A few days back Frode M. Døving decided that Mailody should start working in KDE4. We discussed the current problems and decided that it was best to stop our home brew backend based on sqlite3. The model/view/delegate/proxy had several problems so it could not show the messages. As I failed to fix it after a few days of hacking I gave up.

After the discussion and after talking to Till, we decided to go for Akonadi, It ships with a ready to use model and threading proxy, so that problem would be solved easily. And Akonadi is more or less ready to be used on a larger scale.

I started with making me a lot less popular with the packagers by copying akonadi and parts of libkdepim to mailody. We don’t wat to depend on kdepim (which won’t get released anyway), so that means we need a copy. I hope they find a way to ship Mailody ;-)

Frode started with integrating the Akonadi model within Mailody and the first steps are made, see the screenie. You can see the akonadi resources and see the messages stored in one of the resources. The mails are imported from a maildir, we need to write our own imaplib2akonadi interface later. Click for a better a view.

[img_assist|nid=185|title=Akonadi meets Mailody|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=400|height=300]

There is still a lot to do, but at least we started hacking again.

The last weeks I’ve mainly spend my time on the relicensing efford. Basically what it means is that we are trying to relicense all GPL2 files to a dual license GPL2&GPL3 or to ‘GPL2 or later’. It’s a task which on one hand is not very exciting (ok, boring is a better word), on the other hand it is interesting.

Interesting because you are talking to all kinds of people of the past. Delving in the history of the KDE contributors. We have some interesting tools like the website, and I’m learning GIT, which we use to store the mails people send us with approvals. Just for reference.

We see that the current set of contributors is easy reachable and motivated to relicense. Now that those contributors are almost all approached, we are now approaching the contributors who only contributed a few lines (but not ignorable) and contributors which haven’t contributed in years. These people are a lot harder to reach and less responsive, probably not reading there email every hour anymore.

Anyway, the work is progressing nicely, we are down to 850 files left todo, we started at 1100. Some modules like kdeedu, kdegames, kdesdk, kdegraphics are done, some are a lot more problematic like kdepim and kdelibs and base.

If you have not yet approved to the relicensing, please go to the techbase-project page. If you have any questions, find me on IRC or mail me (tomalbers@kde.nl).

Diego is wrong. KHTML is actively maintained and I want to stress that there are no plans to replace it with WebKit and I want to ask to stop spreading these kind of rumors. I love KHTML.

Let’s all cheer a few times. The Dutch governement has seen the light. Today an action plan was approved by the parliament, which pushes Open Standards and Open Source.

From spring 2008 the central governement will make Open Standards mandatory for their IT. If not possible it has to be explained why it is not possible, including a time line to the standard. Closed standards will have to be phased out. Their will be a commission for people to complain to if the governement uses a closed standard where an open standard can do the trick as well.

Using Open Source is not ‘mandatory’, but when a choice has to be made between closed source software and open source software which behaves equally, than the open source version should be choosen.

MacWorld holds an english copy of Brenno de Winters article puslished on WebWereld which is very informative and probably explains the ideas better than that I can.

The great thing is that there is a large majority of the people in the parliament approving it. It means the lobby of Microsoft against this plan has failed. And did they lobby. I have never ever seen so many protests from Microsoft. They twisted and turned, tried silly arguments, even tried to get emotional at some times. OpenXML is not a standard in the parliaments definition of it, so it is forbidden to use it. Microsoft not happy ;-). ODF will rule. The fact that they have lobbied so hard, makes me realise we are actually making great progress in spreading The Open Religion.

But I don’t care much about Microsoft. They will adapt, just like the Borg from Star Trek. I do care about Open Source and Open Standards, and that’s getting a big push right now and that’s great news!