The Finishing Touch

Speaker: Sebastian Kügler

KDE, while being technically integrated and rather complete isn't so in terms of being a product. KDE, and Free Software components in general are to be considered a raw product, which augmented with a device, installation, support and possibly a handbook makes for a whole product, i.e. something that a consumer would buy, something that covers a complete need ("I want to be able to surf the web") rather than being just one component needed.

While the software side of the Free Desktop has come a long way, there are still very little products using these technologies in the real world. And to be perfectly honest, most of these offering are way below of the potential a software package like KDE can deliver.

So what is going wrong here, what is the true potential of a finished product based on KDE? What are the steps necessary to be taken to bring KDE to the consumer / customer? The presentation outlines answers to the question how state of the art desktop technology such as KDE can be made into a finished product suitable for end users.