April 3, 2002 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0, the third generation of KDE, a free and powerful desktop for Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.0 is available in 50 languages and ships with the core KDE libraries, the base desktop environment, an integrated development environment, and hundreds of applications and other desktop enhancements from the other KDE base packages (administration, artwork, development, edutainment, development, games, multimedia, PIM, utilities, and more). A KDE 3 port of the KDE office suite is available. Consistent with KDE's rapid and disciplined development pace, the release of KDE 3.0 includes an impressive catalog of bug fixes, performance enhancements and feature additions.

KDE, including all its libraries and its applications, is available for free under Open Source licenses. KDE can be obtained in source and numerous binary formats from the KDE http servers or ftp mirrors, and can also be obtained on CD-ROM or with any of the major Linux/UNIX systems shipping today.

"More and more pieces have come together for creating a viable Linux desktop," stated Bernd Kosch, Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Alliances at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "KDE 3 is an important step forward towards this goal since it will make it easier for ISVs to port to the Linux/KDE platform. We see increasing interest in Linux and KDE and we appreciate the excellent achievements of the development team."

"In response to customer demand, we have made KDE the default desktop environment in our Turbolinux Workstation product," said Dino Brusco, VP of Marketing at Turbolinux Inc. "Our customers really appreciate the features and stability that KDE provides and we will be offering this latest version of KDE in future releases of our Turbolinux Workstation product."

"We are very impressed with the design and performance and productivity boosts KDE 3.0 provides for Linux desktop computing," said Carsten Fischer, SuSE Linux Product Manager. "KDE 3 is perfectly aligned with our strategy to provide our users with simple but powerful tools to perform their daily tasks with Linux, and we are very pleased to ship KDE 3 in our new 8.0 release later this month."

"KDE systems - combined with GNU/Linux or a UNIX system - offer a compelling solution for enterprises which desire to realize substantial savings in their IT budgets, and comes at an opportune time in light of current economic conditions and runaway licensing fee inflation," added Andreas Pour, Chairman of the KDE League. "KDE enables enterprises, governments, schools, retail outlets, charities and other businesses to shed themselves of a substantial portion of maddening licensing fees, restrictions and audits. Essentially, I guess you could say that KDE is opening the gates to freedom for the enterprise."

More information about using KDE systems in an enterprise environment is available at the KDE League website.

KDE 2 applications will work with KDE 3 if the KDE 2 libraries are present. Many KDE 2 applications have already been ported to KDE 3, and porting to the new framework is mostly straight-forward.