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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] Re: as far as theKompany is concerned
From:       Christian Lavoie <clavoi14 () po-box ! mcgill ! ca>
Date:       2001-12-08 18:14:13
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On Friday 07 December 2001 06:29, Shawn Gordon wrote:
> > For example, as part of the KDE community myself, I must say I cringe
> > everytime you expound how you are "rebaptising" what was formerly a
> > KDE product and turning it into a pure Qt one.  Aethera immediately
> > loses value to me, personally, but I am not your paying customer
> > (yet).
> 
> You know, I've had people say this a number of times and I just don't get
> it.  What are you loosing?  

KIO slaves, kparts, and countless others. That is always my first reaction 
when I read "TheKompany rewrote X for Qt only!". I really read: "Yeah! I 
can't access my files on (say) FTP anymore! Hurray!"

I'm not sure this is really how it is, but from a PR point-de-vue, yes it is. 
That's the first reaction I get, and I'm not the only one.

> since I do the courtesy (that most busy CEO's don't) of responding to
> emails and talkbacks, I get personally involved.  I also get a lot of
> customers because we are so responsive.  The people who don't like us will
> for the most part always not like us and it is purely a matter of ideology.

It's more than ideology, most often it's bad past experiences. It's called 
"get lots of users with a nice product, then change the product to give 
advantage to the company instead of the user as it was the case before". 
Think about the AIM fiasco where you can't connect to the servers with 
open-source clients. Think Microsoft and protocols (kerberos?). Think the 
pains samba has to take to be able to talk with Windows machine. People are 
simply afraid you're gonna kick them in the pants the same way.

There's a huge psychological block to companies for the simple reason that 
most people have serious reasons to _hate_ quite a couple of companies.

I don't personally mind TheKompany doing whatever they feel like with their 
products (as long as older licenses are still honoured -- which they have 
been), but you _have_ to understand that it's extremely easy to equate 
"makeing a buck" to "f*ck my customers as long as they pay me". and to "even 
more f*ck to those who _don't_ pay me"; as this _is_ the overall feeling one 
gets by looking around at the software market, especially the big heavyweight 
monopoly.

 (Again, I'm not saying this is the attitude of TheKompany, quite the 
opposite, so please don't take any of this personally)

Again, exagerating, but the Open Source community in general has this feeling 
about just about all attempts to make a buck out of Open Source. Just check 
out gnotices for the latest flames at Ximian for their connector thingamajig.

Wishing you the best of luck,
Christian Lavoie
clavoi14@po-box.mcgill.ca
http://www.christianlavoie.com
 
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