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, Discourse or Element for the chat.
Pling.com
A major part of opendesktop.org's services is pling.com, which allows the publishing of any kind of libre content like themes, wallpapers or software applications and add-ons, as well as general creative content like 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 or make a donation and also upload new content such as applications, themes, add-ons or other libre content. 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 part of the network, like gnome-look.org, xfce-look.org and more. It's a place where developers, artists and users come together sharing more than 100,000 user generated contents and generating over 90 million page impressions per month.
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 is a key factor to improve the quality of open source and to ultimately grow Linux Desktop. 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 sections of the platform via donations.
Pling.com uses the Open Collaboration Services API, or short OCS API, which is a certified standard protocol of freedesktop.org. KDE SC 4 was the first project to make use of the OCS API. Nowadays KDE Plasma 5 and various KDE-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, 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 page impressions per month were made. A year later, in 2002 there were 6000 registered users and 3 million page impressions. Heavy growth for more than 8 years lead to more than 130.000 registered users from over 100 countries in 2009. Over 90 million page impressions per month are reached with more than 6 Terabytes traffic per month. 2.5 million people visit openDesktop.org every month.
History
The first website of the portal, , was started in the year 2001 by Frank Karlitschek. Shortly many similar sites with focus on other open source themes such as GNOME were launched. In 2007 the openDesktop.org got established as an umbrella page for the whole network that summarizes the content from the sites such as , or , which now continue under pling.com.
