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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."
and you are a bunch of faggots.
first post!!
Why did I post this? Ask me now!
kde is butt ugly
windowz eXPee ForeVER!
Why the hell do I eat my own shit? It smells bad. It sort of drips out of my sphincter, and it probably is even full of all kinds of weird smelly germs. And yet, I just can't get enough of the stuff.
Let's see how low that karma can go! Karma is -4.
Aeka slipped off her heavy layers of clothes to prepare for an early
.
evening dip in the hot springs. Busily folding the royal garments, Aeka
completely failed to notice Ryoko as she phased through the bedroom wall.
Hands reached up from beneath those of the nude Jyurain princess and cupped
her breasts.
"What the...?" Aeka angrily spouted. Ryoko pinched her royal nipples
and rolled them about in her fingertips. The princess took a second to
release a heady sigh before spinning about. "What's the big idea?"
"I wanted to show you my new toy," Ryoko said and held up what looked
like a lollipop. Aeka eyed it, and the swirl on the disk began to spin. Her
eyes turned glassy, mesmerized by the swirl. "Hehe," Ryoko laughed with a
smirk.
Earlier . .
Ryoko was simply walking by, minding her own business, when the door
to Washuu's dimensional closet swung open and the spiky-haired mad
scientist sprung forth.
"Eeaa!" Ryoko let out as she hopped back. "It's you. I don't want
anything plugged into me today."
"Little ole, me?" Washuu chimed, pointing her index fingers at her
cheeks in a cute display. "I wouldn't do that. I have a birthday present
for you."
"What?" Ryoko said as Washuu thrust the invention at her.
Ryoko took it in her hand and eyed it. "Looks like a lollipop." She
opened her mouth and prepared to take a bite out of it. Washuu's hand
smacked Ryoko upside the head, shutting her mouth.
"It's a Hypno-Stick," Washuu explained as she landed. Little Washuu-
bots popped from around her shoulders to hold up 10.00 point landing cards.
"I thought you could have some fun with it." Ryoko's look of annoyance
phased to one of interest.
"I think I could," Ryoko said, grinning, With that, Ryoko turned to
leave and begin plotting.
"That's my girl,"Washuu said. "Your mommy loves you!"
Ryoko cringed and grimaced while behind her, Washuu's mouth turned a
sly smile as she closed the dimensional door.
A vacant Aeka stared out at an all too happy Ryoko. "Put this on,"
Ryoko told her, handing Aeka a light-blue robe from her rack. Once the
naked princess was partially covered, Ryoko took her hand and led her out
the door and down the hall. "You know, I'm the sort of girl who enjoys
sharing her good fortune with others."
Outside the door to Tenchi's room, Ryoko stopped and listened. Having
confirmed someone was inside, she whispered into Aeka's ear who immediately
started blushing brightly. Ryoko grinned evilly as Aeka slipped inside.
Ryoko waited a bit at the door, listening for the fun to start before
phasing through to get the full peeping experience.
"Hi, Ryoko," Tenchi said, walking past her in the hallway. Ryoko spun
around, shocked, and waved meekly. Then who the heck is inside?! Ryoko
thought.
Once Tenchi turned the corner, Ryoko heard the shout of "hentai!" and
a smack. Aeka came back out into the hall. Tenchi's dad lay on the floor
unconscious with his pants around his ankles. A large red handmark was
splayed across his face. Ryoko fought the large sweat bead of embarrassment
from forming.
"Don't worry," Ryoko told Aeka. "I was just so anxious I went a few
doors too far." Grabbing the princess by the arm, Ryoko tracked Tenchi down
to a large room in the house that he used for sword practice. There he was
with a wooden practice sword, going through a kata grandpa was forcing him
to learn. Ryoko impatiently nudged Aeka into the room.
Hearing her, Tenchi looked to see Aeka. "Tenchi," she said, a sweet
tone to her voice. The front flaps of her robe were not quite pulled
together, and he could see she wore nothing underneath as she approached
him.
Controll Group strikes back for all those sugar pills.
Bart Decram?
Don't have a penguin, man!
qslack.com
'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.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
This man has been educated far more than you, has travelled the world far beyond your pathetic experiences (leaving your parents basement does NOT count for anything), has acquired wealth beyond your means, and runs the most successful contuining business enterprise in the history of the world.
In short, he makes decisions every day that are more important than your life's work.
So F* OFF, you USELESS HIPPIES. GOODBYE!!!
P.S.
He also takes a shower every day and gets a haircut once a month... another problem you dirty hippies haven't figured out how to solveâ¦
we all know his spelling couldn't of went wrong =)
...considering Hancom's close partnership with theKompany. Perhaps someone can point him to kde-look.org where he can find all sorts of eye candy goodness for KDE.
Or have I been trolled?
:Peter
...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.
qslack.com
Come on KDE is anything but butt ugly! Look and Feel is sure subjective but it shows his extreme bias when he says KDE is butt ugly. That alone will make me not read what he has to say. If he thinks KDE is ugly then what about CDE/Motif ? ;)
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?
how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world
..
Oh yeah, nothing like selling it on it's merits or anything
Dude. I'm all sporting wood now.
My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant. There's an elegancy missing in the thing. The underlying thing is pretty darn good, no argument with that.
I think "K" is as offensive as the rest of the letters "F", "U", and "C"!
Serious things in the article... The maturing of Star Office (it should rather be OpenOffice, right?), KDE, and GNOME. How, WinXP bootleg CDs cannot be found in Korea.
I believe the "anti-US sentiment" mentioned in the summary is not fully representative of the interview -- the point seems to be more like "if a single source for product is present, the Koreans should rather have a Korean source rather than an American source". That is very different from "K" (and the other offensive letters) USA
S
Yes, step right in to kde-look.org. We have 1000s of KDE themes!
Now would you like the Aqua or XP ripoff?
Its just like those rednecks who like both kinds of music -- country AND western.
He may be "riding out the storm" but he's just helping another one along. Why did the dotcom crash happen here? Well, I'm sure the economists could give me all sorts of answers, but the simple facts are that innovative solutions and products are not always good products to profit off of. No one really needs a "mobile computing solution" we might need a cellphone that can message or get email, but for all our other needs, all one really needs is a desktop, or a laptop. All these portable devices are wonderful toys, but they don't provide services that persons desperately need or want. They won't sell profitably. Period.
-=The Dude=-
I use KDE because it has a lot of features. But nevertheless, KDE's style looks ugly.
And the name KDE is even more ugly. K always reminds me to Kmart. Can't they come up with a better name?
And KDE folks should take a look on OS X. This style looks really professional.
Interview: Bart Decrem -- Leveraging desktop Linux
To those who have followed Linux for awhile, the name Bart Decrem is a familiar one. Originally from Belgium, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and a Master's in International trade before moving to California in 1989 and enrolling in Stanford Law School. In 1999, he became a co-founder of Eazel, the innovative but ultimately unsuccessful open source company that produced the Nautilus graphical shell for GNOME. He has now joined Hancom Linux, the Korean concern that produces a Linux distribution there and that is known elsewhere for its Hancom Office productivity suite. In an interview with Linux and Main, the personable and enthusiastic Decrem discussed life in Korea, his company's plans, Linux business models, what went wrong at Eazel, how dislike of the U.S. could spell success for Linux and disaster for Microsoft, and a multitude of other things. We began by asking him how he had become involved with Hancom Linux, where he is the newly named Vice President of Business Development.
LaM: So what's going on with you and Hancom?
Decrem: I've been in Korea for about eight months. I came out here after Eazel shut down. I wanted to travel, and my wife is Korean-American and I wanted to learn Korean, learn another language, and ride out the stormy weather in Silicon Valley. So I ended up working for a company called Linux One, not the U.S.-based Linux One that everybody has talked about, just a company that happens to have the same name, which is kind of poor marketing. It's a Linux-based system vendor in Korea. I worked there for about six months, helped them with strategic planning and stuff like that. Thre wasn't so much for me to do there because it's really a Korean company with Korean customers. So I moved over to Hancom about one month ago, and here there's lots of stuff for me to do.
LaM: Hancom is known and successful throughout the Far East because of its handling of two-byte character sets. Are there plans for a broader U.S. and European presence?
Decrem: Let me give you my view on the world on that issue. This is my view and not company policy at this point. The way I describe the company is that we're a provider of Linux-based productivity solutions. I'm not saying that to talk fancy, I'm saying that because we're not necessarily just a Linux desktop company, because what we're doing with Sharp and the Zaurus is really important to us. It's not really a Linux computer -- it's a handheld device that happens to run the Linux operating system. That's important to our future. Our company has three products. The first product we have is Hancom Office; the second one is Hancom Mobile Office; and the third one is Hancom Linux OS. Hancom Office is an office productivity suite for the Linux desktop that was first done in Korean, then in Chinese simplified and traditional, Japanese -- this week we're launching the Arab edition, which is kind of our big news for the month, actually. That's a big deal. Let me talk to you about that in a second. We also have the English edition. The mobile product runs right now just on the Sharp Zaurus. That's the beauty of Qt, that you get to port to all different platforms pretty easily, so we're hoping to bring that product to other Linux-based PDAs. I think it all kind of depends on how well the Zaurus does, whether there's going to be a Linux-based PDA market or not. And then the Linux OS right now we're really only marketing in Korea, because in Japan for example we have a partnership with Red Hat, and there we are bundled with Red Hat. In Korea it makes sense for us to have our own branded product. So we took Red Hat and made a derivative. We cleaned up KDE and made it look pretty. It's a pretty decent desktop, although I happen to not run it because I've been running GNOME for awhile, from the old days. But we are bringing the Linux OS to other markets. For example, we are doing an Arab edition. As far as I know, we'll be the first pure Linux Arab language Linux-based OS when we ship this week. It's like nothing out there that I know of. I'm scared to say it's the only one, just in case I'm wrong, but I can't find another one and nobody else can either. We're doing an Arab Linux OS and so the way we're looking at the OS business is, if it makes sense because of our partnership agreement and because of the local market to do an OS, we will. Maybe it will be branded Hancom and maybe it will be branded by a partner.
