On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, John Califf wrote:

| PS  I will not be able to participate in follow up in this thread
| because my ISP is messed up -  I can send by not receive email
| right now.  But I will read any responses posted with a browser.

well, i'm not posting with a browser, but in that i conducted the 
interview and wrote the piece, i think i can alleviate some of your 
concerns.

first, i do kind of wish you had read the whole thing. thekompany.com 
is, as i understand it, working on some things that simply would not 
be done if they weren't doing them: the replacement for visio, for 
instance, and the database; kdb had actually been dropped from 
koffice before shawn hired some people to work on it.

if you came away from the story with the impression that 
thekompany.com is trying to dictate the development of koffice, then 
i apparently wrote insufficiently clearly. and the fact is, nobody 
could dictate the course of koffice anyway. shawn's people are 
working on very specific projects that will then be given to koffice. 
the method employed in creating these things is really immaterial, 
just as it's immaterial how other projects get developed -- do you, 
for instance, know how the stuff that is really essential to your 
system got developed, by who, and under what circumstances and 
organizational structure? probably not.

here, on this list, one can suggest pretty much anything and barring 
a vigorous objection is encouraged to develop and contribute it; 
sometimes, we noncoders make suggestions and if they're good enough 
someone else will be kind enough to write the code that scratches 
that itch for us.

in a very long interview, i got the sense that shawn's purpose here 
is to help kde and koffice become essential to businesses that want 
to use linux. that's not the kind of thing that anyone here is likely 
to oppose. he has hired programmers and paid them out of his own 
pocket, in many cases simply to give them time to do whatever they 
were doing before, with the results contributed to the community, 
just as they were before, only, it is hoped, quicker.

so i'm very sorry that my story led to your concern, and to the 
extent that the way i wrote it might have contributed to this 
misimpression, i apologize.

-- 
dep
--
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
                                    -- Daniel Patrick Moynahan