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

On the subject of Eazel...

[PeterClark]

I was a little surprised that the interviewer didn't turn up the heat a bit and ask just how Eazel managed to burn through all the investment money so fast. My question, for all you armchair pundits out there, is why was Eazel so dependent upon the reports of IDC? 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 (remember, 48.2% of all forecasts are pulled ourt of thin air). By my (admittably simple) mind, it would be good business practice to always have a little nest egg to help tide you in such times.

Of course, it was nice of them to release Nautilus under the GPL, so that the community could take a bloated and slow program and actually make it work. :)

:Peter

Re:clarification

[bartdecrem]

Well, I know this sounds really stupid - but then again, pretty much all marketing sounds stupid. But the reality is, there are fashions in product naming, and if you violate those fashions, names sound kind of odd. There's a reason people make good money worrying about these issues.

For instance, during the dot-com phase, everyone put ".com" in their company name, but by now, everyone's removed that from their company name. Also, a few years ago, it was very popular to make compound words with capitals in the middle (HancomLinux) - but now that's not so popular anymore.

Similarly, single letters go through periods where they are hot and not. So a few years ago, everyone loved using the letter Q in company names (Quantum etc.). But that's really old now. When Eazel picked Z that was a decent marketing decision (in addition to the fact that the Easel.com domain was not available). In my personal opinion, the overuse of the letter K in all things related to the KDE project gets old very quick and is not a huge asset. But I'm sure KDE users feel the same about Galeon, Gnumeric and all the other G-words that are connected with GNOME. I just think the letter G is overall more elegant - it sounds smooth and looks round, whereas the letter K is so, well, square. Also, once I heard that KDE originally stood for Kool Desktop Environment I could never quite get that thought of my head - and that's kind of a traumatic thought:) (I fully appreciate that GNU Network MOdel Environment is quite a mouthful). There - for what that's worth :)

Having said that, I do think the KDE project has made great progress on the marketing side over the last year. The web site, the press releases, the entire enterprise.kde.org site (which doesn't render properly in Mozilla RC1) are all great showcases of an open source project that knows how to market itself. Kudos to the KDE team!

Bart

PS: The letter R doesn't invoke a strong emotional response in me one way or another.

Re:clarification

[10Ghz]

but in my opinion, the default icons and some of the other look & feel elements really are KDE's biggest weakness and the default icons that ship with KDE need a make-over

So change them! In my KDE I use the nice Crystal iconset I got from www.kde-look.org. Installation took about 2 minutes.

You seem to love the underlying technology of KDE but hate the looks. Well thank god for that, since it would be really difficult to change the technology, whereas you can change the appearance in just few minutes. Saying that "KDE is ugly" is not a valid reason not to use it, since you can change the way it looks