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Linux Business

Bart Decrem on the Linux Business 262

Posted by michael from the big-picture dept.
Anonymous Hero writes "Co-founder of Eazel and now vice president of Hancom Linux, Bart Decram gives his views on a whole lot of things related to desktop Linux in an interview at Linux and Main. He talks abour what went wrong with Eazel, why everyone should work together to build Microsoft Office filters, how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world, and how he thinks KDE is 'butt-ugly.' Long read, but worth it."
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Bart Decrem on the Linux Business More

Bart Decrem on the Linux Business

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  • Bart Decram? (Score:2, Funny)

    by qslack ( 239825 )
    Bart Decram?

    Don't have a penguin, man!
  • 'anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world,'

    Finally, my flag-burning software will get some use! Time to work on my anthrax algorithm.
    • #include <kerosene.h>

      int main(void) {

      sqrt(flag); /* Squirt the flag with kerosene */

      }

      I think I've reverse-engineered part of your algorithm. Can you help me with the rest, please?

  • well.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by neo8750 ( 566137 )
    He talks abour what went wrong with Eazel,

    we all know his spelling couldn't of went wrong =)

  • ...considering Hancom's close partnership with theKompany. Perhaps someone can point him to kde-look.org [slashdot.org] where he can find all sorts of eye candy goodness for KDE.

    Or have I been trolled?

    :Peter
    • from the article: The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant.

      Yeah... just like the word "Start" will keep people from using Windows. The same goes for the Apple menu on MacOS. Puh-leeze. I think this guy is a little shallow by determining his desktop on the types of icons and menu picture! You use a GUI to help you accomplish work faster... NOT to debate about how pretty the pictures are!
      • I think this guy is a little shallow by determining his desktop on the types of icons and menu picture! You use a GUI to help you accomplish work faster... NOT to debate about how pretty the pictures are!

        I don't know -- I agree with him for the most part. Every time a new version of KDE comes out, I switch to it for a week or two. I always like KDE, it always feels very together and fluid. But I always go back to GNOME. No matter how much time I spend poking through kde-look or classic.themes.org (you know, the one that actually has themes on it, unlike the new one), KDEs ugliness just nags at me. Eventually I get to the point where I avoid doing any work on the computer because it hurts my eyes to look at it.

        I know there are people out there that like how KDE looks... great. But aesthetics does have a real effect on your attitude while using a computer. (Switch to all-Motif apps for a week and see how you feel ;) )

        • Re:He'd better get used to KDE... (Score:4, Funny)

          by cscx ( 541332 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @01:20AM (#3407156) Homepage
          But aesthetics does have a real effect on your attitude while using a computer

          Well, when you reflect on it, looking at CDE on a SparcStation for too long makes me want to throw the box at the wall. And you have to love the CDE color schemes as well... let's see there is the 'bright pink on dark purple, no.... dark blue on bright purple, no.... fuscia on pink, no..... bright gold on blue, no....'

          Personally I think whoever designed CDE didn't really give a shit, as compared to Microsoft and Apple who practically give people psychological tests when designing the GUIs. Shoot, I remember that Microsoft once conducted a large-scale survey to see if people liked the shadows better on one side of the icon or the other. Freakin' shadows! And all this time the CDE people are like, "purple it is, we don't care, we're not changin' it."
      • I've got to agree with the man too. Sure, there are other reasons why I prefer GNOME, but aesthetics are probably the biggest reason I don't use KDE. It really does bother me to look at it, even after trying 101 different themes.

        Aesthetics are a very important part of computing enjoyment. If it isn't pleasing to the eye, you wont want to look at it. Now, for what its worth, I agree with you that a GUI should help you work faster, but if you can work equally fast in either desktop, wouldn't you choose the one that is more appealing visually?


    • > Or have I been trolled?

      D00D, this is Slashdot. It goes without saying that you've been trolled, or will be trolled soon, or perhaps are in the process of being trolled at this very moment.

  • Hmm. (Score:5, Funny)

    by qslack ( 239825 ) <qslack@@@pobox...com> on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @11:35PM (#3406791) Homepage Journal
    ...why everyone should work together to build Microsoft Office filters, how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world, and how he thinks KDE is 'butt-ugly.' Long read, but worth it.

