Shawn Gordon of TheKompany answers questions posed by Slashdot
readers in this interview. Interesting answers to questions about
his outfit’s business model, its relationship to Ximian, and the
competition his commercial products face from no-cost
alternatives:
“We’ve been taking a more Qt centric approach of late.
It is an old argument that Linux has to have a Quicken/Word/Excel
workalike before users will abandon Windows. Another way of
approaching this is to deliver the Linux applications on Windows.
It will be much easier to get a user to move to Kapital from
Quicken if they don’t have to move from Windows to Linux at the
same time. Eventually the user realizes they can move to Linux just
by changing the OS, without incurring any other costs (as, for
example with BlackAdder and DataArchitect, when they buy the Linux
version they also get the Windows version — they don’t pay again
when moving OS).We’ve also recently signed an agreement to provide some of our
products for BSD. If this proves to be popular then we will make
all of our products available on BSD. Another advantage of the Qt
approach is that there is much less to worry about for installation
thus making more platforms much easier to support.I do want to say that our more Qt centric approach is not taking
away from our KDE’ness. We are building some infrastructure so that
our apps continue to look and behave properly under KDE when they
are just Qt.”