Support Amarok during Roktober 2008!

As already said we plan to use MySQL exclusively, for now in the embedded version. Support for remote databases will be added later, currently it seems as if that won't be a part of Amarok 2.0.0. But we will have releases after that one for sure, (re)introducing features.

Well, you never know where developments lead and if you can reach your goals in time. Anyway, from the development front the future plans might look as follows: First, of course, we need to get Amarok 2.0.0 out of the door. Which means we will have a stable release, which will still lack some (not many) features from the 1.4.x series. But honestly we finally really need to bring Amarok 2 code to our users. Yes, we try to be very open on that issue and are working on a list of missing features (http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Not_yet_implemented_features_in_Amarok_2). After that of course in the following 2.0.x releases we will work on bringing missing stuff back and look at the user feedback from the release to see what needs to be fixed.

This will sooner or later (hopefully sooner) lead to a very stable and powerful Amarok 2(.1?), and when we are there we can start real marketing for Amarok on Windows and Mac, which is technically already possible today, but as those are really big, new markets we have to make sure everything runs really well before entering them. Otherwise we might fail horribly, if the first feedback in the media is not positive enough. Windows and Mac releases are very important for us: imagine a growing user base on those plattforms, buying music at Magnatune via Amarok. As we get a 10% share there this might once be a way to get money for the project, so we sould no longer depend on Roktober and you could also support other projects more. *dreaming*

Marketing, well that's the point where costs come in: We were at several large and small expos/conferences during the last year. Very small ones often pay for the train ticket to let us give a talk, but the best we can get from larger ones (like CeBIT Hannover or LinuxTag Berlin) is a free booth including a conference slot. Travel costs then have to be paid by the project (which is ok imho, because there we can really show Amarok to a large audience). Those include train tickets/fuel for cars but also a cheap place to sleep, which often is not easy to get. Remember: many of us are students (including me) and couldn't afford paying such stuff for themselves to work on a project during their free time.

The really expensive conferences are developer meetings. A booth can be manned by people living closest nearby, our developers are distributed all over the world. Those meetings are very productive. Oh yeah, aKademy was that this year, of course (where we also got financial help from the KDE e.V.).

I hope this gives you an impression where money goes, but as already said: our treasurer is working on a detailled financial report which will give a more accurate overview of our costs. This list here is from my personal experience and not official.