    Hmm, I seem to remember a site with a bunch of essays like that. It's something like Slashdot [slashdot.org] or something similar. :) :)

    • Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SkulkCU ( 137480 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @11:44PM (#3406831) Homepage Journal

      I seem to remember ... a bunch of essays like that

      It gets a little redundant, but suggestions from the community (peer review) is how this 'open-sorce' thingy gets to a dope zen-like all-powerful existance. Or, at least, marginally improved. I firmly beleive that in another 11 years, people will wonder what happened to Windows, and Bill Gates will be alone in an alley with nothing but a stuffed tux doll for a pillow. Muhahahahahah!

      Everytime I make a joke, I get modded to insightful, and it's starting to scare me.

      • Re:Hmm. (Score:3, Funny)

        by flacco ( 324089 )
        Everytime I make a joke, I get modded to insightful, and it's starting to scare me.

        Hey, that's better than my situation. Everything I try to say something insightful, it gets modded "Funny." :-)

    • I'm going to take on his quote of:
      Because of that, in my opinion, it's hard to make money in the U.S. because the companies are pretty happy with Windows. It works pretty well, and the cost savings that result from Linux on the desktop for most companies do not warrant the trauma of having to worry about whether your Microsoft Office document is going to open properly.
      I'm not so sure that people are happy with Windows.... It's rather that they still don't have all of the pieces needed to make the switch. One company I worked for tried to force all of the geeks to switch over to Windows... The argument of the DTO was that we needed access to the Microsoft Calendering software. For him, this was pretty much the market-killer.

      I've actually heard similar comments from someone who told me that RedHat had gotten queries from VP and CEO levels of Fortune 500 companies about switching the entire company from Windows to Linux. The big show-stopper was apparently things like Calendering software. This actually makes a lot of sense to me. In terms of beauty and ease of use, KDE/Gnome is right up there with Windows (in fact, I remember thinking that Win2K looked like a gnome knock-off).

      I think that the next stage of the Linux World-Domination project would be to take a survey of what necessary functionality is missing from the Linux desk-top to allow a full-company switchover. I figure that -- if people are willing to take it on, there are probably Fortune-500 companies that would be willing to put a couple of million dollars into funding the core group to develop some of this functionality.

      In terms of what it would save them to be able to walk away from the MS-Tax, I'm guessing that even $10M would be small change for a fortune-500 company -- but a hefty chunk of money to an OS development effort.

  • Build Office filters? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tutal ( 512222 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @11:36PM (#3406793)
    I'm not quite sure if that is the right route to go. As MS continues down the sprial path of proprietary software, shouldn't the open source community develope open standards for documents, spread sheets, and presentations rather than endlessly chasing after the newest service release that "fixes" compatibility issues?
    • An interesting point and one to take note of. However, I believe that an Office filter would do Linux some good. It's like the whole P2P thing. People wont switch over to FunnyName P2P if it had no or little content. It's that initial little hurdle to get over.

      A solution to address your point would be to focus on a good input filter and give only a little time for a basic output filter so the user would be encuraged to save the file as an open source friendly (and hence a open standard) format.

      Remember, one key to success is communication. Without it everyone would be lost.

    • Re:Build Office filters? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tim Colgate ( 519024 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @05:00AM (#3407800) Homepage
      What he says is:

      I think we have to build this middle layer, this XML layer, and everybody exports to that and imports from that. In the short term it always feels good to keep making your current filters just a little bit better, but I think if you take like a three-year view, then I think StarOffice and us and KOffice and GNOME Office, if we all worked on the same thing, then we'd all be much better off in a couple years.

      . The point is, you've got 4 main groups (Star/OpenOffice, Hancom, KDE, GNOME) all developing filters for e.g. MS Office, RTF, Lotus 123, WordPerfect etc. And then each group has its own native format as well, so for full interoperability, you've got a lot of filters. It would make more sense in the longer term to have a common intermediate format. Maybe we should just use OpenOffice as the standard format(s), and turn the OpenOffice filters into a library. Then if Kword wants to read MS Word it just uses the OpenOffice filters. Of course there are some plans along these lines already [openoffice.org] - just look at the DTD - 200K! There are also a lot of good links on this page (scroll down) [koffice.org]


  • My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant. There's an elegancy missing in the thing. The underlying thing is pretty darn good, no argument with that.
    I think "K" is as offensive as the rest of the letters "F", "U", and "C"!

