KDE Targets Windows, Mac

Jesse Zbikowski, author of the Linux Is Fun blog and member of the Bay Area Linux User Group—or BALOG—said he is gearing up for KDE 4.1. "They're saying with the next release this summer you'll be able to run all your Apple OS X desktop widgets inside Linux also," Zbikowski said.

"Reaching out to developers was one of the things we really wanted to achieve," Seigo said. "Another thing was to spread adoption of open standards and open document formats. This is key and critical to maintaining freedom around the world.”

Meanwhile, Seigo said groupware is an interesting example of open standards and open formats in action.

"So what if we brought a groupware suite familiar to people who are used to [Microsoft] Outlook but that does not run just on Linux and Unix, not just on Windows, not just on Mac, but on all the platforms?" Seigo said. "And it looked identical on all the platforms and worked identical on all the platforms and gave equal time to any groupware server?"

He said this is one of the things KDE developers are considering and hoping to promote. He said Microsoft Exchange "does not use a lot of open protocols; they are fairly proprietary."

“For those who would like to actually be able to access their information using open protocols and open formats, you now have the option to pick your server and your desktop and they're not tied together at the hip," Seigo said. "This is one of the very exciting possibilities we're opening up.”

He said that KDE supports the ODF (Open Document Format).

Also, following on the free software theme of KDE, Seigo said KDE plans to eventually provide search capabilities with street maps where the data is open and free.

Holger Schroder, a KDE developer working on the Windows port, demonstrated the progress so far on the project. He showed various KDE applications running on Windows, "but we do not yet have KOffice [the KDE office suite] or we do not yet have Konqueror running right now, but besides that it [the KDE Windows Project code] is quite usable right now, and we hope to have it stable by KDE 4.1"