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I'm hoping someone familiar with TheKompany and KDE Studio can answer a few questions for me.

From my understanding, KDE Studio used to be fully open source, but they stopped releasing that version with 2.0.

Now they have KDE Studio Gold, a commercial version at what seem to be reasonable prices. I have absolutely no problem with commericial software and commercial open source software. My question is, is KDE Studio Gold still open source? (not as in free FTP download but source included with purchase). From my understanding TheKompany has every right to take their old Open Source code, and since they own the copyright for everything, release it as a commercial product with no code available.

Can someone please tell me what it is they did?

Also, it would seem their web site needs a little work... the KDE Studio page talks about pre-ordering the software in February 2001.

> Does theKompany believe that software should be Free? Also is that a reflection of the KDE community or a minority stance?

To quote from the responses:
Our philosophy has essentially been that if it's infrastructure like our projects KDE-DB, VeePee, Korelib, etc then we make it open source because it's in everyone's interest to have it available

Checking over at their website to see what they mean when they say 'open source' reveals that Korelib and KDE-DB are released under the GPL.

So no, they don't seem to share RMS' view that ALL software should be free, but rather the more common notion that some software should definitely be free and others areas left open for competition between free and closed and/or payware apps.

They seem to draw the line for free or for money at whether it is 'infrastructure' or not, which seems to be a reasonable definition to go by if you ask me.

• Qt Designer
• KDevelop
• KDE Studio
• PyQt/PyKDE (Python bindings for Qt/KDE)
• KBasic

• Qt Designer
• KDevelop
• KDE Studio
• PyQt/PyKDE (Python bindings for Qt/KDE)
• KBasic

Well, I imagine that it's from selling software. The "download version" of Kapital is $24.95, while the final version will cost $39.95 to download. Those prices are pretty comparable to what Intuit charges for Quicken (basic).

However, one has to wonder whether he'll take Intuit's lead and charge folks $20 for an annual incremental upgrade.

There's KIllustrator (photo-editing), Konqueror and Mozilla (web browsing, HTML editing etc), and again a good many others.

Oh, and anti-aliased fonts are very very nice, but that's just a bonus of a superior toolkit...

Also don't forget that there is also a groupware client for KDE that looks to be coming along nicely. It's called Aethera and currently at version 0.9.1. From what I've read it's a fork of a very early version of Magellan, which is more of a KDE PIM application.

The link for Aethera is: http://www.thekompany.com/projects/aethera/

And for Magellan: http://zamolxe.csis.ul.ie/

I've never used any of the programs mentioned, I've just been reading all the talk about them. But everyone seems to be focusing on GNOME and Evolution without any mention of KDE or Aethera or Magellan. So I'm mentioning them here. :-)

- Boa Constructor, free, still in alpha but pretty neat.

- BlackAdder, Commercial, still in beta.

I've used Boa Constructor to build some prototypes, while I have a few crashes from time to time in frame design mode, it's great to build a quick GUI in no time. - Wing IDE , commercial.

Kivio is maybe not a recent addition, but Yet Another Tool From TheKompany That Looks Like Something We Know From Windows (YATFTKTLLSWKFW)

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Python ( http://python.org/ )
+ Qt ( http://www.thekompany.com/projects/pykde/ )
+ Firebird ( http://firebird.sourceforge.net/ )
+ gvib ( http://www.zope.org/Members/RETierney/gvibDA )
=
A delicious cross-platform substitute for my obese friend Swing.

