KBear Interview with Björn Sahlström - App of the Month
You can check out the overview of KBear.
Could you please say us any sentence about yourself? Hobby and so on?
Well, my name is Björn Sahlström and I'm from Sweden. I currently working on my master thesis in computer science, at Linköpings University in Sweden, in an international program called "Communication and Interatctivity". I am 41 years old and I sort of came in to this "computer thing" rather late. Apart from computing I am an "outdoor" person, I enjoy fishing a lot and other outdoor activities.
Do you use only KDE, or other platforms too, why?
I use KDE mainly, but lately, due to my studies, I have been using Windows a lot.
Was KBear your first project, or have you started earlier with another work for KDE?
Yes KBear was my first project.
KBear is not a small project, how many people are working with you?
The development has stood still for almost 1 1/2 year now due to my studies. I started off alone with KBear and has done most of the programming myself,, but in the end of development I have had a guy named Frithjof Engel joining me. He really helped me alot and I owe him a great thanks. Then of course we have all translators that helped us translating the app. For a short period I also had a friend of mine helping me, Peter Swärd. I've also had some other help with some special tasks, mainly testing.
Do you know them personally?
Peter I do know personally but not Frithjof, we only had contact through mail and ICQ.
Why the bear in the app?
Well thats simple, my name Björn is the Swedish word for Bear.
Could you tell us the story about KBear in a few sentence?
When I started to use Linux I looked for a graphical FTP client, I found a few but all of them could only connect to 1 server at a time. At that time I used Gnome and developed KBear in Qt. Soon I started to use KDE so I decided to rewrite it for KDE. Since then it has been rewritten a number of time :)
In the last time, we haven't heard a lot from "the bear". Why? What's planned for the future?
As I mentioned earlier both me and Frithjof currently have no time, due to our studies, but hopefully we will find time soon again. I have also been contacted by other people who offered me to take up development. Unfortunately I never heard from the again after the first contact. So if anyone is interested in developing KBear feel free to contact me.
In which language is KBear written and how have you developed it?
It's written in C++ and I tried to work using so called Object Oriented Design. Unfortunately i don't always follow this which tends to mess up the code now and then :)
KBear is free software. Do you like the "GNU-system", or do you produce normally closed source?
Yes I really like the GNU-system with open source. I truly believe this is the way to go to produce more efficient and safer code.
Which person is more important to you? Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds?
That would be Linus I guess, no motivation.
Anything important that we have forgotten?
As I said earlier development has stood still for some time now. I know there are a lot of bugs caused by this since it haven't caught up with the KDE libraries. I'm really sorry for this and if anyone is interested to take up development I guess this is the first task he/she should deal with.
Thank you very much for the interview. I hope, you have the time to work in the future for KBear (I have a few little wishes ;-)
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