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Rekall, Aethera, Kapital... Oh My
The first application is ReKall. Rekall is TheKompany's answer to MS Access. Lots of people have asked for this kind of application for Linux, and TheKompany in response has issued this Preview Release version. The Upcoming KOffice will include a version of Rekall. Instead of using Visual Basic like Access does, Rekall uses Python, as well as plug-ins for MySQL, Postgre-SQL, and Informix (other plug-ins for the various databases will follow.) Note: Since Rekall is using KDE-DB (also a contribution to KDE by TheKompany) and KDE-DB will be available only with the upcoming KDE 2.2; you'll need to do some simple compilation and installation. All the instructions are available at their web pages.
The next product is Aethera -- a nice PIM manager to manage all your email as well as contact information. You might say it's competing with Evolution, but both of the projects takes different direction of implementation. Aethera is also expandable with Plug-ins. (Debian packages are also available).
While ReKall and Aethera are Open Source, the last one is a commercial product called Kapital, which is an Quicken/MS Money workalike. The product costs money (you can find those prices at the above link) and it has one of the nicest and easiest GUI's I've been played with. You can download the beta to test it and find for yourself. (Debian packages are available for Kapital as well.)
Wrong
TheKompany is making their products and if they want - they release software to be included with KDE, but that DOESN'T mean that KDE is depending on TheKompany - they are totally independent of each other.
KDE is being developed by mostly volunteers (and some developers who are paid by the various distributions - Caldera, Mandrake, SuSE) - so if TheKompany tommorow goes south it will be a sad day, but KDE development will be continued...
On the GNOME side, Eazel and Ximian are doing lots of work - if Eazel and Ximian will go south, GNOME will continue to be developed, but with much slower pace until they'll get new volunteers to help.
Hetz (Heunique)
Why is it people continue to follow the Microsoft-think of "One World, One Operating System, One Product"? You do not need a single ubiquitous application or suite to solve interoperability problems! What you should promote instead is a single standard for documents themselves. Wait... isn't XML supposed to do this? (Or is that just a hollow promise? I'm not really an XML fan, an I'm not an application fan either, but this is ridiculous.)
Isn't it every other day with "New macro virus!" or "New Outlook security hole!" that we criticize the ubiquity of single applications? "Interoperability" means multiple products working together. Not the MS definition, "one product working with itself on every computer". That is not interoperability.
In fact, not having a standard application encourages interoperability. What would have happened if we'd settled on a single application for mail exchange? File transfer? HTML? (Oh, whoops, we tried that, and now have a horribly fragmented mess that's still being cleaned up.)
One ubiquitous office suite is not the answer.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
So what really needs to happen is the KDE and GNOME people need to get together and decide on UI interoperability standards -- then any apps wishing to become a "de facto standard" would adhere to those, and run perfectly well in a GNOME or KDE environment, or a mix of the two, or neither.
To some extent, this has already occurred - AFAIK, it's possible to drag&drop between the two, and KDE is able to make use of GTK themes (haven't played with it myself though)
Admittedly, the differences in toolkits (qt vs gtk) aren't trivial - and the backend communications are even less so - but it doesn't seem out of the question that an interop standard could be agreed upon - then it's just a matter of porting the current apps to the new standards.
I am, of course, prone to being wrong.
The MS file format is specific to features in Word. If the Linux word processor doesn't support those features, then it is pointless to try and be compatible.
Essentially, if you want to be compatible, then you have to treat the document the same way that Word does. Which, one way or another, means putting Word on Linux (by reverse engineering, porting, or parallel development of equivalent code).
To develop a word processor that reads Word documents, your main goal has to be compatibility, not functionality or innovation. You can't say "I think it would be great if my word processor had feature A and changed the concept of feature B". Then when you try to push Word documents into it, you find out that your paradigm doesn't fit Microsofts', and you have to change it all.
Currently, import filters have to eliminate or ignore the parts of the format it doesn't support, and transform the other peices to fit the paradigm. Hence the poor filters.