    Serious things in the article... The maturing of Star Office (it should rather be OpenOffice, right?), KDE, and GNOME. How, WinXP bootleg CDs cannot be found in Korea.

    I believe the "anti-US sentiment" mentioned in the summary is not fully representative of the interview -- the point seems to be more like "if a single source for product is present, the Koreans should rather have a Korean source rather than an American source". That is very different from "K" (and the other offensive letters) USA :)

    S
  • He may be "riding out the storm" but he's just helping another one along. Why did the dotcom crash happen here? Well, I'm sure the economists could give me all sorts of answers, but the simple facts are that innovative solutions and products are not always good products to profit off of. No one really needs a "mobile computing solution" we might need a cellphone that can message or get email, but for all our other needs, all one really needs is a desktop, or a laptop. All these portable devices are wonderful toys, but they don't provide services that persons desperately need or want. They won't sell profitably. Period.
  • is that everyone's a cheap bastard. So unlike in the Microsoft world, where PHB types gladly bend over to pay more and more every year for "select" and other licensing schemes, in Linux land buyers think "Free as in el cheapo!" and don't support the developers. So companies like this go under, as we have seen time and time again.

    Just like slashdot. Only two percent of readers subscribe. Two percent! Do the other 98 percent just think they can get it all for free forever? That the bandwidth they consume is just there? Two percent. Ridiculous.

    Anyway, th

    • Two percent is a very good ratio, assuming that you're not making it up. Most sites which have switched to a subscription model have ended up going bankrupt because they converted well under one percent of their users to subscribers.

    • Re:The problem with the Linux business (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't mean to troll but i'll say the truth.
      The reason i switched to linux it's because the people who got me to switch told me so many times it's free that i believed them. So why would anyone expect me to pay now? I'm not going to give a cent to anybody as long as i get everything i need for free. I'm i cheap? yes i am .. so what? If you don't want people's buisiness stop trying to make them use linux because it's free and everything around it. Use other arguments. I mean this is how everybody sees it. Why do you think all the corporations are switching to linux? Because it's that good? (well, ok it's good also) But the main reason it's because they want to get away from licenses from company X,Y or Z. This the mental thought that goes around linux and that's how things are going to stay. It's sad but unfortuanately it's true.
    • I've been reading Slashdot off and on for a long time, and this is the first time I ever heard about 'subscriptions'.

      Thanks for brining it up. If there is one thing I _try_ to do is to support the open source companies I believe in. I purchase about 90% of the distros I use, even if I've downloaded them to try them out.

  • I have to agree, that's one thing that's turned me off about KDE, the gradients feel weird, and that alpha blending can really look bad. Gnome's no spring chicken either, but I must say nautilus impresses me. For the record, I'm a Window Maker man myself, it is simplicity itself. Run a little Gnome panel, and I'm set. Though I'm very excited about Enlightenment 17 [enlightenment.org]

  • On the subject of Eazel... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PeterClark ( 324270 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @11:56PM (#3406878) Journal
    I was a little surprised that the interviewer didn't turn up the heat a bit and ask just how Eazel managed to burn through all the investment money so fast. My question, for all you armchair pundits out there, is why was Eazel so dependent upon the reports of IDC? For those that didn't read the article, Bart basically said that IDC revised their forecasts for the desktop to one third the original number, the investors got scared, and Eazel failed to get funded and promptly died. Then IDC turns around a couple of months later and revises those forecasts once again, tripling their prediction (remember, 48.2% of all forecasts are pulled ourt of thin air). By my (admittably simple) mind, it would be good business practice to always have a little nest egg to help tide you in such times.

    Of course, it was nice of them to release Nautilus under the GPL, so that the community could take a bloated and slow program and actually make it work. :)

    :Peter
    • I think the point was that Eazel had no hope of making money before their product was completed and they couldn't complete it without money.

      It's pretty trivial to spend millions of dollars on a new start up. You need to pay programmers. The programmers need offices. The offices need furniture. The programmers need computers. You need to buy servers. Bandwidth alone likely cost them 70 grand per year. You also need accountants and a secretary or two. And they need offices. etc and even more etc.

      Getting investor funding was pretty hard at the time and the IDC report made it impossible.

