Do Hackers Dream of free/libre Sheep?

KDE got accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2024! Are you thinking about getting involved into KDE development? Check out the cool ideas KDE devs came up , they showcase what can be achieved by taking part as a student in GSoC. How to start? How to get involved? How to make an impression that will help your application? Prerequisites You like KDE, you like us as a community, you can follow our philosophy, you like our product (a desktop or at least an specific application), and you resonate with our tech stack (C++, Qt, CMake). Grab some code from our GitLab , clone a repository and build it locally. This sounds easy. For first-timers it is not easy. Reach out for help in case you struggle. Run your self-built software. Now you can explore the joy of developing KDE. You do not need an idea, at least not yet. Give it some time. Get involved Try getting involved. Usually it is not easy to fix bugs of implement a feature request from KDE bugtracking system . S

Disclaimer: I am not one of KDE's masterminds or spokespersons. I am a mere bystander with few unimportant commits. I follow KDE's ecosystem and other developments in the free software world. In the following, I share some thoughts and my personal opinion. Talks about new programming languages After 30 years of C code, the Linux kernel opens itself to a second high-level language: Rust. Since fall of 2022 the kernel mainly gained infrastructure work. Some experiments show promising results like a Rust-based network driver or a scheduler . Recently, Git developers started to discuss how to allow Rust code in our beloved version control system. Far from having reached a consensus, its media coverage and heated discussions in forums show how interested the public is in this topic. Other projects try to replace established software by rewritten from scratch Rust ones: uutils coreutils , sudo-rs , librsvg , Rustls . Heck, Rewrite it it Rust (RiiR) has become a meme . We already h

Do you know isocpp.org's blog ? As an open-minded C++ programmer, I am a fond reader and have been inspired multiple times. I always enjoyed the blog posts from Andrey Karpov . He has deep knowledge with static code analysis and is a co-founder of PVS-Studio, a commercial static code analyzer for C++, C#, C, and Java. To advertise new releases of their product, Andrey and his co-workers scan popular open source projects with their tool. They explain the numerous results and showcase by these real-world examples how beneficial static code analysis is even for mature and healthy code bases. I found these posts both entertaining and instructive. If you are not aware of them, you might find them an interesting read: Clang 11 , LLVM 15 , Qt 6 , GCC 13 . I find this topic intriguing; nevertheless, for a long time I did not manage to dive deeper into this topic. I am a satisfied user of Kile , KDE's user-friendly TeX/LaTeX editor. In the span of almost 20 years (Is Kile really that ol