So, to answer your question, in my opinion the U.S. Linux desktop market is the hardest place to make a buck in the world. I kind of learned that one at Eazel, but generally, if you look at the state of the U.S. industry, it's overall much less cost-sensitive than any market elsewhere in the world. When I was in Europe -- I'm a European guy -- copying of software was much more casually done than in the U.S. Companies in the U.S., even small companies, are much more disclplined about things like licensing. Because of that, in my opinion, it's hard to make money in the U.S. because the companies are pretty happy with Windows. It works pretty well, and the cost savings that result from Linux on the desktop for most companies do not warrant the trauma of having to worry about whether your Microsoft Office document is going to open properly. It's a tough place to make a buck. But in the rest of the world the story's a lot different, for two reasons. One, because of cost issues, and second, because of control issues. Even if you talk about Europe, a lot of people just don't like the idea of sending such a big check to Microsoft every year. They want to support the European industry because they think that with Linux they have a chance to build on their own IT sector. And as you go into the rest of the world, the cost issues become much more important. For example, we're doing a deal in Tunisia. I don't think the Tunisian government is too excited about sending a big check to Microsoft or to any U.S.-based company. Those guys are dying to switch to Linux because of the cost savings, because it makes a big difference to them. And the reality is that the U.S. is not very popular in many parts of the world. I'm European, though in a lot of ways I think of myself more as American, in things like an outlook on the world, but the fact is that America isn't very popular in every country. So in my opinion there's great opportunity for companies like ours, first of all in Asia, which is our home base, but I think now with the Arab announcement there are going to be some interesting opportunities for us. We're working on a big deal with the Tunisian government, but then elsewhere in the Arab world, and because of double-byte we get to do Hebrew and all sorts of other languages as well, because now our software is bidirectional. And I think Latin America is an interesting place, and we're talking to people there. The way I would rank things ia Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Europe, U.S.A.; unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa would be below that one because of the state of the economies there.
I think it's important for us to be in the U.S.; it's an important place to do business and we have to have some sort of product strategy there, but it's a tough place. Also, if you look at the Linux desktop space, there are a bunch of interesting things happening, whether it's Xandros or Licoris or Lindows -- lots of fairly polished Linux-based desktop OSes coming out in the U.S. StarOffice is hitting 6.0. It's a pretty decent product. I think our product has some things going for it, but the reality is that StarOffice has been around for much longer than ours and is a more mature product. So we're going to keep working, getting better, and we'll see what we can do in the U.S.
LaM: Are you finding resistance to things like the XP licensing scheme among potential customers who have been using Windows?
Decrem: There are three things coming together. The first thing that happened is the Microsoft antitrust trial, which in the U.S. made people take notice, but I think in the rest of the world made people take notice even more. In an event of the magnitude of the antitrust trial, people start sending memos to their bosses, and they start forwarding newspaper articles, so if you're in China or Korea or pretty much anywhere else in the world you really notice that stuff. Your general unease about Microsoft and dependence on U.S. technology becomes a lot higher. You start looking more closely at Microsoft. Then the licensing change is the second part of it -- all of a sudden they made a lot of pretty dramatic licensing changes. The reality is that Windows and Office are pretty mature products, and most people are pretty happy with them, which is why Microsoft does those licensing changes; they've got to figure out a way to keep sucking money out of people who aren't in a hurry to upgrade. These folks are thinking, "Our stuff works, and they're trying to stick these licensing requirements on us so we keep sending them more money, which we don't feel the need to do necessarily." They look at their IT budgets and the amount of money involved, and they'd rather not send all that money. The third factor is Linux finally emerging on the server and establishing itself, and on the desktop there's starting to be a plausible story with KDE and GNOME maturing, with StarOffice being a credible product and right now Mozilla finally coming to 1.0. So it's now a real alternative.
Those three things together mean that in my opinion specifically government markets have become very interesting opportunities. Because governments are one place where those policy factors play in, and they're big enough that you can make money off of them. They're also big enough that they can set their own standards. So if you're the Korean government, you can say that for word processing, our document format standards are such-and-such. If you're a small company, you can't really do that. So whether it be Korea or China or the Middle East, I think governments are a unique opportunity. You can get a big deal with them; they're interested in the public policy issues; they're very interested in the cost-saving issues; and they're big enough and enough of a market maker that they can create a standard. So they're a big opportunity for us.
We've done Korea. Our big deal in Korea was when we did 120,000 desktops. And if you look at how many government announcements have happened in the last nine months, either doing studies on open source, purchasing small numbers of Linux-based servers, or as in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source, there's a lot of momentum there. And it's going to keep picking up.
You see three different things. You see every government in the world commissioning studies on where it makes sense to deploy open source, whether it be the United States, or Europe, or anywhere. The second thing you see is in some places actual legislation passed, where people say first you must look at open source alternatives, and then if you're going to buy commercial software you have to get special approval. That's the extreme case of Brazil, but there are a couple of other places, too. And then third what I think you're going to see is more situations like Korea, where in our case the government bought 120,000 bundles of OS and desktop, and they paid us. And so now people are deploying these things throughout training centers; usually they're second-boot systems, at least in our case in the first phase, where they keep running Windows but they're also installing desktop Linux. The second phase starts for us in a couple of months, and you're going to start seeing some Linux-only desktops. So whether it's the City of Largo in the U.S., or the government of Korea, or the City of Beijing in China, those are the initial business opportunities.
LaM: And governments have generally steered away from products for which there is only a single source, which with Microsoft presents a problem.
Decrem: It's a single-source thing, right. I think people look at it the way you look at national defense. This a critical piece of your economic infrastructure; you do not want a single source. And if you're going to have a single source, you'd rather have a Korean single source than Microsoft, after the antitrust trial, after all the scandals about backdoors in their software, the security holes -- security is a big factor. People are really freaky about that. Not knowing that the security holes are and also the backdoors -- those sorts of things can have national security implications. The Chinese government is very sensitive to stuff like that. So there are a lot of pretty good reasons to look at Linux, including on the desktop, if you're a policy maker outside the United States, and Inside the United States. Andy's favorite thing to say at Eazel was that in the next five years you're going to start to see legislation in the U.S. to the effect of why should we be sending taxpayer dollars to a company that's a convicted monopolist when there are alternatives; we should be using those taxpayer dollars to support open standards and industries where there are fewer barriers to entry. I think you're going to see more of that in the U.S. The Department of Defense is running StarOffice. It's a Windows-based desktop, but you're going to see more of that kind of thing, though it will take a couple more years to pay off.
LaM: And with StarOffice it's fairly easy to change the underlying operating system.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it. That's the importance of Mozilla and StarOffice. Those are kind of mission-critical applications, and as you switch to those, the operating becomes all but irrelevent. That's the beauty of the Internet, frankly. It commodifies the operating system to a large extent.
LaM: Allowing you to look at other issues, such as security.
Decrem: Right. Security and a lot of other issues. I think Eric Raymond is right about the cost of the product issue. If I'm not mistaken, the Microsoft licensing is now more expensive than the cost of the CPU. So it's the highest single-cost item in the price of a new PC these days that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm wrong. Compaq paid like a zillion dollars in royalties last year to Microsoft.
LaM: There's a lot of discussion of software piracy, especially overseas. Have you seen much of this in your travels?
Decrem: I think it varies from country to country, and I think it has varied with time. I think it's a little different in Europe now than it was 10 years ago. Same in Korea. You do buy fake products sometimes, but when I go to the street markets, I've actually tred to find illegal software here in Korea and I couldn't find it. It's interesting. In the U.S. we have CompUSA; in Korea, you don't really have that. What you have is things called technomarkets, which are places that offer small boutiques, technology shops. You go there to buy a computer or a DVD player or whatever. I looked for bootleg XP and I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it in Hong Kong, either. In Hong Kong I could find bootleg DVDs all over the place. In Korea, you can't find bootleg DVDs anywhere. You can find bootleg leather jackets everywhere, you can find bootleg music very easily, but not bootleg software.
The other thing that's interesting in Korea is, I went to Busan, which is a city here, and went to what we call PC rooms, which isn't exactly an Internet cafe, but instead like a computer center; people go there to play games, by and large. But I couldn't find one that ran Microsoft Office -- they were all running Hancom Office, the Windows-based product. Because 10 years ago, this country was a Hancom Word country. And then Microsoft used some of their usual tactics and took over the market. I think that Microsoft is something like 70 percent of the market in office productivity. And even today in a lot of government and other places you'll find a lot of Hancom Word, which is not actually a full office suite. In all of Busan, there was no Microsoft Office. Now in Seoul, most places do end up having Microsoft Office for some reason, but in Busan or anywhere else, you just can't find it. They don't want to spend the money on it, so you just can't find it.
What you should know, by the way, is that a company named Hansoft made a product 10 years ago called Hancom Word, which is what I'm talking about. And our CEO was the V.P. of marketing there, and a couple of years ago he saw an opportunity to do desktop software on Linux. He created a company called Hancom Linux. He licensed the word "Hancom" from Hansoft. So we have a product called Hancom Office, which is our Linux-based office suite, but when I say Hancom Word, that is the product -- it's actually called something else in Korean -- that's a product that's owned by Hansoft, so we have this kind of funny trademark. If you look at our press releases, they all say Hancom is a trademark of Hansoft. They own like 30 percent of our company. It was a kind of spinoff. I think that at the end of this year they won't own anything, but now they own like 30 percent of us. That's why we have to say Hancom Linux -- we can't say just Hancom when we talk about ourselves. Just so you don't get confused.
