Today, the KDE Community has released KDE Frameworks 5. I've written a guest blog on linux.com about why I think that that matters for Free Software.
Why it mattersIn short, I argue that the most used Free Software toolkit stands to benefit tremendously from the knowledge, experience and code of the dominant Free Software desktop project.
The value of a community like KDE can hardly be overstated. The open and inspiring place it provides naturally is something companies spend billions to build (and usually fail). The KDE community has already contributed a lot to Qt and with Frameworks 5 this stands to continue at a fast pace.
So, as I conclude in the article:
A complete, mature and openly developed toolkit on and for open source platforms is important for Free and Open Source, for current hardware configurations, the new generation of mobile devices and other consumer electronics. KDE Frameworks is an important contribution to innovative and compelling open platforms.
And it is coming soonAnd Free Software won't have to wait long. As Sebastian Kügler noted, most of the work is done. Two modules, KArchive and Threadweaver are already good to go and as Mirko Boehm blogged, these are very mature and usable already. He noted that no API breaks are coming for Threadweaver and as far as I know the same is true for KArchive, making these two ready for use right now.
This allows developers to save development and maintenance work. You can be assured that this code is mature, tested and build based on real-world needs, developed in an open governance process and following clear code- and API style guidelines.
And that is a big deal ;-)
Of course, openSUSE offers binaries for openSUSE 12.3, 13.1 and Factory.
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