Posted on Sunday, March 16, 2008 2:08 PM
Fragment uit een
interview met KDE-ontwikkelaar Matthias Ettrich:
Vista seems to be Microsoft's swan song. Do you think it is the right time for FOSS to hit hard and take over the market?
Matthias Ettrich:
The desktop problem has been solved many years ago. I mean, try to compare Windows XP with KDE 3: nobody in their right mind would choose Windows over GNU/Linux based on the desktop experience alone. The Web problem has also been solved. Microsoft clearly lost the Web war -- they failed to enhance the Web in a proprietary way. What remains are some legal issues on the multimedia side that can be mostly worked around, the office documents formats issue and the flood of applications that only run on Windows, mostly games.
What we need to get across to the software developers is: write portable software -- it's easy, it's doable and it's feasible; simply use KDE/Qt or Java technologies. With Qt Jambi, you can even write KDE applications in Java. Microsoft Office is still a major hurdle; we need more governments and companies to have the bravery to standardise on truly open formats. A proprietary undocumented text format as the de facto standard -- and that's what .doc is -- is a shame for all parties involved. It's like using a special patented ink that can only be read with special patented sun glasses. Who would want to use that for all their scientific, private and business documents? Probably nobody. Why they do so with computers is beyond me.