      • It's certainly trivial to spend lots of money on a startup, but it's not essential. The programmers can work from home to start with, the execs can do their own admin, and so on. It doesn't help that the IDC report came out, but IMO running out of money that early is just bad planning.
        • You are both right. Let me first say that, 300 million (pulled out of thin air, I really don't know how much Eazel burned through, and I don't care.) doesn't get you very far. I would suspect they spent at least 50 million on legal/financial expenses from contract negotiations (they had many contracts with other businesses), accounting, and auditing. Throw in the VERY high cost of marketing, which is a very necessary evil and all the other common business expenses and you can almost get to 300-million. As for the employees working from home? Very few investors would give you a dime if they knew that. The stigmatism of working from home = not working at all is VERY strong in the minds of the people who control purse-strings. Most investors are very rigid individuals.

          Now this isn't to say there wasn't some mismanagement of funds there. In fact, I am confident of it. A lot of startups at that time, were living in a dream world, I doubt Eazel was any different.

          The bottom-line is don't be surprised if a company burns through 300 Million in a year, it's easy to do legitimately. Just be shocked if after that year they have nothing to show for it. In Eazel's defense, Nautilus is pretty nice, but the same work could probably have been done with lower expenditures.
    • It is how it works in USA. Eazel did followed the path of thousands of other startups that are founded through VC money. You write a business plan explaining how you make money in the next 5 years. You need at least 10 time returns. So if you ask for $2-3 million at the first round funding (probably means you give up %40-%50 of the company based on the evaluation), your pro-forma revenue in 5 years should be $50 million. This is how VC's make money. They invest in 10 companies, only one or two of them make a break through, and rest go bankrupt. You spend your first round money to build the prototype in one year, then you ask for second-round financing. It would be good to keep some money in the bank for assurance, but finishing the prototype as soon as possible is more important than having a relatively small amount of money in the bank. In the second round financing you probably will be asking $10-$20 million anyway. Time is money. You don't want competition to catch up for example.

      Obviously IDC reports did have an impact on the investors. Unfortunately times have changed. Before the dot-com-boom, investors were looking for reasons to fund projects; now they are looking (very hard) not to fund project. There simply is not investment money available in the economy. That's because most of the money was spent last 2-3 years. It will go back to normal in couple of years when things get to normal.

      I aggree that Eazel's business plan wasn't very good. But investors invest in people and teams. Eazel should have adapt themselves to the changing conditions and position themselves differently. They didn't figure this out and insisted on their initial business model which as you all know failed.

    • Re:On the subject of Eazel... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For those that didn't read the article, Bart basically said that IDC revised their forecasts for the desktop to one third the original number, the investors got scared, and Eazel failed to get funded and promptly died. Then IDC turns around a couple of months later and revises those forecasts once again, tripling their prediction.

      Which just goes to show that the REAL failure for 90% of dot-coms has nothing at all to do with economics or the stock market and has everything to do with investor-driven companies. If you have a company, you should produce something to sell. That should be your goal from square one. If Eazel's investors had invested in something thet they believed in, and not just something that they thought they could leverage to make a quick buck, it would still be aroudn today AND it may have made them money in a few years.

    • Re:On the subject of Eazel... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Thursday April 25, 2002 @05:18AM (#3407827) Homepage
      Eazel failed because it is only one letter away from Etzel, which is German for Edsel (== Attila). All these things have a rational explanation if you look hard enough.
    • I don't want to call people liars, but Eazel didn't have ANY business plans as far as public people could see. Even when they were approach to bundle commercial software through their services - they replied with a polite email that only their 3rd version of their product will handle infrastructure to sell apps through...

      And as for KDE butt ugly - each person and his opinon...

  • Oxymoron (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NickRob ( 575331 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @12:02AM (#3406900)
    Linux buisness? Business of something free? Wow. I'm starting a sunlight buisness.

    • Re:Oxymoron (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @12:25AM (#3406972)
      Linux buisness? Business of something free? Wow. I'm starting a sunlight buisness.

      Good plan. Businesses that use sunlight (farming, tourism, sports, photography, etc.) are huge.

      • All those places that are banking in the vanity of mostly women that want the perfect tan, they are selling something that one can get for free, they just offer it in a convenient, stilyzed environemnt.
    • Pleny of companies are very profitable offering service solutions around free sunlight. Johnson & Johnson, for example does pretty well on a product called sun screen.

