Last week, you asked Shawn Gordon questions about his venture TheKompany, an outfit which has been (fairly) quietly working on a small flotilla of software for GNU/Linux systems, and some cross-platform applications as well. His responses are below; you might be surprised at a few of them. (And some lucky Debian hacker might even pick up a job.)

Linux won't ever be accepted as a truly mainstream OS by most vendors. The reason for this is quite simply the users. And I'm not talking about everyone, I'm talking about the 31337 h4x0r kids with the bad attitude. They're posting right here on this system, intermixed with others who often share the attitude, but also have a bit more civility. I saw this once again while learning about the Hewlett Packard 3300C flatbad scanner ... which has zippo Linux support from HP. And I don't see that changing. Keep reading and maybe I can explain why.

Slashback slung at you tonight from 36 deg 02.412N 083 deg 24.61W with Debian pictures, the word on KIllustrator (which is not "KIlladobe"), a vague promise from Psion that they will return with consumer devices eventually, and an interesting exchange regarding the proper choice of tracking database for your local nuclear materials facility.

We sent 10 of your questions to IBM Linux exec Scott Handy a while back. Here are the answers. As is common with corporate types these days, a PR person had a hand in what was said, so please take that into account as you read on. But I don't think anything much was changed (I can usually tell) in this case, though.

BorrisYeltsin writes " A story here at InformationWeek about a guy who has equipped his 3500 feild engineers using the new Agenda VR3 palmtop's. It brings up an interesting issue about the Sharp Linux PDA and how the different libraries and API's will cause problems for developers." Having now seen the iPaq running Linux, KDE, and even Konqueror, I now believe its possible.

brunes69 notes that you can read the news that konqueror is supporting ActiveX. I saw it being done at at LinuxTag (as well as wine running The Sims!) so its coming. This ought to do a lot to give Linux users compatibility on sites the force shockwave or other obnoxious activex plug-ins.

metalhed77 writes: "A new version of the Nautilus file manager (1.0.4) has made its way out to the gnome ftps. here's the article on linuxtoday. It includes various improvements which are described on linux today, these primarily consisted of bug fixes and speed ups." Good to see that the effort that went into making Nautilus friendly wasn't wasted. But if you want to browse more than your hard drive, HeUnique points out another interesting project which is not distributed with the official KDE package. It's called: KDENOX ("KDE No X" -- you can use it with X or with framebuffer and QT Embedded: here's a screenshot). The gain? You get Konqueror without KDE, with SSL, cookies, proxy, bookmarks, fonts, and without KDE itself. The executable is small (4MB), doesn't take much RAM, and it works very nicely on low end machines ... (grab it from KDE CVS). Update: 07/08 01:17 AM by T : Here's a screenshot elsewhere; first person to mirror gets a lollipop.

Reader tempestdata indicates this CNN story, writing: "It appears Microsoft is facing quite a bit of opposition for its new licensing program." It looks like Redmond is granting a one-fiscal-year reprieve to the many companies who were caught off-guard by the announcement of new Microsoft licensing plans. Perhaps some of those companies would be interested in the new KDE 2.2.beta1 -- at least KDE and GNOME don't seem likely to institute monthly subscription fees.

Lots of software houses write software for GNU/Linux, but one company that's taking a different approach to products (and an unusual approach to licenses, too) is theKompany.com. TheKompany have released many open source projects, like PyQT/PyKDE, a Python binding to QT and KDE, and KoreLib, cross-platform C++ library for developing modular applications. They also combine Open Source licensed projects with plugins that they're selling: Aethera, Kivio, and closed-source products: Data Architect, (ERD & advanced SQL Editor), Kapital (a Quicken clone for Linux), among other things. Here is your chance to ask theKompany CEO Shawn Gordon questions about theKompany, Open Source, and the Linux from the commercial eye. We'll forward the best questions on to Shawn, and print his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

