Matt Williams

I'm pleased to announce that the latest version, 0.9.2, of the Falcon Programming Language has been released. Quoting from the release announcement:

Although we consider this a starting point rather than a final target, we have completed all the coding and testing we considered vital to release the first official version in the 0.9 series. The last release candidate has been under examination for more than a month, and exposing it to unprotected environment (embedded in commercial grade applications, driving websites, running complex stand-alone applications) allowed us to clear the field, polish the last problems we were able to discover and release this version as official.

For those of you who don't know, Falcon is a relatively new language of the sort that would generally be described as a scripting language. It is multi-paradigm in that is supports more than just procedural and object-oriented with functional, prototype, tabular and message-oriented. Syntactically, I would probably compare it to Python or Lua.

It is already being used to power websites (e.g. the main Falcon website) and is very usable as a general purpose scripting language as well as an embedded scripting language. It is also notable in that is is one of the supported languages for KDE's very own Kross scripting language layer, allowing you to use Falcon to write plugins for KOffice and the like.

I am currently packaging it up for the openSUSE build service (available from the contrib repository or search here) and you can get the source from the official site.

It's almost all written in C++ so if you fancy getting involved in programming language/library development why don't you help out? The community and codebase are both still quite small so it should be easy to get up to speed and hands-on. Come join us in the #falcon channel on freenode or on the mailing list.

It's great to see this article on BBC news (also on Ars Technica) reporting on the UK governments latest promises regarding considering open source software. Though, I'm sure this sort of thing has been said before, we're definitely seeing more and more reports of governments having a look at open source (see an earlier article on it, specifically mentioning Obama's government), however cagey their promises may be.

I'm sure that this isn't the end of the story since, as anyone who attended Patrick Harvie's talk at Akademy 2007 would know. He reported on some of the tactics that he'd seen Microsoft employ in order to prevent the idea of open source alternatives gaining mental footholds in the minds of people in power.

For me, the most important part of the BBC article is that it tells of how both of the interviewed expect the proprietary firms to react:

"I am absolutely certain there have been communications extremely high-up in proprietary vendors with management high up in government," said Mr Shine.
Mr Phipps added: "Measured over the short term traditional vendors will cut prices back, end load contacts and do everything to appear cheaper.
"But the real value with open source comes from giving users a new flexibility."

Finally, it's good to see more high quality, non-FUD reporting about FOSS where it's treated as a sensible thing and not as some hippy idea. I look forward to any further concrete news on this.

I know I'm not the first to post about this (I'm about 12 hours too late for that) but I do think it's very exciting news. I can't see any immediate impact it will have on the KDE desktop itself but I'm sure that 6/12 months down the line, once Qt usage is increased and bugs are fixed and new features are implemented, we'll feel the impact.

It interesting too see how far this news has spread across the Internet too. For example I'm a regular on the Ogre3D forums and even though there's very little interaction between the two projects, there's discussion going on there.

Perhaps the most surprising thing, however, is that reading the Dot post about it there's probably the lowest level of trolling I've seen in a long time. Not even hardly any anti-GTK trolling either which is good to see. Well done community!

(On this note, does anyone know of any time line for the new Dot? I heard before 4.2 is released but that's getting closer now.)

I'm going to Akademy! (no pretty image from me I'm afraid, I'm feeling too lazy right now)

I'll be getting the EuroStar from London on Friday (leaving 18:35) and will be staying until Thursday morning/midday. I'm glad that I'll be present for most of the hack week since last year I was only able to attend for the weekend conference. The conference schedule looks really good and as with last year I'm going to have difficulty choosing between some of the talks in different tracks.

Eugene and I had submitted a talk about the state of KDEGames and it's place in the KDE ecosystem but unfortunately it wasn't accepted. Regardless of this we're planning on holding a few KDEGames BoFs on kdegames general, GGZ/multiplayer, GHNS etc. most likely on Wednesday.

Yesterday we held our student day in #kdegames. It was a chance for all the students who applied for GSoC projects related to KDE Games to come meet our community, to give us a chance to meet them and to let them ask any questions they had about GSoC or KDE Games in general.

It was a great success, we had at least 10 students in total (out of about 20 applications) come along at varying points throughout the day most of whom really took part, asking questions and just chatting away with the other students and the regulars. We even had one student ask it he was allowed to do his project even if he wasn't chosen. "Of course!" we said.