Interview With Shawn Gordon of TheKompany

Gentu writes "OSNews features an interview with Shawn Gordon, president of TheKompany. Shawn talks about version 1.0 of Aethera and Kapital coming out in September, porting a lot of their Qt apps to MacOSX, the future of Linux on the desktop, how the embedded Linux market was surprisingly successful financially for them, as well as selling well their desktop apps. It is really encouraging to read that a desktop-oriented company actually made real money from Linux this year!"

Comments

Good article; good news.

[sirinek]

It is indeed refreshing to see that a Linux-based software company is making quality applications, and more importantly, making money.

The other thing I enjoyed seeing is that they are starting to get their products into retail stores and that Linux and Windows versions are "one box, one price", allowing people to migrate between the two and keep the app they paid for. Nice! :)

Hopefully they keep up the good work, come out with some very nice apps and make the transition to Linux that much easier.

Maybe they should come up with a QT Office suite (KOffice?) with for-pay MS Word filters and then migrate people over to Linux cause their software will still run. :) It'd be cheaper than MS Office, and still read the documents they need to read *and* run on Linux! :)

siri

QuantaGold? DataArchitect? Give me the Connector!!

[imac.usr]

The lions share of requests have been for QuantaGold on OS X so far.

The number one most useful product they could offer OS X users right now is a port of the Connector!

Microsoft has stonewalled on delivering a native Exchange client for Mac OS X. In fact, according to a recent posting on Macintouch (scroll down to the second or third message), their official recommendation is that you set up a separate PC and use the new Remote Desktop client to access it!

Here at NIH, we want to move to OS X soon but the lack of a native Outlook client is really going to hurt us. If Evolution+Connector were available instead, we would likely take a serious look at spending some serious money on it.

A Long Hard Road

[XNuke]

I was an early adopter of Kapital. Seems like over a year now, I am not sure. I had been using Linux exclusively since 1996 and only used windows for Quicken/TurboTax since it had all my financial data since 1993. The early beat versions of Kapital were very encouraging but the most amazing thing was the damn near heroic effort to get a program like Kapital to work on the ZILLIONS of different Linux distributions. Anyone who thinks Linux has a chance on the mainstream desktop needs to look at the mailing list logs for kapital, and the many replies from Shawn regarding difficulties in those areas. Simply amazing. Linux isn't going to Fork like the major Unices did in the 80's, it already HAS.

Aethera UI designer has never seen Outlook !

[InodoroPereyra]

Very nice and refreshing interview, I wish TheKompany the best. The only part that was really shocking to me was the following:

The other way we differ [from Evolution] is that we didn't set out to make an Outlook clone, as a matter of fact the UI designer has never even seen Outlook

He is talking about Aethera, and comparing it to Ximian's Evolution. It really strikes me that their User Interface designer has never seen Outlook, the most used email client. He should IMHO. I heartly agree on not having to clone Outlook, but you need to take a look at what people are used to, just as a reference. And a lot of the potential users of Aethera are now using Outlook.

That said, I should probably add that I have never seen Outlook myself but I am not a UI designer for an email client ;-)