You might have seen the awesome Klassy theme by Paul McAuley for Qt applications and window decorations for KWin.

It has some issues compiling against the latest Plasma since the KDecoration API break.

Until it is fixed in the main repository, I’ve created a temporary fork that includes the port to KDecoration3 done by Eliza Mason, with a tiny additional fix I added on top of it. The fork is available at github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy

The kdesrc-build recipe for it is:

module klassy
    repository https://github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy
    cmake-options \
        -DBUILD_QT5=OFF \
        -DBUILD_QT6=ON
    branch plasma6.3
end module

If you’re old enough, you probably remember that there was a meme from the 4.x days is that Plasma is all about clocks.

I’ve started working on some new artwork, and ended up sidetracked spending more time designing fun clocks for Plasma than on what I planned to work on, proving there’s some truth to the meme.

These are based on one of the coolest watch designs I’ve seen in recent years – a Raketa Avant Garde:

I use several non-KDE Qt-based applications which I tend to compile manually from source to use the same non-distro-provided Qt version that I compile KDE software against.

I’ve noticed that I don’t update them as often as the rest of the system, so I decided to see if I can add them to kdesrc-build.

The packages-to-be-built definitions are located in repo-metadata/module-definictions which already contains a few 3rd-party libraries that the KDE frameworks and applications use.

Adding the Strawberry player (fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok 1.x) to the build, was quite straight-forward. I just needed to define the repository, cmake options to make it build the Qt6 version instead of the Qt5 one, and the branch I want to build from.

module strawberry
    repository https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry.git
    cmake-options -DBUILD_WITH_QT6=ON
    branch master
end module

For applications with normal cmake setup, it is as easy as that. But there are applications like recoll which don’t have a CMakeLists.txt file in the top level, and kdesrc-build doesn’t like that.

To ensure that kdesrc-build finds the real src directory for cmake, I needed to do something completely hackhish. I had to pass the path to the source directory, which is otherwise defined automatically by kdesrc-build for each project it builds, to cmake-options:

module recoll
    repository https://framagit.org/medoc92/recoll.git
    cmake-options \
        -DRECOLL_QT6_BUILD=1 \
        -DRECOLL_ENABLE_SYSTEMD=0 \
        -DRECOLL_ENABLE_WEBENGINE=1 \
        -DRECOLL_ENABLE_X11MON=0 \
        -S /kde/src/recoll/src
    branch master
end module

Fortunately, kdesrc-build appends cmake-options the normal cmake arguments, so my -S path overrides the path that kdesrc-build defines.

I recently saw one of my old branded “stripes” wallpapers in a screenshot of FreeBSD by someone on X, and that triggered me to make a new wallpaper in a similar style.

There was a call for artwork for the next Debian release – Trixie, and I made a modified version of one of my old wallpapers for it. As it was not chosen to be the default in Trixie, I decided to post it here for people who might like it.

It is, like all my wallpapers, a calm non-distracting one. (it is much prettier full-4k-size than in the thumbnail below)

If you like it, you can download it from Debian’s Wiki – in 1920x1080 and 4k versions. There is also a version with the Debian logo there for inspiration if you want to create a custom distribution-branded one.

A strange fact recently came into my purview – many users and developers don’t know what Open Source is.

Some time ago, there was a controversy regarding the Floorp web browser (a fork of Firefox) going closed source.

The cause for this was that some company forked Floorp and made a browser based on it. I’ll not comment on the irony that the author of a fork of a project complained that someone forked his project.

Obviously, this triggered a storm of negative reactions on quite a few platforms where fans of Free Software / Open Source software hang out.

The developer responded that this is just temporary, and that the browser will soon be Open Source again. After a while, the repositories became public again and all was fine.

The developer said that Floorp is again Open Source, the angry mob said good, the Floorp browser is again Open Source. And every discussion about Floorp got a plethora of comments that people should stop complaining, that Floorp is Open Source, and that the previous situation was just a misunderstanding.

Open Source

The term Open Source is well defined at opensource.org.

Making the source code of a program publicly available is not enough for something to be Open Source. Having an army of people saying that something is Open Source, is not enough for something to be Open Source.

If a license that the code is published under doesn’t conform to the criteria published on opensource.org, a program is not Open Source. A program whose license contains the following sentence, is, by definition, not Open Source:

You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial products.

– Floorp private components/LICENSE

This is strangely worded as it looks like you can not use the Floorp web browser to access, for example, a work e-mail account as that would be using it for commercial purposes. This is likely not what the license author intended – the intent of the license is to disallow creating commercial products by forking Floorp.

While it is a valid desire of the author not to have somebody else profit from his work, it is the thing that makes the Floorp web browser not Open Source.

You can call it ‘source available’, you can call it ‘fair code’ but you can not call it Open Source.

Update: A few days after this blog was published, Floorp moved the code from the private submodule to the main repository. So, it should be again Open Source. Let’s hope it remains like that.

Redefining Open Source

This blog post should have been written when the Floorp thing happened, but I thought this is just a random incident not worth the extra attention.

It seems I was wrong. It is something that people should start paying attention to.

A lot of people – developers and users alike, intentionally or not – misuse the term Open Source, and some of them like FUTO even go that far to redefine it and create their own incompatible The Open Source Definition that will suit their own purpose.

Open Source Confusion Cases

Now, the main purpose of this post isn’t for me to let off some steam, but to share a great project started by Dan Brown of attempting to find and list all projects which claim to be Open Source while their licenses say otherwise.

It can be found on his Github account.

Share your views to FSFE

Albert pointed out that FSFE is also interested in this topic:

The FSFE is looking for examples and thoughts about openwashing if you feel like it I’m sure they’ll welcome your input mastodon.social/@johas/112524760073638652