Agustin Benito Bethencourt - Opening New Doors: KDE in Embedded - Akademy 2017
Channel: The KDE Community
Date: 2017-11-20

Automotive and other tradition embedded industries are moving beyond their traditional role as Open Source consumers only. KDE project might have an interesting role to play if we open ourselves to this sector. This talk will describe why is such an interest move for the project and what challenges we will face on the journey.

On October 2016, while being in charge of the GENIVI Development Platform for automotive, Agustin wrote an article about the opportunity that represents for KDE the automotive sector today. This is true for other embedded industries that lack a "desktop" and applications done in the open to supports the different platform development efforts. The opportunity is even greater if we look at embedded as a collection of industries that are currently in early stages in terms of Open Source development practices. Big players are investing effort in supporting R&D projects in the open and they know very little about us. And those who do know about KDE, limit our efforts, technologies and focus on "non-touch" screens.

From the variety of distribution efforts that bring bring Open Source to embedded, Agustin finds particularly interesting the Yocto project, the most popular "distribution effort" within embedded nowadays. Other projects like Buildstream have interest too.

Today Agustin is involved in the development of another automotive platform, driven by the Linux Foundation (AGL), that is getting momentum and has a weak equivalent solution compared to Plasma. The same applies to the very limited set of applications, specially if we compare them with what KDE might offer.

Agustin will describe why embedded Linux represents such an opportunity for KDE, what are the areas we should look at and what are the main challenges we need to overcome. Another interesting topic is the synergies that such a move would bring with the Qt community.

https://conf.kde.org/en/akademy2017/public/events/357