So when people say, "Linux needs better import filters for Word documents," what they are really saying (but don't know it) is, "Linux needs Word."
The real issue is: why don't they stick to standard file types? Well, maybe there isn't a standard for presentations, spreadsheets, etc.
You can't use a Microsoft standard without your program having Microsoft's features in it. The two are inseparably tied together.
The de facto standard doesn't solve the problem, it just limits the options. A true standard will give a base upon which may be built custom extensions. That way an application may explore the possibilities, yet return to the basics when interoperability is called for.
This is nearly off-topic, but interesting in the same way:
KDE has a project going to produce a print publication (alongside a web site, of course) that highlights and discusses KDE applications and features articles of interest to KDE users.
The title of the project is KDE-Zine (can anyone in Europe guess where this is going?).
We Americans (particularly us Southern Boys) reflexively connect Kapitalized words that subsitute "s/C/K" with the embarrassing and horrific KKK, but the Europeans in the KDE project don't really realize this, but it goes both ways...
Recently on the KDE-Zine list, some of the Americans had started abbreviating KDE-Zine as "the kz". They would discuss what should go into the kz, what progress was made on the kz, etc. It lasted for a short time until some of the Germans on the list became rather emotional, to the bewilderment of the Americans.
It turns out that "kz" is the designation for the Nazi Concentration Camps in German. It's a *very* touchy and emotion filled subject.
It's interesting how Open Source ties cultures together, and how we are all revealed to have our own little hangups and embarassing cultural legacies.
And then there's the recent nixing of the proposed name for the new standard text editor for KDE - the original author wanted to name it Kant, until it was pointed out that many english speakers (particularly some British ones) had some issues with how that was pronounced. :)
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
No office suite is very good yet. As soon as one pokes its head out from the others with the stablity and features necessary, then it will probably be adopted as more or less "standard" (although it could be that we get more than one, which is probably fine). RedHat should not adopt any office suite as standard, because that would interfere with the evolution and natural selection of the best office suite. Just wait a little bit, and things will sort themselves out. Same is true for the web browser (konqueror really is pretty good, and Mozilla/gecko is getting better all the time). I've seen the cries of "X-windows doesn't do 3-D", and "we don't support USB", and "the kernel doesn't scale well", etc., etc..... the point is we always seem to get there. The same is true of office suites. We have several serious contenders now. Just let them evolve. In a year, we'll have a serious contender to MS Office.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
The difference between TheKompany and Ximian/Eazel is that theKompany doesn't have any affect on the KDE core team and the KDE core development.
theKompany is just a software company. Don't use their software if you don't want to (and I think many KDE users don't use their software).
But nowadays, if you are a GNOME user, practically, you cannot just ignore the work of Ximian and Eazel (in the way you can ignore theKompany). They have taken over the GNOME development with venture capital. VC, which source now seems to drain.
That's the difference.
Eh? their products are either fully commercial, closed source, etc or totally open (gpled, bsded, or what license they use). For the most cases their commercial and open software is separate and have little to do with each other. Some of it is open-source but addons cost money - somewhat more questionable but still ok with me- usually the added features are stuff not that many need.
I just dont see their free projects as their evil plan to lure customers into feeling all warm and fuzzy then totally ripping them off. In my opinion the free stuff is their main thing, and the proprietary stuff is just to keep the food on the table. How else could they spend most of the day writing free stuff?
Now, that's a totally legitimate business plan, of course, but TheKompany isn't a free software company any more than Microsoft is. They're just selling proprietary software for an otherwise Free platform.
But please remember that they've released a lot more Free code than proprietary. Comparing them to microsoft is insulting. It's true though that they're not a *pure* free software company. They mix from both worlds. The "feel" i get is that they are a bunch of guys that wants to write free code, but still eat so they do the best they can.
So don't claim that they "Get it." And why are you knocking Ximian? It's fine to praise TheKompany in this forum, but will you (and TheKompany's prez!) quit it with the "t-shirt and monkey" crap?
I have nothing against Ximian and eazel and i truly hope they make it - but i just cant see how where they'll get the revenue. Hopefully it's just me being stupid.
