Press Release

24 April 2007

KDE's Akademy 2007 Conference Announces Sponsors, Talks Programme and Educational Day

Akademy Registration Open

Akademy 2007 [http://akademy2007.kde.org] is the annual World Summit from KDE [http://www.kde.org], the K Desktop Environment. Over two hundred people will gather together to discuss, collaborate and design their plans for the Free Desktop over the next year. Attendees will include developers, artists, experts from usability and accessibility, translators, industry partners, system administrators and major deployers of KDE.

This year Akademy will be held in Glasgow, Scotland courtesy of The Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde [http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/]. Registration is now open to all [http://www.kde.org.uk/akademy/]. Register before April 30th if you want accommodation booked for you.

Industry Shows KDE Support Through Sponsorship

We are pleased to announce our first sponsors. Our premium sponsor is Trolltech [http://www.trolltech.com], creator of the Qt developers framework used by KDE. "Sponsoring KDE and Akademy is a top priority for Trolltech" Co-CEO Eirik Chambe-Eng said.

Kubuntu [http://www.kubuntu.org] is a gold sponsor. The popular KDE based Linux distribution from Canonical Ltd was recently adopted by the French Assembly to run on all their computers. "I'm thrilled to show our support for KDE by continuing our gold sponsorship of Akademy," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu family of distributions.

The Linux Foundation [http://www.linux-foundation.org/] is also a gold sponsor. The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardises Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms.

Finally, Google is our first Silver sponsor. Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the way people connect with information. With their Summer of Code programme and other activities, Google is one of the largest corporate sponsors of open source software.

More sponsors are due to be announced soon, if you want to show your commitment to KDE take a look at our Sponsorship Opportunities brochure and get in touch [http://akademy2007.kde.org/sponsors/akademy2007_sponsorship_brochure.pdf].

Diverse Programme To Interest All

The first two days of Akademy will bring an exciting programme of talks to inform developers [http://akademy2007.kde.org/conference/programme.php]. Talk steams include KDE 4 Pillars, Applications, Programming Language Bindings, Quality Control, Libraries, Platforms and Distributions and Community. The conference closes with the Akademy Awards, where we recognise the achievements of the top contributors from the past year. "This is one of the most exciting conference programmes we have had for Akademy," said Cornelius Schumacher from KDE e.V., "the talks represent the wide diversity of work going on inside the KDE project".

Schools Day to Showcase Free Software for Education

For the first time Akademy will include a day dedicated to Education and Schools [http://akademy2007.kde.org/codingmarathon/schoolday.php]. The day will bring together those who develop Free Software for education and those who deploy it. The programme includes Agust

Benito Bethencourt from mEDUXa who are deploying KDE on ten thousand desktops throughout schools in the Canary Islands.

We recommend anyone with an interest in computing and education to join us at the schools day.

About KDE

KDE is an award-winning, independent project of hundreds of developers, translators, artists and other professionals worldwide collaborating over the Internet to create and freely distribute a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop and office environment employing a flexible, component-based, network-transparent architecture and offering an outstanding development platform.

KDE provides a stable, mature desktop including a state-of-the-art browser (Konqueror), a personal information management suite (Kontact), a full office suite (KOffice), a large set of networking application and utilities, and an efficient, intuitive development environment featuring the excellent IDE KDevelop.

KDE is working proof that the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software development model can yield first-rate technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Media Opportunities

Akademy are looking for media partners. In return for coverage before the summit and publicity during or after we will display your logo on our web site, in the conference programme and distribute your magazine or newsletter to attendees.

Press contact: Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org +44 7941938912, based in Scotland