  • putting a face to the words (Score:4, Funny)

    by __aanonl8035 ( 54911 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @12:02AM (#3406901)
    For some reason, I always like to get a visual of who is being interviewed... so I searched around and found his home page with some pictures here [decrem.com]

  • Butt-ugly? (Score:2, Troll)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 )
    I dunno, guys. I think linux users have a very strange aesthetic.

    KDE (in KDEstep mode), to me, is one of the cleanest-looking window managers around. The icons are pixel-perfect, there's no distracting eye candy, and the window management doesn't get in the way of what actually matters -- the programs. (In this respect I think KDE learned some good things from Windows.)

    There's no accounting for tastes, I guess, but we don't all feel this way. Keep it up, KDE!
  • Well we think he's ugly!

    Huh I don't understand how someone can be offended by an icon not looking "nice" to him. Nor do I understand how one letter can be more offensive than any other.

    That being said, seeing a foot on my desktop makes me think that something stinks.

    Perhaps this guy shouldn't be bashing the main platform that his company's software runs on anyways. Better yet, maybe he should do something about it instead of complaining.
    • I realize the purpose of interviewing someone is to gain thier perspectives and opinions on things... but in all honesty, why do I give a crap if Bart doesn't like an icon? I didn't start using KDE because I thought it was pretty, I started using it because it worked.
    • That being said, seeing a foot on my desktop makes me think that something stinks.

      Maybe you should wash your feet more often. :)

      • Given that I am not a G**** developer, I guess it couldn't be my foot. Unless one of them is a freak who has been using hidden cameras to spy on me. Maybe that bill isn't so bad after all.

        Damned freaky computer programmers!!
  • Spoken English, transcribed literally, is nearly indecipherable.

  • M$ (Score:1)

    by Freddy_K ( 174281 )
    "we've got this big contract with the Korean government -- that's 120,000 seats -- and we've got a big bundling deal with Sharp, every Zaurus that moves, we're moving a copy of our product, and Sharp has big plans for the thing."

    Sounds like Microsoft...

    Maybe they want to be the next MS?
  • Gnome is the axis of Eazel people. Oh yeah!
  • It's nearly incomprehensible. And a paragraph here or there wouldn't hurt. Yeay, Linux on the desktop and everything, but can we get an interview from someone who speaks English?
  • The only thing I don't like about Gnome are the Icons!

    But that's linux's best selling point to me, You have sooooooooooo many options.

  • StarOffice (Score:5, Funny)

    by CmdrSanity ( 531251 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @01:05AM (#3407116) Homepage
    LaM: And with StarOffice it's fairly easy to change the underlying operating system.
    Decrem: That's the beauty of it.

    Not true! The beauty of StarOffice is in the load time -- it gives me a moment to reflect...clean under my keybord...wash the car...take the kids to soccer practice...eat dinner...call my mom...watch Farscape...sleep. Then I wake up refreshed with no chores or distractions and StarOffice is ready to go!

  • sure the hard core computer users don't care about looks but to get into the average persons desktop you need to make it look nice. Do you think Friends would of been a succesful tv show if jennifer aniston wasnt so damn hot? (or any of the other ladies) Take a hint and beautify linux. Oh and one other rant: I absolutely HATE how most distros arrange their K/Gnome menus. Theres almost no logic to them. Lycoris on the other hand does a pretty good job with the k menu.
  • Decrem: That's the beauty of it. That's the importance of Mozilla and StarOffice. Those are kind of mission-critical applications, and as you switch to those, the operating becomes all but irrelevent. That's the beauty of the Internet, frankly. It commodifies the operating system to a large extent.

    This is an very interesting point. MS Office is the MS cash cow so Microsoft needs to take this issue very seriously. The intelligent way to do this is to port MS Office to Mac OS X and wait until there is a move into Linux by the market.
    Does anybody know the status of MS Office on Mac OS X?
    • Does anybody know the status of MS Office on Mac OS X?

      It works at least as good as on Windows, some things even are nicer, IMHO. Then again, it's mostly a different product, not just a simple port.

