>From: Navindra Umanee > >Amazing that they got this proprietary announcement out without any >flammage, considering the harsh unforgiving movement against KDE/Qt >they launched in the past. Heh, I was marveling at that, too. Miguel de Icaza's company declares that they can't make money on open-source software and abandons their reliance on services -- and that goes entirely without mention in a Slashdot article linking to that very story! Although, I agree with Dre that the comparisons to Qt are unfair (if inevitable). It's the recognition that a pure free software approach is an unworkable business model that I think is noteworthy. >It's truly genius that they pulled this off, but hard to see how they >escaped any significant public finger pointing. TheKompany seems to >have failed miserably in this even in the KDE community itself. >Something to learn here. Some ideas: 1) Everyone knows how much free software Miguel and Ximian have done. The Kompany hasn't done nearly as much, and it's not well known how much they have done. (Although many people seem to think Shawn Gordon is the head of KDE.) 2) As Dre said, you get much better press if you give people something for free and then charge them for an extra. I think Shawn said he tried to do that with Kapital the way he did with Kivio but couldn't find a healthy way to partition it. 3) Also, the Kompany has to make enough money to pay the bills, unlike Ximian which is burning through a huge stack of venture capital. The question is what the balance of free vs non-free work at Ximian is going to be in a few years, especially since this announcement came completely out of the blue. I suspect it will look a lot more like the Kompany's than it does today. _______________________________________________ This message is from the kde-promo mailing list. Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-promo to unsubscribe, set digest on or temporarily stop your subscription.