Upcoming interview about next Kubuntu release, and KF5/Plasma5

[Jonathan Riddell]

Great, I've published a blog post to publicise 

> * finally, applications will be ported as well - some are done, some remain
>   - so our upstream is up to lots of new wonderful stuff, including
> using CI too.
>   - CI is continuous integration with automated testing

14.12 release of KDE Applications will be in December with a mix of Qt
4 and Qt 5 apps, they should both work equally well on your Plasma 4
or 5 desktop and look the same with the classic Oxygen or lovely new
Breeze themes.

> * Our base for 14.10 (codename Utopic Unicorn) is that stable KDE platform.
> * At the same time, we are releasing weekly ISOs of Plasma 5, to make
> it easy for people to test
>   - http://apachelog.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/plasma-5-weekly-iso-revisited/

We're releasing a tech preview of Kubuntu Plasma 5 as part of 14.10
for people to test, I'm using it daily and it's working great but
expect to be competant enough to check for and report beasties.

> * we're following along to KDE's CI effort, and doing that with our packages
>   - see #kubuntu-ci IRC channel for the reports as they are generated

gory details at http://kci.pangea.pub/
packages built constantly to check for any updates that need changed.

> * moving to SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager), KDE/Qt default
> graphical login program
>   - LightDM requires a Contributor License Agreement assigning all
> rights to Canonical, which many KDE devels can't/won't
>   - in contrast, KDE e.V. offers optional FLA: https://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php
>   -- Fiduciary Licensing Agreement for assigning copyright to KDE e.V.

Be careful on terminology here.  LightDM and other Canonical projects
used to require a whole copyright assignment so you effectively gave
over all ownership of your code to them, many people object to this.
It's been changed to a contributor agreement so you allow canonical to
licence it however they wish but otherwise you have your normal
copyrights, which is less objectionable but the change to contributor
agreement was too late and the hard was done and many people object to
it anyway, plus canonical doesn't say why they might want to licence
it non-free.  Qt does much the same contributor agreement but at least
there you know why they need it, for the non-LGPL version.  KDE
e.V. FLA allows for KDE to relicence to appropriate free software
licence should that be needed with e.g. new versions of the GPL, it's
not copyright assignment.

> * moving to systemd replacing upstart along with Debian and Ubuntu

Ubuntu is although nobody seems to know when, hopefully next release.

Good luck :)

Jonathan