LaM; Speaking of office suites, Hancom Office Professional has been suspended or canceled. Is there any likelihood that it will be revived?
Decrem: I think it's unlikely that you're going to see it back in its current form. I think that we may include some of the applications that were included in the beta product. I think that what our CEO wants to do is a desktop bundle for the U.S. market that includes and OS, a Web browser, a full stack. I'm urging us to take a hard look at that in view of Licoris, Lindows, and Xandros. I think we'll bundle, and I'm sure it will end up being available in the U.S., but I'm not sure that that's really going to be the target. The kind of bundle I've described, I'm not sure the U.S. is the best target market for it. That's my personal opinion. I think that like one or two of the applications in the beta will be there, but certainly not all four. We're still trying to figure that out. The timeline on that, to be honest, is probably late summer at the earliest. Internally we're saying maybe August, September, so I'm thinking that means at the earliest. That's why we said look, just give people a refund and do it generously and cleanly so we don't damage our reputation too much in the process. We definitely want to do something called "Hancom Professional," but whether it will be Hancom Office Professional we don't know right now.
LaM: We did see, for instance, Corel Linux, where the company's applications were marketed with a distribution. There seems to be a saturation of distributions right now. Does this enter into it?
Decrem: That's what I'm thinking. Looking at, for example, Licoris -- pretty nice. My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant. There's an elegancy missing in the thing. The underlying thing is pretty darn good, no argument with that. I've been saying for the longest time that they should just hire the guy at Ximian who does what I think is really pretty artwork, they should just hire that guy and have him do the KDE desktop and make it really pretty so I want to use it. But if you look at Licoris, that's exactly what they've done. Licoris in my opinion is a beautiful desktop. The job is done. So my point is, I don't think there's room for three of them -- I don't think you're going to see Lindows and Licoris and Xandros all do well. I think one of them has a shot at it, but it's just too small a space. And Red Hat's just having a blast. From Red Hat's perspective, they're just going to watch all these guys try to work hard to make a product; they watched us at Eazel and Ximian, and now they're going to watch Licoris and Xandros and Lindows try to build a market and try to make this desktop good enough, and then if the market emerges, Red Hat will be the big player that can come in whenever they feel like it. This is the power of being the market leader and having the brand. I think that Red Hat is going to come in and sweep up like half of whatever desktop market there will be, just because of the brand. I mean, it's a quality outfit with quality products, right? I didn't mention Mandrake and the others, but I think maybe one or two of them are going to make it. It's a shame -- I feel sorry for them because they're all working their butt off to make a beautiful product.
LaM: A year or so ago there was movement away from desktop Linux. Did we learn the wrong lesson, and might it be true that Linux on the desktop could be won by a company willing to do it right and willing to endure many quarters of operating at a loss to bring it to pass?
Decrem: I think that's essentially right. The big news was the IDC report that came out in, what was it, February. Last year they actually put kind of the final nail in Eazel's coffin. We were in the middle of doing our fundraising, and really working our butt off to make the case that we could be a reasonable investment for investors. And in the middle of that, IDC came back and restated their desktop forecast and cut it by like two thirds. I forget what the number was, it was that they had this forecast for something like 25 million desktops, and they came back six months later and said oh, no, whoops, we were wrong -- it's only six. It was something that dramatic. All of a sudden we found ourselves in a place where the investors were all running away from any investment because of the stock market crash, so they were asking us to be super, super firm about our ability to be profitable. And all of a sudden IDC came along and said, whoops, we were off, the market is two times smaller than we thought it was, and it made it hard for us even to go to investors and ask for money. We could not say that we were sure we could deliver what they were asking of us. So the IDC report was like the final nail in our coffin. But now they've come out with another forecast, and they've basically tripled their forecast again. I think that's very positive. But I think that what doesn't work is what Eazel was trying to do; in the benefit of hindsight you can see it was not the way to do it -- you can't just assume that you're going to have an end-user market that's going to pay for itself by buying one-offs off of your website.
I think the right example, the right way to do it is, I would say, ours, and CodeWeavers, and Ximian. I'm familiar with them and am not trying to imply anything negative about other companies. But those are three companies I'm familiar with that I think are doing it right. In the case of Ximian, what I think is great about them is that they're hustlers -- those guys will make a buck anytime they can, and that's kind of what Red Hat did: they were selling CDs out of the back of their truck. And I think that's what Ximian was doing. They were selling teeshirts there for awhile, that's what they did to make money. And they got the money and support thay got from Intel and others in the Mono thing, and they got themselves a big contract with Sun, now they have a big contract with H-P. It's behind-the-scenes stuff, but it makes sense, because they're kind of an infrastructure company, a kind of a desktop-infrastructure company. And they're paying the bills. As an investor, that's what you want to see. You want to see guys that are going to hustle and make money in ways that are roughly consistent with the long-term vision. And most of what they are doing is consistent with their vision. I used to think they were doing way too much stuff and they weren't focused enough, but in all respect they're a resilient company, and boy, I love Evolution -- for me it's the best open source desktop app I've used. I can't think of anything better, actually, than Evolution. I would rank it ahead of GNOME or KDE or Mozilla or OpenOffice -- it's just a piece of beauty, that thing Evolution, from an end-user perspective. I've never looked at the code.
The second one, I'd say, is CodeWeavers. I just love their product, CrossOver Office, or any of their things. It's just stuff that works. It's great. And they've sold a bunch of them. Have you talked to Jeremy? Oh, money's coming in, man! He's selling their stuff. People are buying their stuff.
The third desktop company I'd mention is ours, because I think we make sense in the sense that what we're doing here is, we've got this big contract with the Korean government -- that's 120,000 seats -- and we've got a big bundling deal with Sharp, every Zaurus that moves, we're moving a copy of our product, and Sharp has big plans for the thing. Our software is rough on the edges -- you know that and I know that; we all know that -- and the Zaurus as a whole is rough around the edges and needs some major work, needs like a 1.2 release, but if they pull that off, they could build a market that will be really big. And we're trying to do some other deals. We're trying to do a deal, as I mentioned, in the Middle East that's of similar size. So while we have a website and you can buy our software, that's not what keeps us in business. What keeps us in business is these 100,000-copies-at-a-time deals, and I think that's pretty exciting, actually. That makes me feel kind of confident, makes me feel positive about our company.
Yet I think all of them are a struggle: I think Hancom is a struggle, I think Ximian is a struggle, I think CodeWeavers is a struggle. I don't think all three of us are going to survive, but I think one or two of us will survive, and that'll be exciting.
LaM: What are you going to be doing in your new position?
Decrem: I spend about a third of my time doing actual legal work, which is kind of fresh and new, and about a third of my time on product marketing, just because I want to make sure we have products we feel good about, so I spend a fair amount of time fixing up the website or looking at the roadmap for the product. And then a third is in business development -- doing deals with companies in the U.S. and elsewhere. But I'm just getting to know the company, really. And in this place people work hard, man! They work 9 to 9 here, six days a week. That's the culture -- the whole country works like that. What we've bitten off it a lot. It's just a huge challenge.
What I think is my pet peeve, and I think I need to work on it this week, is that you have to spend literally half of your time making sure those goddam Office documents show up properly, and then they still don't. We're not as good as StarOffice on that front. And we need to be as good as StarOffice. I think StarOffice does a decent job, and I think we have some catch-up work to do with them; that's my personal opinion. It's such a headache. And it's the same in Mozilla -- all these guys spend all this time making sure ESPN shows up properly. And it's the same with Konqueror, I'm sure, now. Which is why I don't use Konqueror. I know it's got to be a lot of work to get all these pages to show properly. When I go to MyAmazon.com and try to hit that purchase button, is it really going to work? I use Galeon and it's always like, will MyYahoo show up properly today? Those guys at Yahoo, they just do these crazy hacks that work on Explorer and pretty much nothing else. Mozilla works these days.
Anyway, it's a huge challenge to do an office suite. We've been at it for about two years now, and Hansoft has been at it for 10 years, and Microsoft has been at it for like 15 or something. So getting the core product to be as good as it wants to be, we need to be focusing on that.
But a thing I want us to be working on, I think we need to find a way to have kind of the middle layer, between Microsoft Office and KOffice, GNOME Office, StarOffice, Hancom Office. And that needs to be one open source project that we all just put together. It's unbelievable that I've got all these engineers here just kind of reverse engineering Microsoft Office formats. Same at StarOffice. Same at AbiWord and Gnumeric and KOffice. We're all spending way too much time on that one. I think it's one of those things where it's easier to keep plugging away at your own thing than to switch to the common thing. 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 inm a couple years. We need to figure that one out. I think that in the case of the spreadsheet it's really hard to do that because the application is very closely tied to the format. The functions are very closely tied to the actual document format. In the word processor, I don't think that's the case at all, that it's basically attributes of the document. But the way Gnumeric guys explained it to me, it's actually really hard for the Gnumeric guys to borrow stuff from OpenOffice because it's all tied to the functions you have in the program. Maybe it's hard in that case, but there's got to be a way we can leverage more of that stuff. At least we should be able to have 50 percent of that work done in common. But I can tell you people spend a lot of time poring over Microsoft Office documents here. And it's the only thing people care about -- it's the only thing anybody cares about. And that's why I think that if we all did this together, we'd have a lot more time to deal with changes in document formats and events of that nature, as opposed to everyone on their own.
