KDE-PI: Thoughs of a upcoming contributor.

It’s been a while since the III KDE Brasil Forum – Northeast Edition happened. While I was in Natal, host city of the IV Brazilian Northeast Meeting of Free Software, it was nice the contact we had with people from other places, since that always give us some extra energy to continue promoting free software. We had a lot of interesting lectures and mini-courses with people from all over the country, although the meeting was a regional event.In this scenario, the III KDE Forum had the opportunity to have the attention of a good number of new people, some even newbies in the GNU/Linux universe (and some greener than newbies).

Anyway, I presented a lecture about usability in FOSS, most specificaly in the KDE, taking Krita as a study case. And well, few people in the lecture knew what was KDE (NO, it was not a name branding thing), or even what was a window manager or a free software project. That was a little dissapointing, since we always have people that point at the “linux is not yet ready for desktop” thing and I didnt saw anyone in the lecture to discuss this issue. One of the things that I know, as programmer, is that discuss usability points is important, since the FOSS projects have a more heterogeneous user base now, not just geeks and nerds anymore. Anyway, I was happy for presenting the lecture, but I missed a good discussion.

But that was just a point. The forum was a great success and our mini-courses and lectures, in general, had a vast demand.  I was really excited, because interact with people like Sandro, Lamarque and Helio, active contributors of KDE, lead us to ask a series of provocative questions to ourselves: what I am doing for the project? Is that enough? Could I do more?

Filipe, Me and Amanda.

I believe that, in general, new contributors are shy. I say for myself. I always though that we had to be a master of code to start helping (with code), even thoung various KDE projects sites says this isn’t true. A master of code himself said to me that is not necessary (I remember Tomaz Canabrava saying “Just go rock, kiddo!”). Anyway, I put this shyness aside and took a look in the Krita code (I had downloaded the svn trunk to my laptop to test the new features of the 2.3 beta 3 version). So I read the Wishlist in the wiki and took one of the Junior Jobs to myself, entered the IRC channel of the project and asked some questions.

Now I submited a patch to the Review Board, the first one of a series, I hope.

It already has a review (Thanks, Sven!   and I’m working to get it done. Soon the Krita user can delete the vector and the pixel selection with only one action (deleting shapes and deleting pixels are two different operations).

Since I’m a little free these days (sent all my masters degree course proposals), I want it done as soon as possible. This is the beginning of a journey to become a active free software contributor and the KDE have my graditute to give me this oportunity.

Regards!