Amrita amFOSS member Akhil K. Gangadharan, a B.Tech. student pursuing Computer Science Engineering at the School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus, delivered a talk at FOSDEM 2020 titled “Rendering QML to Make Videos in Kdenlive” in the Open Media developer room on February 3, 2020.

FOSDEM or the Free and Open-source Software Developers’ European Meeting, is an annual global event organized in Brussels, Belgium, to promote the widespread use of free and open-source software. It is meant for people involved in Open Source to meet, share ideas and collaborate and is often regarded as the best open source conference in Europe. This year, the event attracted over 8000 open source developers across the world. FOSDEM 2020 housed over 50 developer rooms or ‘devrooms’, each hosting topics ranging from popularly used languages like Go, Python, Kotlin and Javascript to topics like Quantum Computing, Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies, Game Development and Graphics, etc.

Akhil’s talk was selected in the Open Media developer room where he talked about how QML, a language prominently used for designing User Interface in Qt Applications, is being used to make videos in Kdenlive. Kdenlive is a free and open-source video editor, one among many of the applications in the KDE ecosystem. He was selected as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student with KDE in 2019 in his first year of Bachelors’s, where he worked on revamping the Titler Tool in Kdenlive. Akhil also gave a brief talk earlier on his GSoC project at Akademy 2019, KDE’s annual global community summit held in Milan, Italy. Akhil’s travel and accommodation expenses were sponsored by the KDE e.V.

amFOSS, a student community in the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus, focused on contributing to open-source software. Students from amFOSS have been selected for many international student outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, Season of KDE, etc.