The good news on that front is Microsoft's embrace of XML -- so far, it seems to be getting easier to figure this stuff out, rather than harder. But if and when Linux becomes a real threat or StarOffice becomes a real threat, then I think you'll start seeing many more surprises start to pop up. If you look back two years, Microsoft was behaving pretty well. They were moving to XML and they weren't messing with their file formats so much. But if you look at the context, first of all they were under the antitrust gun, and second of all, everybody thought they'd be making all their money off of Web services by now. So Microsoft thought they'd be able to turn this thing into a revenue stream and deal with the antitrust problem. But now both of those things are gone, and it's starting to look more and more scary every day. It's like a lovefest, what they're getting from Washington these days. Getting the green light, Linux looking more strong, and these Web services and the XP licensing model, and getting the revenue to keep flowing with these new pressures makes it more likely that Microsoft is going to start springing surprises.
By the way, I think it's a great month and a great quarter for Linux on the desktop. I think StarOffice is great news for us; I think CodeWeavers is great news for us; I think Mozilla 1.0 is the biggest news for all of us; and Xandros, Licoris, Lindows -- those are all very positive developments. And then KDE3, and GNOME2 is coming out next month also. It's kind of like everywhere you look on the desktop, it's just a great season.
Just like slashdot. Only two percent of readers subscribe. Two percent! Do the other 98 percent just think they can get it all for free forever? That the bandwidth they consume is just there? Two percent. Ridiculous.
Anyway, th
Pay the fuck up!
I have to agree, that's one thing that's turned me off about KDE, the gradients feel weird, and that alpha blending can really look bad. Gnome's no spring chicken either, but I must say nautilus impresses me. For the record, I'm a Window Maker man myself, it is simplicity itself. Run a little Gnome panel, and I'm set. Though I'm very excited about Enlightenment 17
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
Why can't Linux be pro-American? I consider myself a patriotic American, and think that Linux is a good thing for our country. For every country. Many of the open source contributers who have made GNU/Linux what it is today happen to be -- you guessed it -- Americans.
Why not package Linux as anti-Woman instead? That would have a tad better ring of truth. How about anti-Gay and anti-Black distributions. Wouldn't that be just fine and dandy?
By the way, has any other superpower in the history of the world been as positive for other countries as America? Look at the U.S.S.R. What a great neighbor. Look at the British Empire. Look at France under Napolean. Go back as far as you want.
Who are our enemies? Well, they are governments that are generally aggresive towards us or towards their neighbors. Or even towards their own people. And what to we do with our enemies after we conquer them. Do we colonize? Do we hold mass executions? No, we do our best to democratize and rebuild.
It's fun to moan about American power. But hot damn, if those American carriers out there on the oceans of the world were to disappear tomorrow, the world would not be a better place for freedom in the morning.
Besides, I'm willing to bet that Bin Laden uses Microsoft Outlook to send his hate spam.
What business? Are you telling me that giving something away for free is business? Sounds more like economic suicide to me.
Linux buisness? Business of something free? Wow. I'm starting a sunlight buisness.
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
While Bart was quoted out of context, I think that one of Linux's main selling points is that it is good for all countries. It shouldn't be marketed because it strikes a blow at that Evil American MegaCorp(TM), but because it is Open and Free to all, a gift from hackers of many nations, many religions, and many politics. Out of many, one? :) Sorry, couldn't resist.
:Peter
Nice try karma whore. Your already at 0, lol. Thought you had an easy +5 since you posted so early huh? Well enjoy your downgrading :)
Waste some mod points on this one!
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http://www.eveeieyhfgfcdoosammgwsnboivvbsczxlzgab
...and Gnome is beautiful. Uh huh. And some people actually like rap music too.
Yeah....THIS IS some hot shit. I wannt Tenchi to do WashU up the ass.
COCK
and then in her mouth.
sweeeeeet.
LOL I think we are a little past the KDE isn't themeable flames. As anyone who has used both kde and gnome can tell you, they are more alike than different when it comes to both appearance and use. They are both graphically based on Win95 and I have yet to meet someone who uses windows who can't sit down at either kde or gnome and do basic things like manager and open files.
But then again sour grapes are sour grapes.
I've never seen a proper study of why people hate America. Seems to be simple jealousy and ignorance of what made this country great.
Let them develop.. we can call it "3rd Rate Linux".
The main arguement made by Decrem was about how attractive the massive cost savings would be to countries without an existing IT infra-structure. Software costs, acting much like a tax, increase costs and slows growth.
Why the submitter decided to highlight the lesser part of the arguement about these nations no wanting to use U.S. software I don't know. Why Michael didn't edit this part out as inaccurate or irrelevent I have my guesses.
*cough* pinko *cough*
I dunno, guys. I think linux users have a very strange aesthetic.
KDE (in KDEstep mode), to me, is one of the cleanest-looking window managers around. The icons are pixel-perfect, there's no distracting eye candy, and the window management doesn't get in the way of what actually matters -- the programs. (In this respect I think KDE learned some good things from Windows.)
There's no accounting for tastes, I guess, but we don't all feel this way. Keep it up, KDE!
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.
...Bart Decrem and Bill Gates attended the same high school.
Interview: Bart Decrem -- Leveraging desktop Linux
To those who have followed Linux for awhile, the name Bart Decrem is a familiar one. Originally from Belgium, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and a Master's in International trade before moving to California in 1989 and enrolling in Stanford Law School. In 1999, he became a co-founder of Eazel, the innovative but ultimately unsuccessful open source company that produced the Nautilus graphical shell for GNOME. He has now joined Hancom Linux, the Korean concern that produces a Linux distribution there and that is known elsewhere for its Hancom Office productivity suite. In an interview with Linux and Main, the personable and enthusiastic Decrem discussed life in Korea, his company's plans, Linux business models, what went wrong at Eazel, how dislike of the U.S. could spell success for Linux and disaster for Microsoft, and a multitude of other things. We began by asking him how he had become involved with Hancom Linux, where he is the newly named Vice President of Business Development.
LaM: So what's going on with you and Hancom?
Decrem: I've been in Korea for about eight months. I came out here after Eazel shut down. I wanted to travel, and my wife is Korean-American and I wanted to learn Korean, learn another language, and ride out the stormy weather in Silicon Valley. So I ended up working for a company called Linux One, not the U.S.-based Linux One that everybody has talked about, just a company that happens to have the same name, which is kind of poor marketing. It's a Linux-based system vendor in Korea. I worked there for about six months, helped them with strategic planning and stuff like that. Thre wasn't so much for me to do there because it's really a Korean company with Korean customers. So I moved over to Hancom about one month ago, and here there's lots of stuff for me to do.
LaM: Hancom is known and successful throughout the Far East because of its handling of two-byte character sets. Are there plans for a broader U.S. and European presence?
Decrem: Let me give you my view on the world on that issue. This is my view and not company policy at this point. The way I describe the company is that we're a provider of Linux-based productivity solutions. I'm not saying that to talk fancy, I'm saying that because we're not necessarily just a Linux desktop company, because what we're doing with Sharp and the Zaurus is really important to us. It's not really a Linux computer -- it's a handheld device that happens to run the Linux operating system. That's important to our future. Our company has three products. The first product we have is Hancom Office; the second one is Hancom Mobile Office; and the third one is Hancom Linux OS. Hancom Office is an office productivity suite for the Linux desktop that was first done in Korean, then in Chinese simplified and traditional, Japanese -- this week we're launching the Arab edition, which is kind of our big news for the month, actually. That's a big deal. Let me talk to you about that in a second. We also have the English edition. The mobile product runs right now just on the Sharp Zaurus. That's the beauty of Qt, that you get to port to all different platforms pretty easily, so we're hoping to bring that product to other Linux-based PDAs. I think it all kind of depends on how well the Zaurus does, whether there's going to be a Linux-based PDA market or not. And then the Linux OS right now we're really only marketing in Korea, because in Japan for example we have a partnership with Red Hat, and there we are bundled with Red Hat. In Korea it makes sense for us to have our own branded product. So we took Red Hat and made a derivative. We cleaned up KDE and made it look pretty. It's a pretty decent desktop, although I happen to not run it because I've been running GNOME for awhile, from the old days. But we are bringing the Linux OS to other markets. For example, we are doing an Arab edition. As far as I know, we'll be the first pure Linux Arab language Linux-based OS when we ship this week. It's like nothing out there that I know of. I'm scared to say it's the only one, just in case I'm wrong, but I can't find another one and nobody else can either. We're doing an Arab Linux OS and so the way we're looking at the OS business is, if it makes sense because of our partnership agreement and because of the local market to do an OS, we will. Maybe it will be branded Hancom and maybe it will be branded by a partner.
So, to answer your question, in my opinion the U.S. Linux desktop market is the hardest place to make a buck in the world. I kind of learned that one at Eazel, but generally, if you look at the state of the U.S. industry, it's overall much less cost-sensitive than any market elsewhere in the world. When I was in Europe -- I'm a European guy -- copying of software was much more casually done than in the U.S. Companies in the U.S., even small companies, are much more disclplined about things like licensing. Because of that, in my opinion, it's hard to make money in the U.S. because the companies are pretty happy with Windows. It works pretty well, and the cost savings that result from Linux on the desktop for most companies do not warrant the trauma of having to worry about whether your Microsoft Office document is going to open properly. It's a tough place to make a buck. But in the rest of the world the story's a lot different, for two reasons. One, because of cost issues, and second, because of control issues. Even if you talk about Europe, a lot of people just don't like the idea of sending such a big check to Microsoft every year. They want to support the European industry because they think that with Linux they have a chance to build on their own IT sector. And as you go into the rest of the world, the cost issues become much more important. For example, we're doing a deal in Tunisia. I don't think the Tunisian government is too excited about sending a big check to Microsoft or to any U.S.-based company. Those guys are dying to switch to Linux because of the cost savings, because it makes a big difference to them. And the reality is that the U.S. is not very popular in many parts of the world. I'm European, though in a lot of ways I think of myself more as American, in things like an outlook on the world, but the fact is that America isn't very popular in every country. So in my opinion there's great opportunity for companies like ours, first of all in Asia, which is our home base, but I think now with the Arab announcement there are going to be some interesting opportunities for us. We're working on a big deal with the Tunisian government, but then elsewhere in the Arab world, and because of double-byte we get to do Hebrew and all sorts of other languages as well, because now our software is bidirectional. And I think Latin America is an interesting place, and we're talking to people there. The way I would rank things ia Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Europe, U.S.A.; unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa would be below that one because of the state of the economies there.
