Does anybody know, what's the current progress of the project? The homepage and dev's blog haven't been updated for a plenty of time.

Work is still going on steadily, I believe. There are still regular commits to the K3B trunk, so it's progressing. Not sure about when it'll be released though. For some people the K3B port for KDe 4 is already usable, but on my setup I can't get it to burn CDs.

Looking at cia.vc it seems not to be very active:
http://cia.vc/stats/project/kde/k3b

But if it is important and if you want to be sure, you could write a mail to the maintainers.

AFAIK, one of the reasons for that may be that Sebastian Trueg (k3b mantainer) is mostly busy on the NEPOMUK front nowadays.

Must confess this gives me the jitters. Apparently some projects depend mostly on one guy and start whithering when he/she gets other priorities. This is happening to Quanta and now also to K3B, and both of them can be considered as mission-critical apps in certain contexts. Don't get me wrong, I understand this is the way open source works, but getting Linux into the business world is not exactly feasible if projects can get delayed or cancelled because of one person's unavailability.

I hope this is not considered as unduly criticism, but it would sound like a good idea if the KDE project managers defined the core apps for KDE, so that expectations regarding continuity could / would always be met. Whether K3B and Quanta will be defined as core apps is a different thing, but I would like to think they are.

But even if you declare them as core applications, you have to find people who want to work on them. No one can force somebody to work on a specific project. But also no one can force you not to work on a specific project.

XiniX wrote:Don't get me wrong, I understand this is the way open source works, but getting Linux into the business world is not exactly feasible if projects can get delayed or cancelled because of one person's unavailability.

For that reason applications which business is interested in are developed and maintained (sometimes in a second branch) by service companies and the developers they employ, which can often be the same developers working on the main development branch.

Cheers,
_

I cannot think that K3b will be a high priority in the business world; what do businesses do with CDs or DVDs?

For the moment, people who want the full range of applications will need to use some KDE3 applications with KDE4.

What do businesses do with CDs or DVDs?

I will give you one example from my work: I do a lot with Virtual Machines that we use for demos. Sometimes we need to ship a VM to a client or a business partner on DVD.

Other example: when we finish a development project, we archive the final product on a CD.

john_hudson wrote:I cannot think that K3b will be a high priority in the business world; what do businesses do with CDs or DVDs?

A LOT, at least if my place of work is anything to go by. Some people are going through CDs/DVDs as if they were going out of fashion tomorrow. They're used for backups, sending documentation to clients, in-house produced audio-cds for teaching (low volume so not cost-effective to send off-site for duplication), among other things. Granted, this is not a business in the strictest sense but a university. Still, we wouldn't be able to do without a decent burning application.