You know sydb, you've been bagging on us all day. I answer the phone and I respond to emails because I like to be in touch with our customers. I've got a good number of employees, and I work about 80 hours a week. I've been a programmer for over 20 years, and what has always really pissed me off is companies that don't answer their phones and don't answer their emails. So for as long as I can possibly manage it, I'm going to continue taking care of as much of this as I can. It keeps me in touch with my customers and they appreciate it. I have other things to do today, but it's important for people to be taken care of. You can think whatever you want of that, but I think people like it.
What you're missing is that in almost all circumstances the customer get's the source code, if they need to recompile on BSD or glibc they can, it's just that they can't redistribute those changes.
Here is my main problem. Using KDE Studio Gold as an example. Because it is GPL, I get countless emails from people demanding their 'free' copy because the GPL says that software wants to be 'free'. These people do not understand what the GPL means. It is an enormous burden dealing with these people, they become hostile, they try to attack our servers, they send nasty emails and all because we won't give them something for free. What bestowed upon them the god given right to get things for free? should they get a car, a house, groceries, for free? No they shouldn't. If it wasn't for the enormous type of similar reaction to GPL code we would use it much more often, but there is way too much of a misunderstanding and we don't have the bandwidth to fix it.
You are incorrect. Our customer has the right to modify the code, they do *not* have the right to redistribute it. What the FSF needs to really point out is what the incentive is to write code that you never make money off of in any way. In reality most of the productive open source programmers are employed by a company to write the code, they aren't writing it during the day with no other source of income and living off of the good wishes of others. There is a reality to life that this utopian ideal does not satisfy
yes I do actually and it even provides that if we discontinue support or development of the application, it will revert to GPL after a year. I'm just having our attornies finish reviewing it.
I don't think software has a will that tells it that it wants to be free, and the use of the word 'free' has been unfortunate because way too many people think that means 'no cost' and explaining the difference gets very tiring. RMS also accused us of speaking for the KDE community. We've never made that claim in any way shape or form, we just happen to be one of the first KDE centric software companies.
Here is the bottom line, and I've said it before. I think that users *and* developers need to have their interests protected. Providing the source to a customer is fine, and I agree with that, but they shouldn't be able to redistribute it (in my opinion). We make totally free software, and closed software, and restricted free software. To us it's not an all or nothing thing, we do what works for the product, for us and for the user.
The KDE community in general seems to use the GPL, LGPL and BSD as far as I've seen. I don't speak for them and I don't represent them.
That was the beauty of the name. Python is named after Monty Python, and is also a snake, and BlackAdder was also a british comedy series, and a snake. It started as an internal joke, but we ended up liking it.
We have extensive support for multiple currencies. As a matter of fact when you set up an account, you get a combo box of pretty much every currency on the planet. There is a bit of fine tuning left to do like having the right symbol and word for the currency appear in the check writer, and we are still working on the currency calculator for support of the Euro specifically, but those will be coming shortly. Since our main Kapital developers are in Europe, this topic is dear to their hearts.
Aethera as a fully functional mail client with address book, sticky notes, calendar and newsgroups will always be free. We are making money by selling plug ins (again) that provide extended functionality and features. This isn't to enhance the basic feature set, those will be full featured, it is to add new options to the framework. There is also the groupware server aspect that we will make money on and vertical market applications that can make use of the groupware aspect. So people can choose to use as much or as little as possible.
While we are a bit behind schedule, you should start to see the first commercial plug ins in May.
Actually the format isn't proprietary, it is just copywritten to mean that you cannot freely distribute them. We've had several people submit stencils that they built by just examing the default that was included.
theKompany.com will be releasing beta 1 of Rekall which is designed to be an MS Access style application in that it is a more user oriented, database centric development environment. The scripting language is Python and it has a full compliment of widgets and wizards as well as reporting ability. The web pages will be up in a week or so and the beta will be out around the end of the month (http://www.thekompany.com).
A precurser to this work was the KDE-DB data access layer for KDE. This allowed us to abstract the database further so that while Rekall comes with a default xBase data repository, you can swap it out without notice for anything that has a KDE-DB plug in, which is currently MySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix and soon for Oracle and DB2. You can see details on KDE-DB at http://www.thekompany.com/projects/kdb
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You know sydb, you've been bagging on us all day. I answer the phone and I respond to emails because I like to be in touch with our customers. I've got a good number of employees, and I work about 80 hours a week. I've been a programmer for over 20 years, and what has always really pissed me off is companies that don't answer their phones and don't answer their emails. So for as long as I can possibly manage it, I'm going to continue taking care of as much of this as I can. It keeps me in touch with my customers and they appreciate it. I have other things to do today, but it's important for people to be taken care of. You can think whatever you want of that, but I think people like it.
