Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi

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Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Shawn Gordon on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @10:15

There are a few things that should be clarified, especially since we have software in Koffice. First regarding Aethera, a comment was made that an update hadn't been release since April 2001, this is totally un-true, there have been a number of updates and as recently as 2 weeks ago with another coming next week. We spend a tremendous amount of resources on Aethera. And Aethera is GPL as well. These are all simple things to know, we put out press about all of it when it happens.

Next a comment about Kivio and Kugar. Kivio is a very stable and feature complete application, and doesn't really require constant work, sure it could always use more features, but it is a very popular application based on the enormous amount of sales we've had of our stencils. The biggest problem we've had with Kivio being in KOffice is other people changing and moving things around without asking us. We had someone do a whole sale slice and dice of Kivio last year that really broke it, and everyone kept denying that anything happened until I took extreme steps and we got it figured out. At that time we decided to focus on Kivio mp for a while and see what we could learn that could be leveraged back to Kivio in KOffice and give KOffice some time to settle down. There is a difference between a stable and mature application and one that has been abandonded.

Kugar has always been what it is, and that is a report viewer, if you format your data for it, it does very nicely, we wrote a kio_slave for Konqueror to be able to browse and view reports using Kugar and we were asked to donate it all to KOffice, which we did. Again it is stable and done and needs no work, it could use a report designer if someone wants to write one, we just haven't had time to do it, but it doesn't make Kugar unusable.

The big argument given to us for putting things in KOffice is that all those little library changes and other infrastructure changes that cause applications to break would automatically be applied to the KOffice applications since they were part of the tree. I don't know if this continues to happen or not, but from our perspective it is a little frustrating to donate a major piece of work like Kivio and then get dissed about it.

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Andy "Storm" Goossens on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @10:34

I think theKompany.com is doing good work. I don't know how much people work at your Kompany, but you are always so quiet. The KDE community doesn't know what you're doing at the moment and we don't hear any (press) releases lately. Speak with others about what you're doing at the moment, communicate with KDE users/developers.

theKompany is difficult to compare with Ximian, because you are both doing something different. But Ximian communicates much more with the community then you guys do. A Kompany that speaks, will be heard :-) If you don't say anything at all, nobody knows you exist. Only a suggestion...

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Shawn Gordon on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @10:45

Quiet? We run press releases every 7 to 10 days usually, and recently we've had 3 and 4 a week at times. We have news on Linuxtoday, newsforge, desktoplinux, linuxdevices, gui-lords, pclinuxonline, linuxorbit, various german, italian, french and UK web sites as well. We've recently been covered in Linux Magazine in the states, Linux Format and Linux Magazine in the UK, Linux Magazine in Germany and some magazines in Italy and Norway. About the only place that doesn't have any information on us is the Dot, and from what I can understand from the non-published publishing policies, the kind of press and news we have is not something that the Dot chooses to cover, which is certainly fine as they have to stick with their objectives as well.

I just don't know how we can make more noise than we already are about the many things we have and are doing.

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Andy "Storm" Goossens on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @15:28

Time for me to change browsing habits :-)

When I look at the site I can see I was wrong about making releases. They sites you refered had some press releases indeed.

The software you make is very useful but isn't widely known to the Linux community. It seems to me that the software isn't installed on many computers. We have for example KDevelop which looks like KDE Studio (Gold) but it's free and has a consistent look in KDE. Auto completion is a good feature but I'm not going to pay for KSG because I really need that.

Putting some free apps (thinking of Aethera, ...) in KDE CVS and let developers working on it, would create better software that fits in KDE nicely. Being a part of the standard KDE installation would promote theKompany and users would also benefit. Aethare may look nice (it is), but I don't find it intuitive. If it isn't easy to use, people will use other programs. But that's only my opinion...

Note: The frontpage of your website has a dead link
-> http://www.thekompany.com/ksg
Forgot the /projects part :-)

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Someone on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @12:59

> Kivio is a very stable and feature complete application, and doesn't really require constant work

Have a look at http://bugs.kde.org/db/pa/lkivio.html, eg #27670 (247 days old) makes it pretty unusable.

