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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."
...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 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
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!
But aesthetics does have a real effect on your attitude while using a computer
Well, when you reflect on it, looking at CDE on a SparcStation for too long makes me want to throw the box at the wall. And you have to love the CDE color schemes as well... let's see there is the 'bright pink on dark purple, no.... dark blue on bright purple, no.... fuscia on pink, no..... bright gold on blue, no....'
Personally I think whoever designed CDE didn't really give a shit, as compared to Microsoft and Apple who practically give people psychological tests when designing the GUIs. Shoot, I remember that Microsoft once conducted a large-scale survey to see if people liked the shadows better on one side of the icon or the other. Freakin' shadows! And all this time the CDE people are like, "purple it is, we don't care, we're not changin' it."
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
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!
You know when I was in school 1984 was required reading. I am thinking that is no longer the case.
War is necrophilia.
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