[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-promo
Subject:    [kde-promo] Re: as far as theKompany is concerned
From:       Shawn Gordon <shawn () thekompany ! com>
Date:       2001-12-09 15:58:42
[Download RAW message or body]

At 03:21 AM 12/9/2001, you wrote:
> Message: 2
> From: Christian Lavoie <clavoi14@po-box.mcgill.ca>
> To: kde-promo@mail.kde.org
> Subject: Re: [kde-promo] Re: as far as theKompany is concerned
> Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 13:14:13 -0500
> Reply-To: kde-promo@mail.kde.org
> 
> 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!"

ok, that still doesn't make any sense.  Hardly any apps are kparts, and 
hardly any apps have KIO slaves - what is it specifically that you think 
you are missing?  What does accessing files on FTP have to do with 
anything?  We've always had multi-platform and closed applications, out of 
the first four products we released we had PowerPlant which was like a 
linux distro, we had BlackAdder which was closed to a certain extant and 
multi-platform through Qt, we had Kapital which was KDE only and closed, we 
had KDE Studio Gold which was KDE and GPL.  Lot's of people really like 
having the multi-platform capability.  You guys love KDE right?  You act 
like KDE wasn't build using Qt or something, as though you hate Qt 
applications.

Tell you what, pick one of our Qt based products and tell me what you are 
missing from it because it is Qt based and KDE based, something specific 
because I honestly would like to know.

> 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.

Again this doesn't wash.  I can think of one example of an application that 
we've been selling that we might make Qt based that is currently KDE based, 
this is Kapital.  In all other cases we've been selling Qt based 
applications and for a single price you get that application on all 
supported platforms, so Windows and Linux and when Mac is available, you 
get that too.  This would seem to be the opposite of what you are talking 
about.  Their is huge advantage to the user, they are getting more, not 
less, with what we are doing.

So given what I've just described, can you tell me why what we are doing is 
bad?

> 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.

I thought what started this whole thing was that Ximian *wasn't* getting 
flammed over it and people were asking why they weren't and we were.  I 
would say that we're a good example of *not* making a buck off of open 
source.  We own our Qt license, and write our code using Qt, it seems if we 
did more KDE based applications then that would be more of making a buck 
off of open source.  Sure we use things like GCC to build, but for the most 
part all of our stuff is self contained and written by us, we don't sell 
things that were built by others, and their are reasons for everything 
we've done.  I've offered to write a paper for the dot giving better 
explanations for everything, but they are not interested in publishing 
it.  One of the strangest I get every once in a while is people insisting 
that we stole, and didn't write Kivio and KDE Studio - this is just pure 
BS, and is just one of the oddball rumors floating around about us.


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


Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
949-713-3276


 
_______________________________________________
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.


[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]