I think it's important for us to be in the U.S.; it's an important place to do business and we have to have some sort of product strategy there, but it's a tough place. Also, if you look at the Linux desktop space, there are a bunch of interesting things happening, whether it's Xandros or Licoris or Lindows -- lots of fairly polished Linux-based desktop OSes coming out in the U.S. StarOffice is hitting 6.0. It's a pretty decent product. I think our product has some things going for it, but the reality is that StarOffice has been around for much longer than ours and is a more mature product. So we're going to keep working, getting better, and we'll see what we can do in the U.S.
LaM: Are you finding resistance to things like the XP licensing scheme among potential customers who have been using Windows?
Decrem: There are three things coming together. The first thing that happened is the Microsoft antitrust trial, which in the U.S. made people take notice, but I think in the rest of the world made people take notice even more. In an event of the magnitude of the antitrust trial, people start sending memos to their bosses, and they start forwarding newspaper articles, so if you're in China or Korea or pretty much anywhere else in the world you really notice that stuff. Your general unease about Microsoft and dependence on U.S. technology becomes a lot higher. You start looking more closely at Microsoft. Then the licensing change is the second part of it -- all of a sudden they made a lot of pretty dramatic licensing changes. The reality is that Windows and Office are pretty mature products, and most people are pretty happy with them, which is why Microsoft does those licensing changes; they've got to figure out a way to keep sucking money out of people who aren't in a hurry to upgrade. These folks are thinking, "Our stuff works, and they're trying to stick these licensing requirements on us so we keep sending them more money, which we don't feel the need to do necessarily." They look at their IT budgets and the amount of money involved, and they'd rather not send all that money. The third factor is Linux finally emerging on the server and establishing itself, and on the desktop there's starting to be a plausible story with KDE and GNOME maturing, with StarOffice being a credible product and right now Mozilla finally coming to 1.0. So it's now a real alternative.
Those three things together mean that in my opinion specifically government markets have become very interesting opportunities. Because governments are one place where those policy factors play in, and they're big enough that you can make money off of them. They're also big enough that they can set their own standards. So if you're the Korean government, you can say that for word processing, our document format standards are such-and-such. If you're a small company, you can't really do that. So whether it be Korea or China or the Middle East, I think governments are a unique opportunity. You can get a big deal with them; they're interested in the public policy issues; they're very interested in the cost-saving issues; and they're big enough and enough of a market maker that they can create a standard. So they're a big opportunity for us.
We've done Korea. Our big deal in Korea was when we did 120,000 desktops. And if you look at how many government announcements have happened in the last nine months, either doing studies on open source, purchasing small numbers of Linux-based servers, or as in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source, there's a lot of momentum there. And it's going to keep picking up.
You see three different things. You see every government in the world commissioning studies on where it makes sense to deploy open source, whether it be the United States, or Europe, or anywhere. The second thing you see is in some places actual legislation passed, where people say first you must look at open source alternatives, and then if you're going to buy commercial software you have to get special approval. That's the extreme case of Brazil, but there are a couple of other places, too. And then third what I think you're going to see is more situations like Korea, where in our case the government bought 120,000 bundles of OS and desktop, and they paid us. And so now people are deploying these things throughout training centers; usually they're second-boot systems, at least in our case in the first phase, where they keep running Windows but they're also installing desktop Linux. The second phase starts for us in a couple of months, and you're going to start seeing some Linux-only desktops. So whether it's the City of Largo in the U.S., or the government of Korea, or the City of Beijing in China, those are the initial business opportunities.
LaM: And governments have generally steered away from products for which there is only a single source, which with Microsoft presents a problem.
Decrem: It's a single-source thing, right. I think people look at it the way you look at national defense. This a critical piece of your economic infrastructure; you do not want a single source. And if you're going to have a single source, you'd rather have a Korean single source than Microsoft, after the antitrust trial, after all the scandals about backdoors in their software, the security holes -- security is a big factor. People are really freaky about that. Not knowing that the security holes are and also the backdoors -- those sorts of things can have national security implications. The Chinese government is very sensitive to stuff like that. So there are a lot of pretty good reasons to look at Linux, including on the desktop, if you're a policy maker outside the United States, and Inside the United States. Andy's favorite thing to say at Eazel was that in the next five years you're going to start to see legislation in the U.S. to the effect of why should we be sending taxpayer dollars to a company that's a convicted monopolist when there are alternatives; we should be using those taxpayer dollars to support open standards and industries where there are fewer barriers to entry. I think you're going to see more of that in the U.S. The Department of Defense is running StarOffice. It's a Windows-based desktop, but you're going to see more of that kind of thing, though it will take a couple more years to pay off.
LaM: And with StarOffice it's fairly easy to change the underlying operating system.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it. That's the importance of Mozilla and StarOffice. Those are kind of mission-critical applications, and as you switch to those, the operating becomes all but irrelevent. That's the beauty of the Internet, frankly. It commodifies the operating system to a large extent.
LaM: Allowing you to look at other issues, such as security.
Decrem: Right. Security and a lot of other issues. I think Eric Raymond is right about the cost of the product issue. If I'm not mistaken, the Microsoft licensing is now more expensive than the cost of the CPU. So it's the highest single-cost item in the price of a new PC these days that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm wrong. Compaq paid like a zillion dollars in royalties last year to Microsoft.
LaM: There's a lot of discussion of software piracy, especially overseas. Have you seen much of this in your travels?
Decrem: I think it varies from country to country, and I think it has varied with time. I think it's a little different in Europe now than it was 10 years ago. Same in Korea. You do buy fake products sometimes, but when I go to the street markets, I've actually tred to find illegal software here in Korea and I couldn't find it. It's interesting. In the U.S. we have CompUSA; in Korea, you don't really have that. What you have is things called technomarkets, which are places that offer small boutiques, technology shops. You go there to buy a computer or a DVD player or whatever. I looked for bootleg XP and I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it in Hong Kong, either. In Hong Kong I could find bootleg DVDs all over the place. In Korea, you can't find bootleg DVDs anywhere. You can find bootleg leather jackets everywhere, you can find bootleg music very easily, but not bootleg software.
The other thing that's interesting in Korea is, I went to Busan, which is a city here, and went to what we call PC rooms, which isn't exactly an Internet cafe, but instead like a computer center; people go there to play games, by and large. But I couldn't find one that ran Microsoft Office -- they were all running Hancom Office, the Windows-based product. Because 10 years ago, this country was a Hancom Word country. And then Microsoft used some of their usual tactics and took over the market. I think that Microsoft is something like 70 percent of the market in office productivity. And even today in a lot of government and other places you'll find a lot of Hancom Word, which is not actually a full office suite. In all of Busan, there was no Microsoft Office. Now in Seoul, most places do end up having Microsoft Office for some reason, but in Busan or anywhere else, you just can't find it. They don't want to spend the money on it, so you just can't find it.
What you should know, by the way, is that a company named Hansoft made a product 10 years ago called Hancom Word, which is what I'm talking about. And our CEO was the V.P. of marketing there, and a couple of years ago he saw an opportunity to do desktop software on Linux. He created a company called Hancom Linux. He licensed the word "Hancom" from Hansoft. So we have a product called Hancom Office, which is our Linux-based office suite, but when I say Hancom Word, that is the product -- it's actually called something else in Korean -- that's a product that's owned by Hansoft, so we have this kind of funny trademark. If you look at our press releases, they all say Hancom is a trademark of Hansoft. They own like 30 percent of our company. It was a kind of spinoff. I think that at the end of this year they won't own anything, but now they own like 30 percent of us. That's why we have to say Hancom Linux -- we can't say just Hancom when we talk about ourselves. Just so you don't get confused.
LaM; Speaking of office suites, Hancom Office Professional has been suspended or canceled. Is there any likelihood that it will be revived?
Decrem: I think it's unlikely that you're going to see it back in its current form. I think that we may include some of the applications that were included in the beta product. I think that what our CEO wants to do is a desktop bundle for the U.S. market that includes and OS, a Web browser, a full stack. I'm urging us to take a hard look at that in view of Licoris, Lindows, and Xandros. I think we'll bundle, and I'm sure it will end up being available in the U.S., but I'm not sure that that's really going to be the target. The kind of bundle I've described, I'm not sure the U.S. is the best target market for it. That's my personal opinion. I think that like one or two of the applications in the beta will be there, but certainly not all four. We're still trying to figure that out. The timeline on that, to be honest, is probably late summer at the earliest. Internally we're saying maybe August, September, so I'm thinking that means at the earliest. That's why we said look, just give people a refund and do it generously and cleanly so we don't damage our reputation too much in the process. We definitely want to do something called "Hancom Professional," but whether it will be Hancom Office Professional we don't know right now.
LaM: We did see, for instance, Corel Linux, where the company's applications were marketed with a distribution. There seems to be a saturation of distributions right now. Does this enter into it?
