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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] Who are KDE's main competitors?
From:       Stefan Teleman <steleman () nyc ! rr ! com>
Date:       2004-12-05 11:39:14
Message-ID: 200412050639.15029.steleman () nyc ! rr ! com
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Just my 0.02:

First (and most important) disclaimer: i do not work for Sun 
Microsystems.  i never worked at Sun. Sun does not pay me a dime to 
maintain KDE on Solaris, or to say warm and fuzzy things about them. 
Ergo, i have no vested material interest in what i am about to say.

I have seen no sign of any conspiracy at Sun to destroy, undermine or 
otherwise hinder KDE in any way. Quite the contrary, many people at 
Sun, with whom i have had contact, mostly related to KDE on Solaris, 
have been very supportive of KDE.

KDE is not a for-profit organization selling a product. It does not 
make any money from selling software, nor does it try to.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a for-profit corporation. They sell their 
products to make a profit (of which we haven't seen much lately).

The idea that they (Sun) are trying to "displace KDE" is not realistic 
IMHO. In two of my previous jobs i have worked for commercial 
software shops. The hard reality of the sofware business is: you 
hardly ever make any money, unless your name is M$, and you are a 
government-sponsored monopoly. The cost of developing software, QA 
and ongoing maintenance and upgrades makes any chance of a profit 
very slim. Very hard to believe that Sun would be spending serious 
money on developing their own, new, desktop environent, just to hurt 
KDE.

One of the main reasons for JDS' existence is actually Sun customer's 
unhappiness (to say the least) with Sun's GNOME. Please don't get me 
wrong, i'm not trying to bash GNOME in any way, but let's just say 
that Sun's version of GNOME is not exactly what one would call a 
"flagship product". They had to come up with something better, and 
this "something better" is JDS. That doesn't mean they are trying to 
displace KDE, or that they are developing JDS because they are trying 
to hinder KDE. They are trying to market and sell their own products, 
and their most profitable products are hardware and services, not 
desktop software. The reality of Sun's desktop environment has been 
CDE for the past 10 years. It was high time for them to build 
something new.

0.02.

Cheers,

--Stefan

------

> On Sunday 05 December 2004 00:01, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> > Are you implying that the claims were false?

> > If Sun could displace KDE desktop deployments in a organisation
> > with JDS, do you think they would do it?

> > that's exactly what Ximian was doing.  They looked at every
> > announcement that mentioned a big organisation was switching to
> > KDE and then tried to convert them to GNOME.  To this day the
> > City of Largo is still on GNOME.

> > So doesn't that make them a competitor to KDE in some sense?
> 


-- 
Stefan Teleman          'Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition'
steleman@nyc.rr.com                          -Monty Python

 
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