  • If Bart Decrem fires a Hancom programmer, could you say that he Decrements their staff by one?
    • Dude, that's an instant classic. I can't believe I lived 34 years without thinking of that one.
      • Dude, how were you not able to find pirated software in Hong Kong? It's all over every computer market. Exen XP/Win2k.

        dave
      • I'm sorry about the pun. Any sarcasm from your side is well waranted.

        Seriously, though, I think you are somewhat on the money about KDE, but not in the way that you intended. KDE has more usability problems than GNOME (although both environments have quite a few of these). Among KDE's worst usability problems are the multitude of tiny, undescriptive icons whose tinyness makes them far slower to access with a mouse (via Fitts' Law) and whose action is hard to decipher because the icons are so non-descriptive and tiny. And mind you that because KDE does not have button-labelling turned on by default, the lack of a label makes button even smaller and slower to access, and the lack of a label means that the user has to basically guess what the icon does, or find out the hard way by doing something that might possibly destroy their work. Or they can wait a painful 3-5 seconds for the tooltip label to come up. The end result is that most of the buttons are going to go unused, just like what happens in programs authored by Microsoft, who KDE bases most of their designs off of. The problem with doing a carbon copy of microsoft is that many of Microsoft's designs are flawed in one way or another, and many of those flaws have found their way into KDE. Good artists create, great artists steal, bad artists steal crap.

        Re aesthetics: be sure to remember that just because something is aesthetically pleasing does not mean that has greater usability, and a lot of linux geeks who've tried for the desktop (and who don't have a lot to show for it) equate usability solely with aesthetics, I once talked to a distribution installer author about the usability problems in his installer. He couldn't understand what the problem was; he assumed I thought that "it wasn't pretty enough".

        You should also not place any serious bets on the Zaurus as far success with the non-geek community(unless TrollTech will get their act together with Qtopia, which I highly doubt). From what I've seen of the UI design and some of the initial reports from reviewers, Sharp has fallen into the same trap as many other linux PDA developers/manufacturers where they design the hardware/system software first, and only after they've got that all done do they design the interface and come up the user interaction model.You can't do that with a PDA. People will put up with inefficient and bad interfaces on desktops because they budget several hours a day to kludging through their task. They grow surprisingly less tolerant of ill-designed interfaces when the screen is shrunk down to 240X320 and they have only 20 seconds to get down an important phone number. You might have good marketing; you might get some people to buy the PDA, but if the interface doesn't work, those people will subconsciously try to find every excuse they can to use the PDA as little as possible.If that happens, you can forget about selling those people hardware add-ons and software after the first several months. The chance that they'll upgrade to the next latest and greatest thing, or that they'll convince a friend to buy one of the PDA's, drops down to 0% as well.

        With PDA graphic toolkits based on desktop toolkits (i.e. qt & Qtopia), there's also that fatal trap of thinking "with this mobile version of this widget toolkit, I can easily port over all the desktops to the PDA and everything will be good". Again, apps with UI's that work with full sized mouse and keyboard and a 17" monitor will often not translate very well into a PDA with a small screen and a stylus. Microsoft made this mistake with WinCE, and I saw Agenda make the same mistake with FLTK. Agenda is dead, and PalmPC's only survive because PalmOS isn't yet running on equivalent hardware.

        If you take nothing else from my PDA advice, understand that the most successful PDA in history [intergate.ca], the Palm, was fashioned after a block of wood that Palm creator Jeff Hawkins carried around with him to use in pondering what a good PDA should act like. Before the dies had been tooled or the system software was finished, he designed the interaction. There has been no block of wood involved in the creation of the Zaurus.

        You're welcome to either take my advice or drag it to trash and empty. But I've seen too many linux companies get splattered across the industry because they said "to hell with good design". Yes, it really is that important.

  • clarification (Score:5, Informative)

    by bartdecrem ( 193647 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @01:45AM (#3407215)
    Hi folks,

    I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by my line about some of the artwork in KDE. I do stand by the substance of my statement, but I could and should have said this a bit more delequately.

    In any event, while I can't blame the /. editors for singling out this colorful statement, I hope that you guys will read the entire article and realize that that particular line does not summarize my opinion about the KDE project. As I say in the article, I think KDE is a terrific project. Also, Qt is the building block for my employer's software, and it's a great piece of software. Please note also that the entire point of the "KDE is butt-ugly" line was to then state that Lycoris has done a wonderful job polishing KDE.

