Posted on by Martin Flöser

KWin Hacking++

Very soon after joining the KWin development team almost five years ago, I realized that KWin would need at least one full time developer. It is one of the most important parts for the user experience of the KDE Plasma Workspaces and we have seen quite often that important changes for the user experience could not be implemented due to lack of manpower.

With the upcoming required changes like Qt 5 and Wayland the need for developers is increasing. I think it’s currently a wonderful time to join the KWin development. It’s a very interesting and challenging work and working on KWin means working on the future of the free desktop.

Lately I had more possibilities to work on KWin and starting from January I will join Blue Systems for working on KWin. I want to thank Blue Systems for this great opportunity and also for all the other sponsored work in the KDE community.

I’m really excited about this new possibility and are looking forward to it. I want to use this chance to work on bringing KWin to the world of Wayland. As explained in my blog post about the current state of development, I’m very satisfied with all the preparation work which went into KWin and I think it’s now in a state that we can start hacking on it 🙂 And I hope to see lots of involvement from the community. All the work will go directly into master, so it will be easy to test the new features but also easy to contribute to it. I intend to continue setting up simple tasks for the community and announce them through my blog.

27 Replies to “KWin Hacking++”

  1. Nice, Congratulations!
    To work on your (almost)baby project, the project you seem enthusiastic about and be payed for that is an awesome thing 🙂

  2. Martin,

    Congratulations with this – in my opinion – awesome opportunity to work on something you love doing 🙂 I hope to find myself in that position sometime.

    Good luck on this great new adventure!

  6. This is good news, I like how Blue Systems is hiring some of the most active devs to work on developing full time. This is a great example of a company working with the community in the best way. Thanks for the great work 🙂

  7. Congratulations, Martin! And a big thank you to Blue Systems, you guys are supporting the development of key parts of the system I am running! I am sure Martin is yet another great choice. 🙂

  9. Good news. Congratulations Martin!

    I tried looking for information about Blue Systems and I have not been successful. Someone could tell me who they are, what they do, how they make their profits, etc.. I would appreciate that info.

    1. Blue Systems is the pet project of Germany’s successful FC Schalke 04 team’s chairman. He has lots of money to throw around and no business plan. See http://www.golem.de/news/clemens-toennies-der-neue-philanthrop-hinter-kubuntu-1207-93009.html (in German)

      I don’t know how rich he is but unless he’s as rich as Bill Gates, his money will at some point run out if he just gives it away to employ KDE devs. So either he’ll come up with a sustainable business plan or fire everyone.

      1. Thank you. Your reply has clarified some things to me (although I had to translate from German to English and English to Spanish). I just wanted to be sure that this is not the case of an evil company that achieves its profits by exploiting people or selling weapons or Microsoft/Apple or something 🙂
        I think it would be nice if someone create an entry in wikipedia about what is Blue System (many people wanting to know that)
        Regards.

        1. Small correction: It’s the chairman’s nephew (who happens to have the same name – Clemens Toennies).

          I looked a bit into German Wikipedia: Clemens Toennies Sr. and his brother Bernd Toennies (the father of the Blue Systems founder Clemens Toennies Jr.) founded “Tönnies Fleischwerke” (Meat plant) with 4.6 billion € revenue in 2011. After his father Bernd died, Clemens Jr. co-owns “Tönnies Fleischwerke” with his uncle.
          To sum up https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%B6nnies_Fleischwerk#Kritik:
          The company …
          * has or had video surveillance of employees even in bathrooms
          * was under investigation for bribery
          * pays its employees extremely low wages.

          So, Toennies is not involved in weapons trade (unlike e.g. Samsung) but still exploits people.

      2. Its the nephew of that Guy. The company (afaik the largest meat producer / processor in Germany and one of the largest in europe) was founded by his father. His uncle, the one described above, leads the company since his father deceased. And the company is large. Wikipedia says 4.6 billion revenue in 2011.

        But whatever, I think even if he “sponsors” just one man-year worth of development, its great. I hope they find a nice business model.

      3. That’s definitely wrong, it’s the nephew of the Schalke 04 chairman, not the chairman himself. He’s 36 years old, and developer who isn’t employed as a developer any longer for “health reasons”, and who won’t be developing any time soon.
        It’s unknown how the project is financed.

        1. Yeah, I knew about the nephew part. I originally included the word nephew but the original sentence had awkward grammar and while correcting the grammar I accidentally deleted the word.
          However he is co-owner of Tönnies Fleischwerke. You can look it up on the German Wikipedia article for his father Bernd Tönnies.

          1. @ STiAT, @ Markus S.: Thank you.
            Again. We would appreciate if you, who understand German, create a Wikipedia (in English too) entry about Blue Systems, telling us things like the above.

  11. Pingback: KWin pod opiek? Blue Systems | KDEFamily

  12. Herzlichen Glückwunsch / Congratulations, Martin!
    And Congrats to KDE because of this high qualified programmist.
    Best regards, bostaurus

  14. Congratulations Martin. It’s great that now there is a full time developer working on KWin (and very likely other stuff as we know you). That will give you the opportunity to really focus on making KWin even better.

    Most excited I’m about the changes to plasma and KWin making it possible to use them without deep-in KDE dependencies (which will be with the new platform if I understood that correctly).
    That possibly gives the opportunity to build a lighter desktop on-top of KDE technology (“light” desktop using KWin and Plasma).

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