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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."
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)
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
I'm not quite sure if that is the right route to go. As MS continues down the sprial path of proprietary software, shouldn't the open source community develope open standards for documents, spread sheets, and presentations rather than endlessly chasing after the newest service release that "fixes" compatibility issues?
I 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
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
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.
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.
If they did know where Bin Laden was, they wouldn't say. Kill him? Sure. But say they had killed him? Maybe not. Why? He's too useful. Take away Bin Laden, and people might lose interest. We need UBL. We need him to excite the "what if" fear. We need him to be for Bush what the "bear in the woods" was for Reagan. Take away the bear, and there's no reason to carry a gun. Of course, the real bear is probably Iraq with weapons grade plutonium, anthrax, or chemical agents; but Sadam's marketing department is even better than MSFT's.
Now, from the radical "Moslem" POV, they won't tell us if UBL is dead either. They need him to make the myth. They need him to be the one who the Americans can't catch. They need him to fill time on Al Jazeera. :)
No, UBL is sticking around for a good long time. He's too useful to both sides to just die. Personally, I think he's probably already dead from kidney failure, and has probably been buried secretly in Pakistan where he died from exhaustion and kidney failure after the border crossing. No matter. Both sides will keep him "living".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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!
Two percent is a very good ratio, assuming that you're not making it up. Most sites which have switched to a subscription model have ended up going bankrupt because they converted well under one percent of their users to subscribers.
For more information, click here.
Hey, man, it's mostly Americans who repeatedly call Linux "anti-American" so don't blame anyone but yourself.
With regard to colonialism: the US is the largest practitioner of colonialism in history; the breath of its economic conquests stretching across the face of the earth. What do you think all the protests are about? That Wal-Mart's prices aren't low enough? Why do you think the Islamists are so upset? Do you really buy Bush's "they hate democracy" propaganda?
The only reason withdrawal of American carriers would lead to instability is because of the power vacuum their departure would leave -- a power vacuum which could then (and should have always been) filled by countries who actually have a direct, regional interest in those waters.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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
No, the reason why you won't read what he has to say is because you always post before reading the article. Perhaps if you did, you'd understand the context of what he said.
But then you'd feel like a moron.
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!
I don't mean to troll but i'll say the truth. .. so what? If you don't want people's buisiness stop trying to make them use linux because it's free and everything around it. Use other arguments. I mean this is how everybody sees it. Why do you think all the corporations are switching to linux? Because it's that good? (well, ok it's good also) But the main reason it's because they want to get away from licenses from company X,Y or Z. This the mental thought that goes around linux and that's how things are going to stay. It's sad but unfortuanately it's true.
The reason i switched to linux it's because the people who got me to switch told me so many times it's free that i believed them. So why would anyone expect me to pay now? I'm not going to give a cent to anybody as long as i get everything i need for free. I'm i cheap? yes i am
it's really simple, for the same reasons that people hate MS.
You know when I was in school 1984 was required reading. I am thinking that is no longer the case.
War is necrophilia.
Dude, how were you not able to find pirated software in Hong Kong? It's all over every computer market. Exen XP/Win2k.
dave
It works at least as good as on Windows, some things even are nicer, IMHO. Then again, it's mostly a different product, not just a simple port.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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!
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!
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
I've been reading Slashdot off and on for a long time, and this is the first time I ever heard about 'subscriptions'.
Thanks for brining it up. If there is one thing I _try_ to do is to support the open source companies I believe in. I purchase about 90% of the distros I use, even if I've downloaded them to try them out.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
> 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
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
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.
Indeed. Bin Laden is our very own real-life Emmanuel Goldstein. Every time I accidentally flip to CNN, I want to say "And now, for our two minutes of hate."
I wonder why you believe that.