Bart Decrem on the Linux Business

Anonymous Hero writes "Co-founder of Eazel and now vice president of Hancom Linux, Bart Decram gives his views on a whole lot of things related to desktop Linux in an interview at Linux and Main. He talks abour what went wrong with Eazel, why everyone should work together to build Microsoft Office filters, how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world, and how he thinks KDE is 'butt-ugly.' Long read, but worth it."

Comments

Bart Decram?

[qslack]

Bart Decram?

Don't have a penguin, man!

of course

[Joe the Lesser]

'anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world,'

Finally, my flag-burning software will get some use! Time to work on my anthrax algorithm.

well..

[neo8750]

He talks abour what went wrong with Eazel,

we all know his spelling couldn't of went wrong =)

Hmm.

[qslack]

...why everyone should work together to build Microsoft Office filters, how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world, and how he thinks KDE is 'butt-ugly.' Long read, but worth it.

Hmm, I seem to remember a site with a bunch of essays like that. It's something like Slashdot or something similar. :) :)

Re:Hmm.

[flacco]

Everytime I make a joke, I get modded to insightful, and it's starting to scare me.

Hey, that's better than my situation. Everything I try to say something insightful, it gets modded "Funny." :-)

putting a face to the words

[__aanonl8035]

For some reason, I always like to get a visual of who is being interviewed... so I searched around and found his home page with some pictures here

Re:Oxymoron

[Waffle Iron]

Linux buisness? Business of something free? Wow. I'm starting a sunlight buisness.

Good plan. Businesses that use sunlight (farming, tourism, sports, photography, etc.) are huge.

StarOffice

[CmdrSanity]

LaM: And with StarOffice it's fairly easy to change the underlying operating system.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it.

Not true! The beauty of StarOffice is in the load time -- it gives me a moment to reflect...clean under my keybord...wash the car...take the kids to soccer practice...eat dinner...call my mom...watch Farscape...sleep. Then I wake up refreshed with no chores or distractions and StarOffice is ready to go!

Re:He'd better get used to KDE...

[cscx]

But aesthetics does have a real effect on your attitude while using a computer

Well, when you reflect on it, looking at CDE on a SparcStation for too long makes me want to throw the box at the wall. And you have to love the CDE color schemes as well... let's see there is the 'bright pink on dark purple, no.... dark blue on bright purple, no.... fuscia on pink, no..... bright gold on blue, no....'

Personally I think whoever designed CDE didn't really give a shit, as compared to Microsoft and Apple who practically give people psychological tests when designing the GUIs. Shoot, I remember that Microsoft once conducted a large-scale survey to see if people liked the shadows better on one side of the icon or the other. Freakin' shadows! And all this time the CDE people are like, "purple it is, we don't care, we're not changin' it."

Royalties

[Ian Peon]

Compaq paid like a zillion dollars in royalties last year to Microsoft.

Such misinformation! Compaq paid no more than 12.4 ba-jillion dollars last year, not even close to a zillion...

Re:On the subject of Eazel...

[Ed Avis]

Eazel failed because it is only one letter away from Etzel, which is German for Edsel (== Attila). All these things have a rational explanation if you look hard enough.

Re:He thinks KDE is ugly?

[kubrick]

That being said, seeing a foot on my desktop makes me think that something stinks.

Maybe you should wash your feet more often. :)