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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!"
Who cares? The people you are talking about, the average user, is probably only dimly aware they are using Windows. It's not like they chose Windows, it's what their computer came with, it's what their apps run on. They would never do anything so radical as to change OS unless they a) had someone else to install it for them and b) had a compelling reason to change.
Sneaking it in when they aren't looking is a pretty safe bet, it's what allowed MS to succeed.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
siri
Is it too much to ask that the blurbs on Slashdot's frontpage should explain what a software package does, instead of just citing the name as if everyone should magically be familiar with them all?
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.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
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.
Blackadder has been in the works for quite a while......... Still waiting to see how it'll do as a Ruby IDE.
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How do we know they made money? The article said nothing about profits, and it's not a publically treaded company.
The other way we differ 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.
That's great and all. But how can you be a decent UI designer if you have never seen some of the best examples of User Interfaces. Despite not wanting to make a clone of Outlook, there are wonderful UI elements MS created for Outlook and MS Office in general.
You can't just read a book to develop excellent User Interfaces. You have to experience what is out there and build on that with your own and other's insight.
1;
I tried Aethera, and it was totally unsuable for me. It was one of the ugliest pieces of software I've ever seen. I don't mean to stomp all over the poor guys work but you're right, he really should take a look at some other stuff first. Maybe things have improved for 1.0 though.
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 ;-)
In terms of comparing [Aethera] to Evolution, they both are at the heart email/PIM applications. We differ initially in the fact that ours will run on Linux and Windows
So does he mean 'will' as in 'in the future' or 'it will run today' on Windows? Native version, or this one of those 'install Cygwin' things?
creation science book
LSB does not cover Qt nor KDE, environments that Kapital depends on.
I thought the same thing when I saw it.
You can eat pizza but you can't shave while sat at your keyboard staring at the screen.
I tried to make a FreeBSD port of Aethera, and discovered, it is impossible.
The Aethera's supposedly source tarball comes with a few binary libraries. At least one of them, according to the Kompany, is not "open-sourced". Since the binaries available are only for Linux/x86, all other platforms are left out...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yeah, this is a day late, but I just downloaded the latest available Aethera, and it doesn't support IMAP. It's part of the configuration setup, but you can see messages in the command line area being passed back and "IMAP4::getMail() is not supported" is one of them (or something similar to that).
This much-lauded email/PIM thing is about to become 1.0 - still mostly aimed at geeks - and doesn't support IMAP? I don't get it.
creation science book