Decrem: That's what I'm thinking. Looking at, for example, Licoris -- pretty nice. My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant. There's an elegancy missing in the thing. The underlying thing is pretty darn good, no argument with that. I've been saying for the longest time that they should just hire the guy at Ximian who does what I think is really pretty artwork, they should just hire that guy and have him do the KDE desktop and make it really pretty so I want to use it. But if you look at Licoris, that's exactly what they've done. Licoris in my opinion is a beautiful desktop. The job is done. So my point is, I don't think there's room for three of them -- I don't think you're going to see Lindows and Licoris and Xandros all do well. I think one of them has a shot at it, but it's just too small a space. And Red Hat's just having a blast. From Red Hat's perspective, they're just going to watch all these guys try to work hard to make a product; they watched us at Eazel and Ximian, and now they're going to watch Licoris and Xandros and Lindows try to build a market and try to make this desktop good enough, and then if the market emerges, Red Hat will be the big player that can come in whenever they feel like it. This is the power of being the market leader and having the brand. I think that Red Hat is going to come in and sweep up like half of whatever desktop market there will be, just because of the brand. I mean, it's a quality outfit with quality products, right? I didn't mention Mandrake and the others, but I think maybe one or two of them are going to make it. It's a shame -- I feel sorry for them because they're all working their butt off to make a beautiful product.
LaM: A year or so ago there was movement away from desktop Linux. Did we learn the wrong lesson, and might it be true that Linux on the desktop could be won by a company willing to do it right and willing to endure many quarters of operating at a loss to bring it to pass?
Decrem: I think that's essentially right. The big news was the IDC report that came out in, what was it, February. Last year they actually put kind of the final nail in Eazel's coffin. We were in the middle of doing our fundraising, and really working our butt off to make the case that we could be a reasonable investment for investors. And in the middle of that, IDC came back and restated their desktop forecast and cut it by like two thirds. I forget what the number was, it was that they had this forecast for something like 25 million desktops, and they came back six months later and said oh, no, whoops, we were wrong -- it's only six. It was something that dramatic. All of a sudden we found ourselves in a place where the investors were all running away from any investment because of the stock market crash, so they were asking us to be super, super firm about our ability to be profitable. And all of a sudden IDC came along and said, whoops, we were off, the market is two times smaller than we thought it was, and it made it hard for us even to go to investors and ask for money. We could not say that we were sure we could deliver what they were asking of us. So the IDC report was like the final nail in our coffin. But now they've come out with another forecast, and they've basically tripled their forecast again. I think that's very positive. But I think that what doesn't work is what Eazel was trying to do; in the benefit of hindsight you can see it was not the way to do it -- you can't just assume that you're going to have an end-user market that's going to pay for itself by buying one-offs off of your website.
I think the right example, the right way to do it is, I would say, ours, and CodeWeavers, and Ximian. I'm familiar with them and am not trying to imply anything negative about other companies. But those are three companies I'm familiar with that I think are doing it right. In the case of Ximian, what I think is great about them is that they're hustlers -- those guys will make a buck anytime they can, and that's kind of what Red Hat did: they were selling CDs out of the back of their truck. And I think that's what Ximian was doing. They were selling teeshirts there for awhile, that's what they did to make money. And they got the money and support thay got from Intel and others in the Mono thing, and they got themselves a big contract with Sun, now they have a big contract with H-P. It's behind-the-scenes stuff, but it makes sense, because they're kind of an infrastructure company, a kind of a desktop-infrastructure company. And they're paying the bills. As an investor, that's what you want to see. You want to see guys that are going to hustle and make money in ways that are roughly consistent with the long-term vision. And most of what they are doing is consistent with their vision. I used to think they were doing way too much stuff and they weren't focused enough, but in all respect they're a resilient company, and boy, I love Evolution -- for me it's the best open source desktop app I've used. I can't think of anything better, actually, than Evolution. I would rank it ahead of GNOME or KDE or Mozilla or OpenOffice -- it's just a piece of beauty, that thing Evolution, from an end-user perspective. I've never looked at the code.
The second one, I'd say, is CodeWeavers. I just love their product, CrossOver Office, or any of their things. It's just stuff that works. It's great. And they've sold a bunch of them. Have you talked to Jeremy? Oh, money's coming in, man! He's selling their stuff. People are buying their stuff.
The third desktop company I'd mention is ours, because I think we make sense in the sense that what we're doing here is, we've got this big contract with the Korean government -- that's 120,000 seats -- and we've got a big bundling deal with Sharp, every Zaurus that moves, we're moving a copy of our product, and Sharp has big plans for the thing. Our software is rough on the edges -- you know that and I know that; we all know that -- and the Zaurus as a whole is rough around the edges and needs some major work, needs like a 1.2 release, but if they pull that off, they could build a market that will be really big. And we're trying to do some other deals. We're trying to do a deal, as I mentioned, in the Middle East that's of similar size. So while we have a website and you can buy our software, that's not what keeps us in business. What keeps us in business is these 100,000-copies-at-a-time deals, and I think that's pretty exciting, actually. That makes me feel kind of confident, makes me feel positive about our company.
Yet I think all of them are a struggle: I think Hancom is a struggle, I think Ximian is a struggle, I think CodeWeavers is a struggle. I don't think all three of us are going to survive, but I think one or two of us will survive, and that'll be exciting.
LaM: What are you going to be doing in your new position?
Decrem: I spend about a third of my time doing actual legal work, which is kind of fresh and new, and about a third of my time on product marketing, just because I want to make sure we have products we feel good about, so I spend a fair amount of time fixing up the website or looking at the roadmap for the product. And then a third is in business development -- doing deals with companies in the U.S. and elsewhere. But I'm just getting to know the company, really. And in this place people work hard, man! They work 9 to 9 here, six days a week. That's the culture -- the whole country works like that. What we've bitten off it a lot. It's just a huge challenge.
What I think is my pet peeve, and I think I need to work on it this week, is that you have to spend literally half of your time making sure those goddam Office documents show up properly, and then they still don't. We're not as good as StarOffice on that front. And we need to be as good as StarOffice. I think StarOffice does a decent job, and I think we have some catch-up work to do with them; that's my personal opinion. It's such a headache. And it's the same in Mozilla -- all these guys spend all this time making sure ESPN shows up properly. And it's the same with Konqueror, I'm sure, now. Which is why I don't use Konqueror. I know it's got to be a lot of work to get all these pages to show properly. When I go to MyAmazon.com and try to hit that purchase button, is it really going to work? I use Galeon and it's always like, will MyYahoo show up properly today? Those guys at Yahoo, they just do these crazy hacks that work on Explorer and pretty much nothing else. Mozilla works these days.
Anyway, it's a huge challenge to do an office suite. We've been at it for about two years now, and Hansoft has been at it for 10 years, and Microsoft has been at it for like 15 or something. So getting the core product to be as good as it wants to be, we need to be focusing on that.
But a thing I want us to be working on, I think we need to find a way to have kind of the middle layer, between Microsoft Office and KOffice, GNOME Office, StarOffice, Hancom Office. And that needs to be one open source project that we all just put together. It's unbelievable that I've got all these engineers here just kind of reverse engineering Microsoft Office formats. Same at StarOffice. Same at AbiWord and Gnumeric and KOffice. We're all spending way too much time on that one. I think it's one of those things where it's easier to keep plugging away at your own thing than to switch to the common thing. 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 inm a couple years. We need to figure that one out. I think that in the case of the spreadsheet it's really hard to do that because the application is very closely tied to the format. The functions are very closely tied to the actual document format. In the word processor, I don't think that's the case at all, that it's basically attributes of the document. But the way Gnumeric guys explained it to me, it's actually really hard for the Gnumeric guys to borrow stuff from OpenOffice because it's all tied to the functions you have in the program. Maybe it's hard in that case, but there's got to be a way we can leverage more of that stuff. At least we should be able to have 50 percent of that work done in common. But I can tell you people spend a lot of time poring over Microsoft Office documents here. And it's the only thing people care about -- it's the only thing anybody cares about. And that's why I think that if we all did this together, we'd have a lot more time to deal with changes in document formats and events of that nature, as opposed to everyone on their own.
The good news on that front is Microsoft's embrace of XML -- so far, it seems to be getting easier to figure this stuff out, rather than harder. But if and when Linux becomes a real threat or StarOffice becomes a real threat, then I think you'll start seeing many more surprises start to pop up. If you look back two years, Microsoft was behaving pretty well. They were moving to XML and they weren't messing with their file formats so much. But if you look at the context, first of all they were under the antitrust gun, and second of all, everybody thought they'd be making all their money off of Web services by now. So Microsoft thought they'd be able to turn this thing into a revenue stream and deal with the antitrust problem. But now both of those things are gone, and it's starting to look more and more scary every day. It's like a lovefest, what they're getting from Washington these days. Getting the green light, Linux looking more strong, and these Web services and the XP licensing model, and getting the revenue to keep flowing with these new pressures makes it more likely that Microsoft is going to start springing surprises.
By the way, I think it's a great month and a great quarter for Linux on the desktop. I think StarOffice is great news for us; I think CodeWeavers is great news for us; I think Mozilla 1.0 is the biggest news for all of us; and Xandros, Licoris, Lindows -- those are all very positive developments. And then KDE3, and GNOME2 is coming out next month also. It's kind of like everywhere you look on the desktop, it's just a great season.
Spoken English, transcribed literally, is nearly indecipherable.
Although the US does not colonise in the old way, it still does the postmodern version of colonisation.
And yes there have been mass executions as a result of that. Chile under Pinochet is an example.
"we've got this big contract with the Korean government -- that's 120,000 seats -- and we've got a big bundling deal with Sharp, every Zaurus that moves, we're moving a copy of our product, and Sharp has big plans for the thing."
Sounds like Microsoft...
Maybe they want to be the next MS?