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No, i dont work for 'em. (Tho i'd like to :)

-henrik

i never could get into one.
i didn t use kde1 because it did crash my pc every session. i had not time to look for what was doing it nor for going into a "kde sucks" thing. so i used gnome a lot. i found it ugly but it worked well. i also used enlightenment alone a lot .
then kde 2. it is just wonderfull. simply wonderfull. there are a few bugs but ,with every compilationfrom cvs , i saw one or another leaving the scene on a daily basis.
their developpment rate is incredible. and they release good stuff!!
mozilla is still better than khtml but too heavy. i fire it only when i know konqueror won t do the stuff.
but i don t find myself going into a "kde rules" frenzy.
and i m sure gnome2 will be great when it s ready.
but there are discussions i lack which should happen here, on slashdot:
-in the kde world, the kompany is doing a great deal of fast and efficient work for the kde project. but at the same time it s releasing closed source programms in order to finance itself. In particular, they plan to release an outlook killer, keeping the server side closed.Also they are really sincere about giving to the community, just finding a way to fund themselves.
-in the gnome world, there seems to be a lot of effort put into tunnelling apps into the user desktop and deals between those entities: eazel, ximian and red hat . a lot of marketing ...which is, as we all know it, the real evil behind m$
the analogy between the difficulties that compagnies related to those projects face stroke me more than the differences .
I m sure such matters should be discussed here more often than , say, lego stories as there are plenty of solutions which could come from here to help all of them.

While Kylix is very interesting for Delphi users wishing to migrate from legacy OSes i think Black Adder is a better choice for the unix crowd. (It's not OSS tho - but i can understand that theKompany needs to make a living too. They've released tons of Free software, so i don't mind "sponsoring" their Free work with buying other non-Free software)

Not to mention that Black Adder is a much cooler name than Kylix :)

-henrik

Check out the roadmap. Groupware is coming, with shared calendar targeted for March.

IDEs like KDevelop and KDE Studioare remarkably like Visual Studio. Whenever I've used both, they've always seemed (mostly) feature complete and stable. There are other IDEs out there, but from my expierence, these are the most mature ones out there. (and, imho, Emacs doesn't count as in IDE)

And now, I have a question for you (or anyone else out there): Are there any good books/materials for learning Win32 or Carbon/Coco/etc programming? I'm a pretty good programmer, but I don't want to be tied to Unix/POSIX forever ;-)
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heh but gtk is only useful as long as you are coding in c, wrappers for other languages lag behind...

and btw there are python wrappers for qt. check out following sites "Python + KDE tutorial"> and PyKDE

Secondly, The Kompany will be releasing a similar update tool as Helix/GNOME really soon for KDE.

Thirdly, if you use Sax2, it automatically does configure itself for the highest resolution that the monitor supports (i tried it with a TNT2 clone and it worked beautifully).

And of course, for the IP you can use DHCP. Works out of the box (at least for SuSE, but I don't know about Redhat).

I suppose you could do application development using the Visual Python environment, however, if I may quote an answer to the question "What's the relationship between Visual Python and PyQt/PyKDE?" from the Visual Python FAQ: They are intended to serve different purposes. PyQt/PyKDE (and I guess the same applies to GNOME-Python) are intended to be used by developers to create full-blown applications in Python rather than C++. Developing the GUI is an important part of this development. Visual Python is intended to be used by end-users who just want to get a job done quickly and the last thing they want is to spend lots of time having to write GUI code.

Speaking of Python, does anyone know what's up with Python 1.6^H^H2.0? A while back, python.org had said that version 1.6 would be out on June 1. Then there was an announcement, mid-June that it would be delayed. Then at the end of June, this link was placed on python.org, and it was stated that the Python interpreter, version 1.6, was renamed to 2.0, and the first beta would be available on July 1. Now, on July 17, that link has been removed from python.org (although the webpage still exists), and the release schedule is gone!

./configure
make comment
make post

theKompany, which are the guys behind Visual Python, also supports the development of KDE Studio which is a C++ IDE that in many respects are more advanced than KDevelop. Have a look at some nifty screenshots here.

They also finance two developers working on KWord for two years. Great initiative.
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theKompany, which are the guys behind Visual Python, also supports the development of KDE Studio which is a C++ IDE that in many respects are more advanced than KDevelop. Have a look at some nifty screenshots here.

They also finance two developers working on KWord for two years. Great initiative.
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