-henrik
I have absolutly no problems buying products from theKompany - because I know I sponsor their free work by doing so (that their products are excellent may have something to do with it too :)
All people need food on the table, and selling some proprietary applications to be able to develop free stuff seems like a reasonable tradeoff. I'm afraid some linux companies will just disappear once they've burned through the VC money simply because they have no plans on how to make money. :(
Sorry FSF(Free Software Fanatics? :) but i feel that in some cases proprietary software might be a Good Thing. This could be one of them. The net effect of theKompany releasing some closed source products will be *more* Free software, not less.
Also: If you think their products could be useful: *please* buy them! It'll keep the free stuff coming.
Kudos to all @ theKompany.
-henrik (no, i dont work there :)
You could pay $30 for a "preview release", or $40 for a final version. Or you could just run Quicken instead.
Or you could use the just-as-polished, already available, open source product.
I bet you'd like some screenshots
An aside:
People always whine about KDE vs Gnome and relative freedom, GPL, FSF, blahblahblah. But it is interesting to note that Ximian and Eazel release ALL their products under Free licenses. TheKompany says "We will be offering Kapital under a closed-source license. However, we are considering a limited open-source license, under whose terms purchasers of the software also receive source code. We are exploring other options for making the software as open as possible."
Actions speak louder than words.
About 3D -- if you use Debian's supplied XFree86 4.x deb's, you get the precompiled drivers for the video card. And I have no idea where you're getting the idea that the drivers are 0.01 -- DRI is maturing rapidly and is already very useful on out-of-the-box configurations. Yeah it will only get better, and I think they're still calling the results "beta", but it's very-usable beta. If you have a card that is not supported in a distributed X, like the ATI Radeon (which I have), getting the drivers is still quite easy -- go here. That's the Debian side of things (and will probably apply to Progeny etc. as well); talk to others about the Mandrake or whatever. The only driver really lacking in automated install at the moment is the nVidia Linux driver, but I'll bet somebody has packaged that up by now also, and it's not hard at all to install even without a package. I think that takes care of almost all mainstream video cards (see the DRI site for what cards they support (a lot)).
And what's this crap about the games being poorly ported! Loki has done an amazing job moving these highly complex games from one display platform to another and packaging the results. I have recently installed Descent 3 for Linux, and the only trouble I had was that I didn't want to install it as root (but most people would install anything as root) and had to change the permissions on the install directory, but that was simple.
As for business apps, having useful apps on Linux would be nice, but VMWare running Windows 2000 gets me all I could possibly want in that area without leaving the comfort of my KDE desktop.
Let's hear it for the good work already done in bringing Linux to the mainstream, and I'm not even getting into KDE vs. GNOME or any of that (they're both nice, usable environments; I happen to like KDE more).
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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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
I'm not usually a troll-biter, but there is a valid point there. There's a long tradition in the US for the Ku Klux Klan to use "K" spelling as a code-word for something they endorse. (Posters for "Kalvin Kooledge" used to be fairly common, for example. Check eBay for more.).
However, since the KDE folks are european, I wouldn't expect them to know this.
I don't think it's that important, but there should be some sensitivty there. Just as with folks who insist on using the word "cracker", which is a very common racial slur in parts of the US.
The problem with Linux suites is that there's no lack of them in the marketplace, and none of them is in any danger of becoming a standard; users just install whatever suite they think is neat, which is an obstacle to interoperability.
Conversely, the (perhaps only?) good thing about MS Office is that any computer with Windows is likely to also have Office, so you can edit/display/transmit your files to virtually any Windows user. The most compelling example of this that I can think of is PowerPoint; if I need show someone my presentation at short notice and don't have my laptop handy, I can borrow someone else's, as long as they have Office. I had high hopes that Corel's suite for Linux would address this when it came out, but that seems to have died the death.
Why doesn't a major Linux distribution provider (like RedHat) specifically embrace an application suite, and ship it with their bundle? By creating such a de facto standard, much would be accomplished for interoperability and document sharing.
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