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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."
I'm not quite sure if that is the right route to go. As MS continues down the sprial path of proprietary software, shouldn't the open source community develope open standards for documents, spread sheets, and presentations rather than endlessly chasing after the newest service release that "fixes" compatibility issues?
I seem to remember
It gets a little redundant, but suggestions from the community (peer review) is how this 'open-sorce' thingy gets to a dope zen-like all-powerful existance. Or, at least, marginally improved. I firmly beleive that in another 11 years, people will wonder what happened to Windows, and Bill Gates will be alone in an alley with nothing but a stuffed tux doll for a pillow. Muhahahahahah!
Everytime I make a joke, I get modded to insightful, and it's starting to scare me.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
Linux buisness? Business of something free? Wow. I'm starting a sunlight buisness.
Well we think he's ugly!
Huh I don't understand how someone can be offended by an icon not looking "nice" to him. Nor do I understand how one letter can be more offensive than any other.
That being said, seeing a foot on my desktop makes me think that something stinks.
Perhaps this guy shouldn't be bashing the main platform that his company's software runs on anyways. Better yet, maybe he should do something about it instead of complaining.
If they did know where Bin Laden was, they wouldn't say. Kill him? Sure. But say they had killed him? Maybe not. Why? He's too useful. Take away Bin Laden, and people might lose interest. We need UBL. We need him to excite the "what if" fear. We need him to be for Bush what the "bear in the woods" was for Reagan. Take away the bear, and there's no reason to carry a gun. Of course, the real bear is probably Iraq with weapons grade plutonium, anthrax, or chemical agents; but Sadam's marketing department is even better than MSFT's.
Now, from the radical "Moslem" POV, they won't tell us if UBL is dead either. They need him to make the myth. They need him to be the one who the Americans can't catch. They need him to fill time on Al Jazeera. :)
No, UBL is sticking around for a good long time. He's too useful to both sides to just die. Personally, I think he's probably already dead from kidney failure, and has probably been buried secretly in Pakistan where he died from exhaustion and kidney failure after the border crossing. No matter. Both sides will keep him "living".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's certainly trivial to spend lots of money on a startup, but it's not essential. The programmers can work from home to start with, the execs can do their own admin, and so on. It doesn't help that the IDC report came out, but IMO running out of money that early is just bad planning.
You know when I was in school 1984 was required reading. I am thinking that is no longer the case.
War is necrophilia.
For those that didn't read the article, Bart basically said that IDC revised their forecasts for the desktop to one third the original number, the investors got scared, and Eazel failed to get funded and promptly died. Then IDC turns around a couple of months later and revises those forecasts once again, tripling their prediction.
Which just goes to show that the REAL failure for 90% of dot-coms has nothing at all to do with economics or the stock market and has everything to do with investor-driven companies. If you have a company, you should produce something to sell. That should be your goal from square one. If Eazel's investors had invested in something thet they believed in, and not just something that they thought they could leverage to make a quick buck, it would still be aroudn today AND it may have made them money in a few years.
I don't know about G being a more mellow sound, but Gnome stuff tends to be better named generally. Gnumeric is quite a cool name... Galeon doesn't scream "G stuck on the front" in the same way that KMail, KWord, KSpread, Killustrator or Krapp bellows "stupid morons who can't think of a good name".
Barely worth reading, IMO. He waffles so much it's hard to understand what exactly he's saying, and even appears to contradict himself:
:)
"We cleaned up KDE and made it look pretty. It's a pretty decent desktop,..."
but later...
"My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly"
Huh? Does *he* even know what his opinion is? And what kind of drugs do you have to be on to think that saying:
"the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant"
relates in any way to a question about marketing applications with a distribution?
An awful interview -- next time find someone articulate and coherent to talk to!
I don't want to call people liars, but Eazel didn't have ANY business plans as far as public people could see. Even when they were approach to bundle commercial software through their services - they replied with a polite email that only their 3rd version of their product will handle infrastructure to sell apps through...
And as for KDE butt ugly - each person and his opinon...
Hetz (Heunique)
My biggest gripe about the current state of the KDE UI design is clutter. This is something that loading fancy eye-candy from kde-look.org cannot easily fix.
Load, e.g. KWord, and then pause for a moment
to reflect on how many toolbar buttons there are, and how much one can accomplish with them.
And last time I checked, it wasn't easy to rearrange things to get rid of the things you use least.
My take on the use of toolbars comes from the common (RISC era) maxim: optimise the common case.
Commonly used operations should go on the toolbar. More transient widgets should be used for less common things (e.g. menus, context specific sidebars, etc.), and it should be possible for someone to, with a few clicks in the right place, pick up a button, or grab a shortcut to something and place it on a toolbar themselves.
A second comment regarding clutter is palettes for this and that. I'd personally like to see them used a little more, and there needs to be some standard (i.e. already written, well integrated, etc.) way for an application to create palettes for various operations, and have them organised. Note that this sort of thing presents problems in the face of the big fat invisible line drawn between window management and an applications widgets.
p.s. One should take note of that flat button on MacOS X, allowing one to show and hide all toobars with the click of a mouse.
John_Chalisque