openDesktop.org is a libre website portal offering personal cloud services like storage and communication services, as well as public services in form of a store for libre (

Open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

/creative commons) content publishing and a code hosting site for open development.

Features

Main Site

The goal of opendesktop.org is the advancement of free software and libre computing technologies via hosting free-as-in-freedom-and-beer services for the community.

Opendesktop.org Personal Services

As of 2019, Opendesktop has extended its offerings of free alternatives to proprietary services, like file sharing, contact and calendar management, chat and messaging. All these services are based on libre software components, like

Nextcloud Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. Nextcloud provides functionally similar to Dropbox, Office 365 or Google Drive when used with integrated office suite solutions Collabora Online or ...

Discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...

or Element (Matrix client) for the chat.

Pling.com

A major part of opendesktop.org's services is pling.com. It's a place where developers, artists and users come together sharing more than 100,000

user generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

s and generating over 90 million

page impression In web analytics and Website governance, website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of an Internet site. On the World Wide W ...

s per month. It allows the publishing of any kind of libre content like themes, wallpapers, software applications and add-ons, as well as other creative content like audio, videos or comics, provided the content is released under liberal licensing terms like the GPL or Creative Commons. This content can then be downloaded or directly installed by everyone without registration or any other limitation or cost. Registered users can up- or downvote content, add comments and upload new content such as applications, themes, add-ons or other libre content. Community members can also decide to sponsor certain content with a monthly donation. In that regard openDesktop.org's Pling is one of the biggest online communities for making such content available, serving as platform for the official KDE Store and other sites that are organized in sub-groups such as gnome-look.org, xfce-look.org and many others.

Supporting via Donations

The social community aspect of the portal has been a driving factor early on. According to the project site a dedicated

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, villag ...

is a key factor to improve the quality of

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and to ultimately grow

Linux Desktop Besides the Linux distributions designed for general-purpose use on desktops and servers, distributions may be specialized for different purposes including computer architecture support, embedded systems, stability, security, localization to a s ...

. Today the acceptance of FLOSS projects and CC artwork is growing, as is the willingness to support quality content via monetary support of the creators of such content. One primary goal for Pling is to encourage free software users to support the various subgroups of the platform via donations.

OCS API

Pling.com uses the Open Collaboration Services API, or short OCS API, which is a certified standard protocol of freedesktop.org.

KDE SC 4 KDE Software Compilation 4 (KDE SC 4) was the only series of the so-called KDE Software Compilation (short: KDE SC), first released in January 2008 and the last release being 4.14.3 released in November 2014. It was the follow-up to K Desktop En ...

was the first project to make use of the OCS API. Nowadays

KDE Plasma 5 KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new defaul ...

and various

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

-applications use the OCS API via the KNewStuff framework.

Opencode.net

Opencode.net is a part of the Opendesktop providing development services for the community. It is based on

GitLab GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer ...

, with the possibility to build binaries via CI and integrate any project with Opendesktops publishing service Pling.com.

Growth and Statistics

In the beginning of December 2001, 2000 users were registered on the sites. About 0.8 million

s per month were made. A year later, in 2002 there were 6000 registered users and 3 million

s. Heavy growth for more than 8 years lead to more than 130.000 registered users from over 100 countries in 2009. Over 90 million

s per month are reached with more than 6

Terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s traffic per month. 2.5 million people visit openDesktop.org every month.

History

The first website of the portal
KDE-Look.org
was started in the year 2001 by

Frank Karlitschek Frank Karlitschek (born 25 July 1973) is a German open source software developer living in Stuttgart, Germany. Karlitschek argues on his blog that "Privacy is the foundation of democracy." He says that people should have a basic right "to contro ...

. Shortly many similar sites with focus on other

themes such as GNOME were launched. In 2007 the openDesktop.org got established as an umbrella page for the whole

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

that summarizes the content from the sites such a
Xfce-Look.orgGNOME-Look.org
o
Linux-Apps.com
which now continue under pling.com.
In January 2016

sold hive01 to

Blue Systems Blue Systems is a German IT company. It is most prominent as a major KDE supporter and previous driving force behind Kubuntu with a number of KDE developers working for Blue Systems. According to Blue Systems employee Aurélien Gâteau, "Blue S ...

GmbH.
Today openDesktop.org is a global meeting place for

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

enthusiasts from all over the world. The websites are operated and maintained by the hive01 GmbH, based in

Bielefeld Bielefeld () is a city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 341,755, it is also the most populous city in the administrative region ('' Regierungsbezirk'') of Detmold and ...

, Germany.

References

External links

openDesktop.org website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Opendesktop.Org GNOME KDE Social Desktop Social networking services