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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
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
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.
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