    But I do think that icons and other look & feel work ARE very important. At the end of the day, KDE is a DESKTOP and the artwork and look & feel is a key part of the desktop. It's what we look at all day long. Everyone's opinion about artwork is highly subjective of course, but in my opinion, the default icons and some of the other look & feel elements really are KDE's biggest weakness and the default icons that ship with KDE need a make-over. They're just not competitive with other desktops that regular folks (my wife, my parents) are used to looking at.

    Cheers,

    Bart
    • No need to apologize! You were right the first time. For a desktop that one is staring at all day, it should be fairly easy and smooth on the eyes.

      I think the folks at Ximian are to be commended. I dual boot X between KDE and Ximian, I frequently go over to KDE but always run back to Ximian/Gnome.

      Even though there are less features, you end up doing more because it all fits together so well.
      • so true, at first I liked KDE better but then when I tried Ximian's GNOME well I wouldn't go back to KDE. GNOME still have some usability problems but they're much less apparent than in KDE and the whole desktop is much more beautiful.

    • Re:clarification (Score:4, Informative)

      by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @02:26AM (#3407373) Journal
      You'll be happy to know that KDE 3 comes with an alternate icon set, iKons, in addition to the worked-over original set. Also, several others (slick and crystal come immediately to mind) are available at kde-look.org (a wonderful site that seems to have brought a kde themeing community out of the woodwork).

    • Re:clarification (Score:2, Interesting)

      by foniksonik ( 573572 )
      Some /.ers are thinking about starting a new OS solution called Simpleface. It would be a standards org w/ some implementation and would be based on all the current UI guidelines of the most popular Desktops.. ie: OS X, Windows, KDE, Gnome, etc..

      Anyone interested in collaborating please contact: russ@russellbeattie.com

      referring comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=3382685&sid=31 443

    • My biggest gripe about the current state of the KDE UI design is clutter. This is something that loading fancy eye-candy from kde-look.org cannot easily fix.

      Load, e.g. KWord, and then pause for a moment
      to reflect on how many toolbar buttons there are, and how much one can accomplish with them.
      And last time I checked, it wasn't easy to rearrange things to get rid of the things you use least.

      My take on the use of toolbars comes from the common (RISC era) maxim: optimise the common case.
      Commonly used operations should go on the toolbar. More transient widgets should be used for less common things (e.g. menus, context specific sidebars, etc.), and it should be possible for someone to, with a few clicks in the right place, pick up a button, or grab a shortcut to something and place it on a toolbar themselves.

      A second comment regarding clutter is palettes for this and that. I'd personally like to see them used a little more, and there needs to be some standard (i.e. already written, well integrated, etc.) way for an application to create palettes for various operations, and have them organised. Note that this sort of thing presents problems in the face of the big fat invisible line drawn between window management and an applications widgets.

      p.s. One should take note of that flat button on MacOS X, allowing one to show and hide all toobars with the click of a mouse.

    • Re:clarification (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Thursday April 25, 2002 @08:10AM (#3408126)
      but in my opinion, the default icons and some of the other look & feel elements really are KDE's biggest weakness and the default icons that ship with KDE need a make-over

      So change them! In my KDE I use the nice Crystal iconset I got from www.kde-look.org. Installation took about 2 minutes.

      You seem to love the underlying technology of KDE but hate the looks. Well thank god for that, since it would be really difficult to change the technology, whereas you can change the appearance in just few minutes. Saying that "KDE is ugly" is not a valid reason not to use it, since you can change the way it looks

    • Re:clarification (Score:2, Informative)

      by tackat ( 133183 )
      Hi bArt,

      > but I could and should have said this a bit more delequately.

      I guess you are old enough to realize something like this _before_ or _during_ an interview, aren't you?

      > But I do think that icons and other look & feel
      > work ARE very important.

      > look & feel is a key part of the desktop.

      At least we agree on this point ;-)

      > the default icons and some of the other look & feel
      > elements really are KDE's biggest weakness and the
      > default icons that ship with KDE need a make-over.

      Well, I don't know if you already realized it but KDE makes much more use of more icons than other desktops. As a result there are a few thousand pixmaps in KDE which the artist team needs to take care of. As not all of those icons were made by artists the quality of the set of course varies from icon to icon a bit. There are some icons which I consider beautiful
      and others which I'd like to replace myself if I had the time.
      I painted most of the icons for KDE though and recently focused on mimetype-icons and toolbar-icons only. In my opinion these are excellent. For application-icons I agree with you: They certainly need a makeover. Most of the application-icons have been designed during KDE 2.0 or even before at a time when we didn't have alphablending.

