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The leadership of the KDE community has decided to reposition the KDE brand from focusing on being an open-source desktop for Linux to being an overall open-source community.
In a Nov. 24 post describing the repositioning, KDE spokesperson Stuart Jarvis said KDE has changed over the past 13 years. “The application framework has grown, matured and gone cross-platform, as have the applications,” he said. “Strong growth in our community has created an increasingly diverse and large set of high-quality applications. In the process, KDE’s identity has shifted from being simply a desktop environment to representing a global community that creates a remarkably rich body of free software targeted for use by people everywhere.”
Moreover, Jarvis said, “The strength of KDE is the community. It is where it all starts. It includes the KDE culture, the KDE values and the KDE mission. The community is also what ties us together and gives us an identity. This identity is KDE. So it is natural that the brand ‘KDE’ stands first and foremost for the community.”
KDE originally stood for the “K Desktop Environment,” but evolved to become simply KDE. However, “The expanded term ‘K Desktop Environment’ has become ambiguous and obsolete, probably even misleading,” Jarvis said. “The term ‘K Desktop Environment’ can be accurately and completely replaced by ‘KDE Community,’ ‘KDE Platform,’ ‘KDE Applications’ or specific KDE application names, depending on what is actually meant.”
To summarize the repositioning effort, Jarvis said:
““??Ã We will use simply “KDE” and retire the expansion “K Desktop Environment”??Ã We will use “KDE” exclusively in two meanings:??Ã KDE, the community, which creates free software for end users??Ã As an umbrella brand for the technology created by the KDE community??Ã We will use distinct brands for the software that was previously referred to generically as “KDE”:??Ã The KDE Workspaces will be separately referred to as “KDE Plasma Desktop” and “KDE Plasma Netbook”??Ã The KDE technologies used for building applications will be referred to as the “KDE Platform”??Ã The KDE Applications will stay as they are: “the KDE Applications”??Ã The product we currently have released as “KDE 4.3” is essentially a compilation of our software (Workspaces, Applications and Platform), and thus the next release will be named “KDE Software Compilation 4.4”“
Also on Nov. 24, the KOffice team released Version 2.1 of KOffice. KOffice is an integrated office suite built on the KDE platform. It utilizes free and open standards like OpenDocument for its document formats, component communication and component embedding. During the development of Version 2.1, it was also announced that KOffice is going to be used in the Nokia n900 smartphones based on Maemo Linux.