What you're missing is that in almost all circumstances the customer get's the source code, if they need to recompile on BSD or glibc they can, it's just that they can't redistribute those changes.
Here is my main problem. Using KDE Studio Gold as an example. Because it is GPL, I get countless emails from people demanding their 'free' copy because the GPL says that software wants to be 'free'. These people do not understand what the GPL means. It is an enormous burden dealing with these people, they become hostile, they try to attack our servers, they send nasty emails and all because we won't give them something for free. What bestowed upon them the god given right to get things for free? should they get a car, a house, groceries, for free? No they shouldn't. If it wasn't for the enormous type of similar reaction to GPL code we would use it much more often, but there is way too much of a misunderstanding and we don't have the bandwidth to fix it.
You are incorrect. Our customer has the right to modify the code, they do *not* have the right to redistribute it. What the FSF needs to really point out is what the incentive is to write code that you never make money off of in any way. In reality most of the productive open source programmers are employed by a company to write the code, they aren't writing it during the day with no other source of income and living off of the good wishes of others. There is a reality to life that this utopian ideal does not satisfy
KDE Studio Gold is still GPL, we are just charging for it now, which is allowed (RMS verified this).
Yes, I sent the updates to the webmaster a while ago and he didn't do it, and I sent it again this morning but he is in germany and was asleep.
yes I do actually and it even provides that if we discontinue support or development of the application, it will revert to GPL after a year. I'm just having our attornies finish reviewing it.
I don't think software has a will that tells it that it wants to be free, and the use of the word 'free' has been unfortunate because way too many people think that means 'no cost' and explaining the difference gets very tiring. RMS also accused us of speaking for the KDE community. We've never made that claim in any way shape or form, we just happen to be one of the first KDE centric software companies.
Here is the bottom line, and I've said it before. I think that users *and* developers need to have their interests protected. Providing the source to a customer is fine, and I agree with that, but they shouldn't be able to redistribute it (in my opinion). We make totally free software, and closed software, and restricted free software. To us it's not an all or nothing thing, we do what works for the product, for us and for the user.
The KDE community in general seems to use the GPL, LGPL and BSD as far as I've seen. I don't speak for them and I don't represent them.
Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
It is only $79.99 and is reduced to $49.99 during the beta. The new beta coming out shortly will also include support for Ruby.
That was the beauty of the name. Python is named after Monty Python, and is also a snake, and BlackAdder was also a british comedy series, and a snake. It started as an internal joke, but we ended up liking it.
We have extensive support for multiple currencies. As a matter of fact when you set up an account, you get a combo box of pretty much every currency on the planet. There is a bit of fine tuning left to do like having the right symbol and word for the currency appear in the check writer, and we are still working on the currency calculator for support of the Euro specifically, but those will be coming shortly. Since our main Kapital developers are in Europe, this topic is dear to their hearts.
Aethera as a fully functional mail client with address book, sticky notes, calendar and newsgroups will always be free. We are making money by selling plug ins (again) that provide extended functionality and features. This isn't to enhance the basic feature set, those will be full featured, it is to add new options to the framework. There is also the groupware server aspect that we will make money on and vertical market applications that can make use of the groupware aspect. So people can choose to use as much or as little as possible.
While we are a bit behind schedule, you should start to see the first commercial plug ins in May.
Actually the format isn't proprietary, it is just copywritten to mean that you cannot freely distribute them. We've had several people submit stencils that they built by just examing the default that was included.
Actually there is a good bit of totally free, fully functional software, just look at the web site.
theKompany.com will be releasing beta 1 of Rekall which is designed to be an MS Access style application in that it is a more user oriented, database centric development environment. The scripting language is Python and it has a full compliment of widgets and wizards as well as reporting ability. The web pages will be up in a week or so and the beta will be out around the end of the month (http://www.thekompany.com).
A precurser to this work was the KDE-DB data access layer for KDE. This allowed us to abstract the database further so that while Rekall comes with a default xBase data repository, you can swap it out without notice for anything that has a KDE-DB plug in, which is currently MySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix and soon for Oracle and DB2. You can see details on KDE-DB at http://www.thekompany.com/projects/kdb