      Also be aware that some people who are not satisfied with the looks of KDE icons don't realize that they use 32x32-versions of the icons (while Gnome uses 48x48-icons by default) - Of course you can choose 48x48 in KDE as well. Also some people don't have alphablending enabled (so they don't have smooth borders and lack shadows in the icons).

      Of course there are always some people who don't like the style of the icons. And of course you will find always people who don't consider a certain iconset professional enough.

      A lot of people don't like the Mac OS X icons because they are photographs instead of icons.
      A lot of people don't like Windows XP -icons because they are way too glaringly colorful and look too much like toys (taking the default wallpaper into account "teletubbies" come to my mind ...).
      A lot of people don't like Gnome icons because they look too muddy and rather focus on looking cool than on being usable (at least this was the case for Gnome 1.x - For Gnome 2.0 this has improved and as a result they look much more KDEish).
      A lot of people don't like KDE icons because they don't focus on looking "cool" and because they look too technical or too cartoonish.

      In the end you can't satisfy everybody.
      The current look of KDE's icons is a compromise between beauty and usability and it looks neutral and modern at the same time.
      You'll find some reasons for the current look of the default icons here:

      http://dot.kde.org/1012076875/

      Of course everyone's opinion about artwork is highly subjective. Therefore we rather chose something "neutral" for the default. Thanks to the fact that KDE is great software ;-) you can customize your icons in KDE to whatever you prefer:

      If you want KDE to look like Windows XP then you choose an icontheme like the one Lycoris is using. If you want something that looks rather photorealistic or like Mac OS X then you might want to try "Slick" or "Crystal". If you like Gnome then you can choose one of the gnome icon themes on KDE Look (http://www.kde-look.org).

      Actually I think that it's great that KDE 3.0 already offers so much choice that I can choose between all those great iconthemes depending on my mood.

      If you want to help improving icons in KDE feel free to write a mail to kde-artists@kde.org

      Cheers, Tackat,

      kde-artist team

    • No need to apologize, KDE *IS* ugly! I think they've REALLY improved the icons lately, and some of the visual effects are improved(alpha blending,e tc.), but the one thing that still bothers me is how incredibly cluttered it is. Then there's all kinds of ugliness with menu text off center, ever look at the KDE desktop menu?!?!?

      Every release I download it and try it again(just for fun) and spend a few hours trying to tweak it to make it look nice, then switch back to gnome immediately. Partly because of how ugly it is, partly because it is quite quirky. I think they need to spend more time squashing serious bugs, there are some things that simply don't work properly.

      Not that Gnome is perfect or anything, it's got problems of it's own. For one, I'd really like to be able to use alpha blended tiles in the panel. Gnome could also use some more work in the window manager area, Sawfish is great, but it'd be nice if there would be a bug fix release some time within the next 10 years. An Office Suite would be nice too. At least KDE has Koffice, which is ok, but still extremely buggy.

  • Royalties (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ian Peon ( 232360 ) <ian&epperson,com> on Thursday April 25, 2002 @02:42AM (#3407441)
    Compaq paid like a zillion dollars in royalties last year to Microsoft.


    Such misinformation! Compaq paid no more than 12.4 ba-jillion dollars last year, not even close to a zillion...

  • Barely worth reading, IMO. He waffles so much it's hard to understand what exactly he's saying, and even appears to contradict himself:

    "We cleaned up KDE and made it look pretty. It's a pretty decent desktop,..."

    but later...

    "My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly"

    Huh? Does *he* even know what his opinion is? And what kind of drugs do you have to be on to think that saying:

    "the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant"

    relates in any way to a question about marketing applications with a distribution?

    An awful interview -- next time find someone articulate and coherent to talk to! :)

  • > in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source

    Only some states and municipalities are requiring free software in Brazil. The mostly important sphere of government, the federal (Union) one, still is deeply commited to Microsoft, to the point of preferring it to Brazil’s own Conectiva GNU/Linux. You can read more about it at CIPSGA [cipsga.org.br]’s old stories.

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