Matthias Ettrich.

Today at 4pm CET at the Center for Economics, Technology and Women’s Issues at the Berlin Senate, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software. Matthias was awarded the medal in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good. The award was presented by state secretary Almuth Nehring-Venus. She mentioned that not only is Matthias among the younger recipients of the award but also that this is the first award ceremony where young children of the family were present. Also attending was Eberhard Gienger, member of the Bundestag for the county Matthias grew up in. Read on for more!

Akonadi working in KMail

The second Akonadi sprint this year took place in Berlin, Germany on October 16-18. With a confrontation between the local punks and the law simmering on the streets below, the KDE PIM team and others worked to port applications, add polish to the libraries, and complete PIM software that will raise sparks on the desktop without burning out your CPU. Read on for an overview of what happened there!

During the NLUUG end-of-year conference "The Open Web" in Ede, Netherlands, we did an interview with keynote speaker Steven Pemberton. Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the Center for Math and Information Technology in Amsterdam and has been involved with the web since it's first incarnation - he vividly remembers the day the connection from Europe to the US was doubled to 128 Kbit.

On October 9 through 11, a dozen developers gathered in the Nokia Offices in Munich to bring the vision outlined in Dan Leinir's blog about the "Future of Game Development in KDE" to life. After three days of hard work, the developers joined hundreds of other Qt developers for the Qt Developer Days 2009 (thanks to free tickets provided by Nokia). Read on for more!

At the Maemo Conference in Amsterdam Suresh Chande announced that Nokia has contracted KO GmbH to write a mobile office viewer using the KOffice libraries. The presentation by Suresh was given with the Nokia N900 smartphone, using the new Office Viewer.

The improvements in KOffice have largely been in the libraries, on top of which a Maemo-specific GUI was written. KOffice became faster and more stable, and the various file import filters have been greatly improved. This includes the beginnings of MS Office 2007 import support. Thanks to this work the KOffice document viewer for Maemo will be able to properly read files created with a wider range of office applications, and all other users of KOffice 2.x will benefit.

At the Maemo Summit Conference in Amsterdam, Nokia gave out over 300 N900 phones running Maemo 5. The N900 is the successor to the N810, over a hundred of which were handed out at Akademy a year ago. Read on for some opinions about the N900 and the results of 3 days of hacking.

KDE people @ Maemo

Last weekend Amsterdam was visited by hackers from various Free Software communities and companies from around the world. Brought together by the Maemo Summit in the WesterGasFabriek, they gave and attended talks about topics like the Maemo applications, user interface components, the underlying infrastructure and of course the future of Maemo. Read on for a short impression of this conference.

Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

Last week Adriaan de Groot, Claudia Rauch and Kenny Duffus visited Tampere, Finland representing KDE. This gave a chance to meet face to face with members of the local team and talk about next summer's Akademy 2010 conference.