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Bart Decrem on the Linux Business

Posted by michael on from the big-picture dept.

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."

8 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Build Office filters? by tutal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Build Office filters? by Tim+Colgate · · Score: 4, Insightful
      What he says is:

      I think we have to build this middle layer, this XML layer, and everybody exports to that and imports from that. In the short term it always feels good to keep making your current filters just a little bit better, but I think if you take like a three-year view, then I think StarOffice and us and KOffice and GNOME Office, if we all worked on the same thing, then we'd all be much better off in a couple years.

      . The point is, you've got 4 main groups (Star/OpenOffice, Hancom, KDE, GNOME) all developing filters for e.g. MS Office, RTF, Lotus 123, WordPerfect etc. And then each group has its own native format as well, so for full interoperability, you've got a lot of filters. It would make more sense in the longer term to have a common intermediate format. Maybe we should just use OpenOffice as the standard format(s), and turn the OpenOffice filters into a library. Then if Kword wants to read MS Word it just uses the OpenOffice filters. Of course there are some plans along these lines already - just look at the DTD - 200K! There are also a lot of good links on this page (scroll down)

  2. Re:Hmm. by SkulkCU · · Score: 4, Insightful


    I seem to remember ... a bunch of essays like that

    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
  3. Oxymoron by NickRob · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  4. Re:On the subject of Eazel... by Cato · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:If it were anybody else... by Malcontent · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You know when I was in school 1984 was required reading. I am thinking that is no longer the case.

    --

    War is necrophilia.

  6. Re:On the subject of Eazel... by HeUnique · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)
  7. More important than icons: clutter by John+Allsup · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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