KDE king Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the desktop

Nokia and other vendors are collaborating on Webkit which originated from KHTML. What is likely to happen with these projects within KDE now?

Both KHTML and Webkit will be used in the short term. As long as applications are using it, KHTML is not going away. Webkit is based upon an increasingly well tested project and we will use it in Plasma because for free we also have the ability to display Mac OS X dashboard widgets. So we will see both in KDE4. There is work on the Webkit Kpart which will allow people to choose between them.

KDE4 is cross platform and runs on Apple's Mac OS X and Microsoft's Windows, do you see this as competing with or complementing their own products?

Apple doesn't get the open source development model and has a very control oriented corporate culture and that doesn't mesh very well with an open, collaborative environment. Apple is getting better at it, or at least parts of Apple are getting it. I hope to look at it in five years and say this was growing pains for Apple to get where it is.

We are bringing high-quality apps to the Mac platform and that is a good thing. On the downside Amarok is a better application than iTunes so I think they will have a hard time keeping up with us. Their big innovation is a tilted dock so it looks 3D. We have Strigi and Nepomuk integration so in the mid-term we have a better product and you aren't locked in to any system. We already have feature parity with Mac OS X on many fronts and we are growing faster. On the one hand we are competitors and on the other hand we are partners. I think the old lines of competitors and partners will blur. This is our game in the free software world and the proprietary vendors are being urged to play our game. Their users will get better software too. I look at Vista and it was an abortion, but the work on it was motivated because of competition.

What are your long-term plans for working on KDE and its associated free software applications?

There is so much more to do and there is so much we can do and it's not boring. It may seem strange in this day and age when job security is an outdated concept where you don't stay in the same career for 20 years, but if you have long term goals you have to have long term commitment. The KDE project has never been more exciting. The free software world needs a coordinated directory plan and we need to market free software better. There is a lot of artificial divide and an lot of bridge building to do. I'll be looking at what we do well and attempting to export some of it as well as shed light on our weak points.