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Intern me on KDE September 5, 2012

For the first time KDE in brazil is trying something that can change the way how we interact with universities and students, boosting opensource development as a whole. I’s a common thing to have big companies like MicroSoft and IBM with partnerships with universities, but what about OpenSource and LibreSoftware? I know that there are loads and loads of GNU-OSS-Free groups at colleges and all that jazz… but that eint what I’m talking about baby. I’m talking about something harder, better, faster, stronger. what about a *REAL* partnership between one of the biggest ( in terms of lines of code, users and programmers ) open source projects of all times, you know, the one that started to be the gift from a loving guy to his girlfriend. ( I don’t know about you guys, but I actually am proud to work in a project that started as a concern to make the world a better place to someone I like )

KDE and the Faculdades Ruy Barbosa are joining forces this winter ( for the winter is not comming in the south, and while winter may be a slow season up north, with 6m of snow in Oslo, it’s pretty damn hot down here. ) Six students will work 20h per week, for six months for KDE. They asked me how they could help a project, I asked them if they wanted to be interns, and they loved the idea.  Right now it’s the beginning. They  started formally at Setp 1st,  are studing the code and all that jazz.

But what are they going to do? What are their premisses? who is behind this? What is the catch?

Six students, Two teams. In an ideal world, I would put them in six teams of one and each one could take care of himself, but the real world eint no plain, so they will work together, this way things can go better.

RainGuards – The Umbrello Helpers – This team is focused on helping umbrello, making it a good and modern UML modelling tool. their initial task is to move umbrello from SVN to Git, they are already studing svn, git, svn2git and the old umbrello rulesset. After this, they will fix bugs, clean the code, do the UML modelling of Umbrello’s code with umbrelo itself to stress test the application. A good app must be able to dogfood itself.

Activators – the KDE Activities Helpers – This team is focused on helping KDE Activities as a whole, porting applications to use the activities, helping the activities daemon, the library and helping Ivan to sing Bohemian Raphsody. Their initial task is to Build everything – and that’s eint no easy task for them, because the Activities are splitted in several subprojects ( library, daemon, plasma-activity-chooser, applications that uses activities ) . Their first task is to sort the Krunner – find-files plugin by rating, and while this seems more a Nepomuk thingy than an Activity thingy, all is related.

Good Luck for them, and for me,  because if this works out, more universities will come next year. 😀