Amarok Blog

Left to right: Heike, Klaas, Myriam, Mark

On Wednesday and Thursday a delegation from KDE represented our Kool Desktop Environment at OpenExpo in Berne, Switzerland. Unfortunately I couldn't make it on Wednesday, so that Heike, Klaas, and Myriam were rather busy handling the booth (their voices started to sound rather strained). But yesterday I found some time and could help out a bit.

Klaas Freitag is working for Novell (openSUSE team), and in his spare time he and his wife Heike create a very promising application for businesses, called Kraft. Myriam Schweingruber is from KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu/FSFE (is there anything she doesn't do?), and myself of course I'm from Amarok and KDE.

The event itself generated mixed feelings due the stronger commercial orientation than usual, resulting in less space for Free Software, while the business side (called Topsoft) was more emphasized this time. However, this was not the fault of the organizers (the OpenExpo team is doing a great job). We will see how things are going to work out with this in the future. The Free Software community is hoping that the event could regain the great atmosphere of the past years, which generally used to be very well received.

After the event we went out with Heike and Klaas to the city of Berne, which has a very charming architecture and some great pubs. We ended up having beers in my favorite place, which happened to play videos of Pink Floyd and U2 concerts, and that was just the perfect ending for this day.


Many thanks to Heike and Klaas for attending OpenExpo, it was really nice to meet them!