Source their products, which is a big risk for most of them. Playing with KDE, which is based in the technologies they are familiar with, would be simpler for them. I bet the Qt company would be heavily interested in promoting this effort. It would help to dissipate all the pushing back from the automotive industry to the current Qt license model, GPLv3 based. And it would do it in the best possible way, by providing great ready-to-use software with no competitor. I have been one year preaching about how big the opportunity currently is for KDE, but this is not the kind of challenge that can be sustained on volunteer basis, sadly, since keeping KDE up to date in the Yocto project would require a high level of commitment from KDE as a whole.

The community probably needs first a small success story and some company/corporate push before really jumping on it, I think. The support of a couple of KDE or Qt companies would catalyze the effort.GENIVI and AGL make a significant promotion effort around the world within the automotive industry, participating in forums where KDE is unknown. Many companies that currently develop close source Qt applications for automotive would be interested in KDE which would increase our potential targets for our Corporate program.

Having KDE on GDP and AGL UCB would increase the incentive of developing new applications for many of our young developers who currently do not have automotive as a “professional target“.

Companies like LG, Renesas, Bosch, Hartman, Intel, Jaguar Land Rover, Toyota, Visteon, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Volvo, among many others…. are key stakeholders of GENIVI and AGL. Isn’t it this attractive enough?A success story like the one I am proposing would be yet another example of how KDE can play a key role for the Qt ecosystem. Sadly not everybody in this ecosystem understand what a great “tool” KDE can be for them. After a hit like this one, it would be undeniable.Think about the exposure, think about where we are today… Something like this would place KDE where Unity, Android (AOSP) or GNOME are not… yet. I believe this is the kind of strategic decision that would change KDE future. But also the business perspective of those companies (specially Qt ones) who would get involved.

Let’s do it now… or somebody else will.

Update(29/10/16): to find out about the state of KDE in Yocto please read the comment to this article from Samuel Stirtzel. Thanks Samuel.

Category: kde