You guys pulled your heads our of your collective arses for a few days, and the style (sic) here was better. But you fell right back once again...
- Long read (maybe I read better and faster than you, and to me it's short...don't bother with your off base opinion on how long it takes to read)
- good read (I'll be the judge of that)
- fast read
- short read
- must read (I hate this one the most...the only 'must' around here is you 'must' show up for work or your advertizing $$ are all for naught.)
- fun read (click thru bait)
- interesting read (how the hell do you know what interests anyone? or why should my interests be similar to yours?)
..all of these say one thing. You don't think we can think for ourselves. Cut the crap and post the stupid link for Christ sake.
That's not what official propaganda says. Everybody in the world loves McDonald and Hollywood. Some people just don't understand us. They are confused.
Please tell me if I'm wrong ? Are you confused ?
oooooooooooooh!
g-g-g-g- g-g-aaaaaaaaaaaaay!
I lost any respect for this guy. First he is asking to unite everybody to develop MS office filters and then he challenges anyone who is using KDE. what the hell is that. Until this ideology is completely gone from the Linux community nothing is going to be accomplished.
What's money behind Linux? Let's see IBM, Intel, Redhat, HP ...
All American companies last time I checked.
Zarpa freo! Bassa trew!
The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant Oh really, i think you better change your name Decrem rhymes with god awful things Seriously, this guy is dememted. These type of people who are way to radical bring bad publicity to open source. Due to these handful of war mongers, open sourcers and called communists athiests and what not. What is this guy trying to do! Be the next stallman? Well he is sadly mistaken, stallman is not all rants, that guy is a genius too, and this is sorely lacking in this chap. but I think maybe one or two of them are going to make it. And hes got some arrogance, so similar to Gates
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Gnome is the axis of Eazel people. Oh yeah!
Nottub het eus verpeiw!
Or at least that's what the advertisers think. Anyone with a clue filters them out.
Americans are smart, hard working, and fair. Therefore we have the highest average real income in the industrial world. Other coutries are either corrupt (Russia), lazy (most of Europe), or stupid (S. America / Middle East).
They resent the fact that we are so much more sucessful than they are and act out in rather pathetic ways.
If they had any REAL skillz, they'd have a REAL job.
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!
sure the hard core computer users don't care about looks but to get into the average persons desktop you need to make it look nice. Do you think Friends would of been a succesful tv show if jennifer aniston wasnt so damn hot? (or any of the other ladies) Take a hint and beautify linux. Oh and one other rant: I absolutely HATE how most distros arrange their K/Gnome menus. Theres almost no logic to them. Lycoris on the other hand does a pretty good job with the k menu.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it. That's the importance of Mozilla and StarOffice. Those are kind of mission-critical applications, and as you switch to those, the operating becomes all but irrelevent. That's the beauty of the Internet, frankly. It commodifies the operating system to a large extent.
This is an very interesting point. MS Office is the MS cash cow so Microsoft needs to take this issue very seriously. The intelligent way to do this is to port MS Office to Mac OS X and wait until there is a move into Linux by the market.
Does anybody know the status of MS Office on Mac OS X?
What a faggot.
You Gnome people out there, you always talk big about how "ugly" KDE is. Yet, you never have any specifics. What exactly is so "ugly"?
I'm sure the KDE would love to know. Seriously. They actually do listen to their users a whole lot than most projects I've seen. If you have a real suggestion, and not just another lame-ass flame, let's hear it.
Software is being pirated here. Just not out in the open.
You can get it from your friend, or co-worker, or boss, or off the office server. One CD can see dozens of 'owners'. They either copy and give away, or share the original. Either way, the effect is the same. You can also have a system built in one of the techno marts and they will load on anything you want. He made the mistake of thinking they would admit this to him as a foreigner. It's not that simple and they're not that stupid. Besides, it's game software (Star Craft) they want to pirate, not word processors.
Also, plenty of game (console) software for +/-$5.00 per disc. Saying there is no pirated ware is inaccurate. You can buy PS2 MGS2 for $5.00 or the original for $60.00. Take you pick, they are both under the counter.
Want computer software on the street for cheap? Go to Malaysia.
Bart needs to come back and spend a bit more time out on the streets in YongSan, me thinks.
"(A cell of) rice appears to contain about 50,000 genes, compared with about 35,000 for humans." -- The Wall Street Journal, April, 2002
HUMANS INSIST THEY ARE NOT DUMBER THAN RICE
Many Believed to Be Correct
San Diego, Calif. (SatireWire.com) -- Word that genetic researchers have discovered a cell of rice contains more genes than a human cell has caused widespread outrage as people across the globe attempt to prove that humans are easily as smart as a grain of rice.
In Edmonton, Canada, 34-year-old Alan Snigget was one of many average humans who devised intelligence tests to discredit the implication that rice is more evolved. The postal worker began by taping a grain of rice to a brick wall -- "but lightly, so it could move if it had to" -- then hopping behind the wheel of his 1994 Dodge pickup truck. After honking several times to give fair warning, Snigget drove at high speed directly into the rice. According to eyewitnesses, however, the rice never moved.
Said one Edmonton police officer who observed the scene: "Stupid rice."
As in Snigget's case, humans have managed to prevail in almost every test. In Montgomery, Ala., state employee Rodney Lopat said he took "two out of three" in a geography quiz against the allegedly brainy grain. And in Aberdeen, Scotland, lorry driver Duncan McCann is confident he will win a chess match that began three days ago. Asked why the game was taking so long, McCann explained that the rice is using the white pieces. "I'm still waiting for it to make the first move," he said.
RICE RIOTS
While most man vs. grain confrontations have been peaceful, a few have devolved into violence. Most notably, rice riots erupted yesterday in Germany after an angry crowd of National Front youths spotted a man who, they decided, looked like a piece of rice. After chasing the man for two blocks, the throng grew bored, but managed to salvage an otherwise disappointing afternoon by ransacking a Japanese restaurant.
In response, the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a boycott of any food product companies that differentiate between white and brown rice.
The press, meanwhile, has generally denounced the findings. In a front-page editorial, the Straits Times of Singapore questioned whether researchers had taken cells from a representative cross-section of humans, or just actor Robert Blake. Expressing its anger, USA Today called the report "as useless as studies insisting there is a widespread dumbing down of America," and included a series of colorful graphs and charts to illustrate its point.
If any one sentiment prevails, however, it is the belief in human superiority. To that end, CNN.com released the results of a poll asking "Are humans dumber than rice?" A full 51 percent of respondents voted no, while only 15 percent clicked yes. The remaining 34 percent accidentally clicked the wrong button, panicked, and deleted their browsers.
Copyright © 2002, SatireWire
I am into the copy and paste.
If Bart Decrem fires a Hancom programmer, could you say that he Decrements their staff by one?
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Hi folks,
/. editors for singling out this colorful statement, I hope that you guys will read the entire article and realize that that particular line does not summarize my opinion about the KDE project. As I say in the article, I think KDE is a terrific project. Also, Qt is the building block for my employer's software, and it's a great piece of software. Please note also that the entire point of the "KDE is butt-ugly" line was to then state that Lycoris has done a wonderful job polishing KDE.
I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by my line about some of the artwork in KDE. I do stand by the substance of my statement, but I could and should have said this a bit more delequately.
In any event, while I can't blame the
But I do think that icons and other look & feel work ARE very important. At the end of the day, KDE is a DESKTOP and the artwork and look & feel is a key part of the desktop. It's what we look at all day long. Everyone's opinion about artwork is highly subjective of course, 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. They're just not competitive with other desktops that regular folks (my wife, my parents) are used to looking at.
Cheers,
Bart
Just because they don't sell it on the streets and cater to foreigners doesn't mean it's not happening. Look at the statistics on how many burners are in use and how many blanks are sold. You can get if off the office server or borrow an original just by asking.
Bart needs to understand he's not a local and they're not going to offer up illegal ware just because he asks. You can buy a BTO box in YongSan and they will load it up with pirated copies of whatever you want. They're not so stupid as to sell CD's out on the street and make it easy for the police.
In addition, they're hot for games, not for applications. StarCraft:Brood War, etc. And PS2 game copies are only +/-$5.00 Ask to see the book and pick out what you want and wait for them to burn one next door...takes only minutes. As soon as you decide, he punches it into his cell phone and a runner is standing by. No inventory..all on demand, and demand is hot.
Piracy is as piracy does and Bart failed to remember the rule....when you come to Asia, you need to leave your personal concepts about how things are at home. Read between the lines if you want to know how things are here...take time to blend in and forget about what you thing you already know.
Office v.X has been available for ages. It's still Office, mind you.
Such misinformation! Compaq paid no more than 12.4 ba-jillion dollars last year, not even close to a zillion...
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
In Mexico and Nicaragua the US killed democracy plain and simple, and that was before the excuse of the Cold War.
The US at one time or another supported people like Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza, Augusto Pinochet, the Argentinian miltary junta, the Duvaliers, the Guatemalan golpists (to prompt up a fruit company of all democratic causes).
Other freinds had included Mobuto, and o yes Saddam.
Get your idiotic rethoric out of here and keep it in that dreamland where the US are champions of freedom and democracy and not slaves of their interests.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
All those places that are banking in the vanity of mostly women that want the perfect tan, they are selling something that one can get for free, they just offer it in a convenient, stilyzed environemnt.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm sorry about the pun. Any sarcasm from your side is well waranted.