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Shawn Gordon on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @13:05

That hardly makes it unusable, and based on the thousands of people using it, they would tend to agree. I see a number of bugs here that are fixed, and some other things like "not all arrow heads have been implemented" - again, hardly makes it unusable. Now perhaps there is a feature or function missing that makes it unusable for *you*.

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Someone on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @13:33

> I see a number of bugs here that are fixed, and some other things

Why aren't they fixed in KOffice "branch"? I appreciate that theKompany donated Kivio to KOffice but I dislike the attitude "we don't want to have to do anything with it anymore". You insist on not calling it abandonded, but this "branch" was obviously abandonded by you.

> like "not all arrow heads have been implemented"

So if it is not implemented, it's definitely a bug that other arrow types can be selected.

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Shawn Gordon on Friday 01/Mar/2002, @13:38

You are misleading once again, I never said "we don't want to have to do anything with it anymore", what I said is that we decided to step back from it for a time and perfect some technology applicable to Kivio and let KDE3 come out and KOffice to stabalize a bit more. We've just recently solve some very interesting problems in Kivio mp with regard to rotation, distortion, text, connectors and such. My plan is to pick up KOffice Kivio development in the next 2 to 3 months and see what we can leverage back into it.

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And now for the *other* face of Shawn Gordon
by Neil Stevens on Sunday 03/Mar/2002, @10:11

http://dot.kde.org/999199700/999274963/

See #13 for his view on KOffice.

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Re: And now for the *other* face of Shawn Gordon
by Shawn Gordon on Sunday 03/Mar/2002, @10:20

Neil your single minded dislike of us and Trolltech is really just a head scratcher. What is factually wrong about that statement that you point to? You may not like what I said, and certainly my comment about "never catching up" is my opinion, but seriously, how can an office suite that has a handful of developers or less working on it part time go head to head?

I even tried using a current KWord to write the manuals for HancomOffice (how's that for support) but every time I tried to embed a graphic in the document, it crashed, so I had to give up on that attempt.

Now certainly the work and output of David Faure is nothing short of stunning, and based on the huge number of Kivio stencils we've sold, I'm assuming that our Kivio application in KOffice is popular. Certainly StarOffice and OpenOffice don't have anything like Kivio, and the psuedo office suite GnomeOffice doesn't, the Dia people explicitly didn't want their application in there.

For Gods sake Neil, we contribute to KOffice - so take a breath, step back and gather some perspective. Now I'm off to take the kids to visit grandma.

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Philippe Fremy on Tuesday 05/Mar/2002, @04:59

This is an interview, so people answered what they thought is true, which might be different from what is true.

I was not aware of any new release of Aethera since april 2001, and this was also the case for all the people in the interview (3 koffice developers, 2 kde developers, 1 user). Despite all your press releases, it looks like everyone knows about Aethera except KDE people. If someone had asked me an outlook-like suit I would have pointed him to Evolution instead of Aethera because I didn't know Aethera was out and maintained. So there is a communication problem. I only read the dot and linuxfr, and yet I know about every release of Evolution.

For the other apps, Kugar and Kivio, there hasn't been any commit from someone of the kompany for 11 month (except one 9 month ago to change the icon). So it looks very much _abandoned_ to me. I find it hard to believe that you are selling an application that haven't had any bug fixed or any tiny feature added in 11 month. But looking at your website, it looks like it is the case. Well, congratulation. If you wrote an app that was perfect at its first release, you should really give an interview as you would be the first one ever in the software industry. :-))

That said, if the application are already doing their job, it is ok for me. After all, I am using plenty of non maintained applications. But I maintain my statement : Kugar and Kivio are not maintained.

The "little library changes and other infrastructure changes that cause applications to break" have however been applied by the KDE crew and those two apps compile along with the KDE releases.

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Re: Some misleading information in the KOffice intervi
by Someone on Tuesday 05/Mar/2002, @14:47

If you look at theKompany's webpage more exactly you will see that they sell Kivio *MP* which is maintained and not identical with Kivio/KOffice.is maintained.

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