These are Robert's answers to questions about GnuCash you posted on June 18th. He says, "Some of the answers to the questions here were the result of discussions with the other people at LDG, where others were more qualified to speak on various topics, so the readers are really getting the benefit of our collected wisdom (well, we hope it's wisdom :) )"

LinuxTag started today. Many of the usual exhibitors can be seen, and the floor is quite busy. Especially noteworth is the crowded KDE booth where they are excited about the 2.2 Betas. kazekiri sent us a report from Slashdot/Japan which you'll need to translate to read, but apparently one of the hotels was closed for hygiene reasons, and many of the developers are without a place to sleep. So now they are staying in a gymnasium! Fortunately for me, my hotel is open and I got a good nights sleep (after 36 hours without any) and am preparing for my keynote Saturday afternoon, and a Q&A session Sunday afternoon. If you're in Stuttgart, check it out, just don't try any of that Deutsch on me, I barely passed that class.

Moritz Moeller - Her writes: "Evidently Adobe -- yes the Adobe that has not ported a single application apart from its PDF Reader to Linux -- sees a threat in KDE. They claim that the Koffice vector based drawing program Killustrator violates their trademark for Adobe Illustrator. Here is the mail on koffice-devel. The company demands 2500 EUR from the developer, maybe someone can help with the legal expenses here? The web site for Killuistrator has been put down for the moment. Shouldn't generic descriptive terms like 'explorer,' 'illustrator' 'word' and 'paint' be free for all to use? Nobody called the program Kadobe! I think it is time for some pressure on Adobe ... "

A reader writes " Looking for an xmms-kde RPM, I've stumbled across rhcontrib.bero.org - looks like Red Hat is building up a new contribution area. Looks quite interesting, but sloow."

drachen writes: "Trolltech has announced that Qt/Windows will now be available under a non-commercial license. To sum it up: 'Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt for evaluation purposes; and Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt on a personal basis to create free programs, and the source code must be made available.'" There's also talk of this at dot.kde.org.

accountant asks: "A very close friend of mine is a qualified usability tester. She gained her Master's Degree last September and now has a good job with a mega corporation. Unfortunately, times being what they are that mega corporation is looking at a mega merger and mega job cuts. It's tough finding jobs in usability at the moment (a lot of companies haven't grasped the concept of usability, nor usability specialists, and a lot of dot coms have no cash to take on more staff). It's especially tough if you have less than one year of experience. Usability, especially on the desk top, is a major priority for Open Sourced environments like KDE and Gnome. Who's doing the testing in such Open Source environments? Are they doing sizeable studies, running focus groups and doing statistical analysis on user test results? Money is handy, of course, but there must be opportunities to feed a resume and help the Open Source community. Your thoughts and URLs please?"

An anonymous reader writes: "One important aspect of Free software is open collaboration and the pooling of efforts. There are several open source word processors available and they all need to import and export the ubiquitous MS Word format. To try and avoid duplicating efforts, developers from the Abiword, wvWare and Kword projects have been talking with regard to pooling their efforts in writing filters."

navindra writes: "While KDE and GNOME often grab the headlines, other projects are silently making progress. Dennis Leeuw tries to make sense of the situation in this interesting GNUstep article featured on LWN Daily."

John Buswell wrote a little opinion thing wrt Mandrake's Donations Page. He raises the arguable point: why would you donate money to a for-profit company? I've written my response too which is full of all sorts of pompous rhetoric to go along with it.

Gatha writes: "The recently concluded Bang!inux conference was a great place to meet some Open Source developers. Among those speaking at the event was Martin Konold, veteran KDE developer. We managed to get an interview with him. Excerpts follow. Interview here on FreeOS.com" Konold (along with Matthias Ettrich) began the KDE project several years ago, and in this too-short interview he touches on the project's origins as well as improvements bound for the stable release, like network transparent sound and anti-aliased fonts. (And a lot more apps -- soon.)

_iris writes: "As reported on the Dot, gesture control (apparently all the rage with the kids after the latest Opera release) is coming to KDE. You can find a _very_ early release of KGesture here." Sounds like a recipe for carpal tunnel to me.