Seriously, though, I think you are somewhat on the money about KDE, but not in the way that you intended. KDE has more usability problems than GNOME (although both environments have quite a few of these). Among KDE's worst usability problems are the multitude of tiny, undescriptive icons whose tinyness makes them far slower to access with a mouse (via Fitts' Law) and whose action is hard to decipher because the icons are so non-descriptive and tiny. And mind you that because KDE does not have button-labelling turned on by default, the lack of a label makes button even smaller and slower to access, and the lack of a label means that the user has to basically guess what the icon does, or find out the hard way by doing something that might possibly destroy their work. Or they can wait a painful 3-5 seconds for the tooltip label to come up. The end result is that most of the buttons are going to go unused, just like what happens in programs authored by Microsoft, who KDE bases most of their designs off of. The problem with doing a carbon copy of microsoft is that many of Microsoft's designs are flawed in one way or another, and many of those flaws have found their way into KDE. Good artists create, great artists steal, bad artists steal crap.
Re aesthetics: be sure to remember that just because something is aesthetically pleasing does not mean that has greater usability, and a lot of linux geeks who've tried for the desktop (and who don't have a lot to show for it) equate usability solely with aesthetics, I once talked to a distribution installer author about the usability problems in his installer. He couldn't understand what the problem was; he assumed I thought that "it wasn't pretty enough".
You should also not place any serious bets on the Zaurus as far success with the non-geek community(unless TrollTech will get their act together with Qtopia, which I highly doubt). From what I've seen of the UI design and some of the initial reports from reviewers, Sharp has fallen into the same trap as many other linux PDA developers/manufacturers where they design the hardware/system software first, and only after they've got that all done do they design the interface and come up the user interaction model.You can't do that with a PDA. People will put up with inefficient and bad interfaces on desktops because they budget several hours a day to kludging through their task. They grow surprisingly less tolerant of ill-designed interfaces when the screen is shrunk down to 240X320 and they have only 20 seconds to get down an important phone number. You might have good marketing; you might get some people to buy the PDA, but if the interface doesn't work, those people will subconsciously try to find every excuse they can to use the PDA as little as possible.If that happens, you can forget about selling those people hardware add-ons and software after the first several months. The chance that they'll upgrade to the next latest and greatest thing, or that they'll convince a friend to buy one of the PDA's, drops down to 0% as well.
With PDA graphic toolkits based on desktop toolkits (i.e. qt & Qtopia), there's also that fatal trap of thinking "with this mobile version of this widget toolkit, I can easily port over all the desktops to the PDA and everything will be good". Again, apps with UI's that work with full sized mouse and keyboard and a 17" monitor will often not translate very well into a PDA with a small screen and a stylus. Microsoft made this mistake with WinCE, and I saw Agenda make the same mistake with FLTK. Agenda is dead, and PalmPC's only survive because PalmOS isn't yet running on equivalent hardware.
If you take nothing else from my PDA advice, understand that the most successful PDA in history, the Palm, was fashioned after a block of wood that Palm creator Jeff Hawkins carried around with him to use in pondering what a good PDA should act like. Before the dies had been tooled or the system software was finished, he designed the interaction. There has been no block of wood involved in the creation of the Zaurus.
You're welcome to either take my advice or drag it to trash and empty. But I've seen too many linux companies get splattered across the industry because they said "to hell with good design". Yes, it really is that important.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Funny, to my eye, KDE is good looking and professional, while Gnome looks like a mid-90s Amiga MUI/MWB nightmare in grey and beige.
He mentions something in this interview which bothers me is how Linux businesses who strive to push a product effectively end up killing themselves because their effort is just immediately absorbed by the larger players due to the fact that they cannot protect themselves from the GPL. So where is the motivation for businesses to innovate if they can't at least reap monetary benefits from their work?
Also, why is Hancom Linux considered special because of it's handling of multibytes? Unicode has only been around for about a decade, and it's something Microsoft was able to fully embrace in Windows NT almost since it's inception. Shouldn't Linux be more global friendly than Microsoft out of the gate?
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!
A distribution name Licoris, and office suite name OpenOffice and KDE 3.0 isn't out yet. I'm guessing what happen for the pass weeks were a dream. Ouch, I think I'm dreaming now, after all, I have KDE 3.0 on my laptop...
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
Excuse the pun. :)
Moderation isn't to reward you for being a good boy. People have and should continue to moderate your comments up when they're worthy of special note. In other words, when Joe Slashbot moderates you up, it's to benefit me, not you. It's to tell the rest of us that you just said something more worth reading than the average comment.
The world... mostly America, which is the most important part of the world right now, is better for all of it.
Well, between gnome and kde, I definitely think gnome is better looking, appealing to desktop users. I just don't like the fact that gnome is not object-oriented so I tend to prefer KDE albeit having to live with an eyesore of a GUI enviroment. Not that object-orientedness does anything for the end-user, mind you...
> in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source
Only some states and municipalities are requiring free software in Brazil. The mostly important sphere of government, the federal (Union) one, still is deeply commited to Microsoft, to the point of preferring it to Brazil’s own Conectiva GNU/Linux. You can read more about it at CIPSGA’s old stories.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
read the headline as "Butt Cream on the the Linux Business"??
This is so wrong, that it is really hard not to correct this in a way that does not sound like an ad hominem attack. Please forgive the following rant, I've tried to include facts.
The British and Spanish were both bigger and more intrusive than the U.S. ever was (especially the British). Have you never heard the saying "The sun nver sets on the British Empire."?
And if you want to go further back, Alexander the Great, and Ghengis Khan and the Romans had some big empires too. The Soviet Union had a nice empire going at one point as well.
Sorry for the rant but this guy seriously needs some education
no wonder korea is for bush a part of the axis of evil. if they produce an arab version of linux. hell, maybe they should make an arab version of windows 3.1 to avoid being bombed ;)
Every release I download it and try it again(just for fun) and spend a few hours trying to tweak it to make it look nice, then switch back to gnome immediately. Partly because of how ugly it is, partly because it is quite quirky. I think they need to spend more time squashing serious bugs, there are some things that simply don't work properly.
Not that Gnome is perfect or anything, it's got problems of it's own. For one, I'd really like to be able to use alpha blended tiles in the panel. Gnome could also use some more work in the window manager area, Sawfish is great, but it'd be nice if there would be a bug fix release some time within the next 10 years. An Office Suite would be nice too. At least KDE has Koffice, which is ok, but still extremely buggy.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
the main reasn is mexico has no middle class. democracies fail without this. a good example is russia
Nothing could be uglier or more distasteful than that smelly foot icon on the Gnome desktop.
I find the name Bart Decrem awkward and offensive. "Bart" is a very abrupt name, and its final "t" combines with the following "D" in an indistinct and wishy-washy way when spoken. The last name is ambiguous, leaving me wondering if I pronounced it correctly (hard or soft "c", and short or long "e"s) or whether I placed the emphasis on the correct syllable. The spelling is questionable and unmemorable, and is likely to cause confusion in the US and Asian markets. Therefore, I propose we retire these names, do not speak them anymore, and stop naming people with them. Bart Decrem is clearly a man good for the Linux world, but he deserves a better name, if only for marketing and aesthetic reasons.
Bart, naming aside, that was an insightful interview. Thanks.
That Marcello Tosartti was deported from the US? It was on the web page noted above to go read the original story. What's up with that?
I think KDE looks fine w/o it, but try Mosfet Liquid style engine for KDE3 and tell me it's ugly.
Mac user == gay faggot.
Lets face it, WindowsXP's default look looks like a 6 year old who just learned about primary colours got out of hand with his crayons.
KDE certainly isn't as good looking as Aqua, but its definitely a lot better looking than XP.
I wonder why you believe that.
In that sentence you make the assertions:
Notice that the first assertion makes no distinction between economic and military variants of colonialism. In fact this "clarification" is actually a modification of the statement of the first post, not simply explanatory.
The second assertion describes the economic impact of the colonialism but not the mechanism. The colonialism examples in my previous post were also lucrative for the colonising powers. Your clarification may have some valid points, but these points are not directly evident in your original post. In fact all the things attributed to the US described in the remainder of the post
No they hate us because of a bad relationship and the fact that neither side is willing to make a reasonable level of accomodation. The fact that the U.S. happens to be the more powerful partner in this relationship, does not mean that if the roles were reversed that we could expect equitable treatment from these leaders, and many problems in addition to inconveniences to the U.S. would arise.
This hypothesis is hard to test, but it just does not seem true. If you are referring to the situation in and around Afghanistan, you have got to be kidding if you think any country in the world would sit still for having a terrorist attack not only on a world class finanacial center (the towers) but have attacked the military headquarters (the Pentagon) of one of the world's most powerful armed forces. I'm sorry but no matter what the rhetoric is, No matter what kind of wrong real or imagined that these guys werre trying to redress, these guys miscalculated and escalated it to a point where the U.S. must step up and handle this situation. We were lucky that the U.S. did not resort to some real unpleasant weapons, this is just about threshold for many people to call for them to be deployed (I'm glad they were not). Regardless of the past behavior of the U.S. and other countries in this region, rather than pretending like it never happened, stability can only occur if the solution employed works given these relationship issues.
And regarding your last remark:
Of course I'm open to learning. However, it may be that English is your second language, and that your original post did not quite clearly state what you wanted it to. In any event, I think given your original position statement, your statements did not ring true and my analysis holds.
I'm not that familiar with Nicarauguan history, but Mexico's problem stems from not having a large enough middle class (as noted by the other poster) and having a deeply instilled sense of corruption in the government (perhaps left over from Spanish Colonialism). Interestingly, Mexico has one clearly great leader Benito Juarez , who was a self educated poor Indian who rose to power and imposed a more equitable government. He is such a cool guy, he is worth knowing about even if you aren't Mexican. He said (loose translation) "Respect for the rights of others is the peace.", a great quote. Unfortunately his successor was a harsh dictator, and noone of his caliber has ever reached high office since. In Mexico, candidates that go against the will of the rich and powerful (and the military) are often assassinated rather than make it to the polls.