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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] wow ximian
From:       Jonathan Singer <jsinger () genome ! wi ! mit ! edu>
Date:       2001-12-04 16:38:23
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> From: Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca>
> 
> 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.


 
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