Linux Online is grateful to Shawn Gordon, CEO of theKompany.com for taking time out of his busy schedule for this interview. theKompany.com produces development tools and application software for Linux such as PowerPlant.

Linux Online: When did you first start using Linux and why did you decide to develop applications for Linux?

Shawn Gordon: My background is mostly developing for the HP 3000 mini-computer since 1984,and a couple years later I had an Atari ST at home for music sequencing and animation work, the 386 hadn't even come out yet, so the Atari and the Amiga were really the way to go at this time. A couple of things happened that started my interest in Unix. One was HP coming out with HP-UX, which got me doing some research on Unix, and then Minix became available for the Atari. A few years later I had a Windows PC and the Mark Williams company had a product called Coherent, which was a unix clone, kind of like Linux, and I spent a good amount of time messing with that.

So with that as an extended lead in, I've always loved developing for the HP 3000, and I missed my Atari, and I saw Linux and especially KDE as a new frontier where things could be done "right". The Windows market was too crowded and I didn't like the platform particularly. About 6 years ago I was tasked by my employer to set up their internet email and their web site. My partner on the project and I had seen one of the operations people reading a book about Redhat, so we installed it on a PC and started to mess around with Apache. A year or so later at my next job I set it up as an intranet server and just kept getting more interested in it.

What really sealed it, and I'm not sure how much I can say about this, is the formation of Loki. I've known the founder, Scott Draeker for many many years, we live about 20 miles from each other. I had this idea for a product, and we had talked casually about Loki funding it as one of their projects, but they ended up getting way too busy with games, this was almost 2 years ago.

Linux Online: What were your motivations behind founding TheKompany.com?

Shawn Gordon:Well, as I was just saying, I wanted to do this project (which I'll explain shortly), and finally in May or June of 1999 I finally figured I should just do it. I had been making very good money consulting, and figured I had enough put away to at least get the first product out, and I was right. I incorporated in August 1999, and immediately lost my first 3 developers to Troll Tech and Mandrake :). They were good enough to find me a couple of new people, and we managed to grow from there.

So to answer you actual question: I mentioned that I developed on the HP 3000, well COBOL is the language of choice for business systems, and it is an excellent language in this regard. COBOL represents business better than any other language I've worked in, I can hear people groaning about it now, but the reality is that there are still millions of COBOL programmers and billions of lines of code. Honestly I've rewritten some COBOL into C and C++, and people say COBOL is wordy, but it's less code than C and C++, and it's easier to read.

I say all that as background, because I've always wanted a visual development environment, like Delphi or Visual Basic, that supported COBOL syntax. So the only reason I founded theKompany.com to begin with, was to build this tool, but for Linux and KDE. Things have morphed significantly since then, especially as I go through the exercise of writing my business plan for the 4th time. We are now working on application software like Kivio and Rekall, and all of our infrastructure work with things like KDB, Korelib and the continued development of PyQt/PyKDE.

Linux Online: The model for your company is pure 21st century. You have assembled developers from around the world and you coordinate their efforts. You have a sort of 'cyber-virtual' workforce. How is this working out? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this model?

Shawn Gordon: Everyone I've talked to is amazed that we are able to make this work. theKompany is spread across 11 time zones at the moment. We have people in England, Germany, Italy, Russia and Romania, with people in the Ukraine and Thailand we are looking to hire shortly. Overall it works very well, but we do have enclaves of people in Mosow and Iasi Romania, we are going to open an office in Iasi soon for the 5 people that will be working there.

The advantages are a lower overhead cost for me. It's not like we intentionally looked at other countries, we just looked for good people, and that's just where they lived. Everyone likes the flexibility of hours, we tease the Romanians that they are turning into vampires because they all sleep during the day now :). It's easier to understand everyones written words than with their accents verbally, and by having to write all your communication, you tend to be more thoughtful about it, and think it through. Our IRC meetings are very quiet :).

Some disadvantages are that it is hard to have brain storming sessions, not impossible, but not being able to throw things up on a wall and break them down can be hard. Because of that, the Romanians do get together as a group fairly regularly to discuss things they are working on. Sometimes it is hard to reach someone when you need to, I've got phone numbers for most of them, but if I get a recorded message, I don't know what it's saying :).

Linux Online: Do you see this as the model to follow in the future? Do you see software development being carried out in this way from now on? Is the traditional 'commute to work, sit in the cubicle' development style definitively dead?

Shawn Gordon: I think we will end up with 3 or 4 offices around the world, bringing whoever wants to come to America here to work in the office with me. We are never going to force people to move, but if we happen to hire someone that is near one of our offices, then we would like them to take advantage of that a few days a week. There is definitely value in having people get face to face sometimes, it's not required, especially when you have people of the caliber that we have, but it can speed things up.

While the 'sit in the cubicle' is dying, it will take a bit more technology to make it go away. We really need broadband everywhere that allows us to do actual conferencing, and also something that allows reasonable white boarding. I know there is some technology available, but hardly anyone in Europe has high speed access, especially Eastern Europe, so it's not practical to use yet. Mostly we take advantage of email, IRC, ICQ and a web based project management system. This need is actually driving some of our development efforts to make tools to help distributed developers.

So face time is still important, but for the most part developers can go off and work uninterrupted wherever they are comfortable.

Linux Online: Let's talk about Linux's de-facto policy of 'free' software. TheKompany charges for its development tools. Even though most of the traditional 'spokespeople' for Linux caution that 'free' should be taken in the sense of 'liberty' and not 'no cost', Linux users are used to getting things at little or no cost. Have you had any problem justifying your policy of charging for the software?

Shawn Gordon: We haven't had a problem because we are doing the same thing as a Linux distribution. We are selling convenience, and some value add. In the case of our PowerPlant product, you have hundreds of various languages, ide's, libraries, databases and such that help the development process. We are like a mini distribution, but PowerPlant is meant to be a compliment to any RPM or DEB based distribution, not replace it. It would take you a long time to download a gig or more of the applications and source found in PowerPlant. Then we have the value add and include a fully licensed version of Erics Ultimate Solitaire as well as a half dozen demos from Loki.

Our objective is to have very low cost software, for some of our newer stuff, we are hoping to keep it small enough that you can download it when you purchase. This helps us keep costs down and only charge a very small amount, like $20 to $30 for applications that cost hundreds of dollars on a Windows platform. In this case you are paying for a quality application that is being supported by a corporation that has a vested interest in making sure that the application is strong and reliable. Because it's basically open source it becomes a real trick to figure out how and what to charge for. We've got it figured out for some of our stuff, but for other pieces it's not so clear yet, and there are other pieces that are just our gifts to the community to help support it. Work like KDB and PyQt/PyKDE and Korelib, these are all infrastructure things that help everyone, but we developed them (except for PyQt/PyKDE, Phil had that already) to support our own efforts and decided to make them part of OSS.

Since all my developers were recruited from the OSS arena, they really help us with figuring these things out and what is acceptable and what isn't. We really do want to be a responsible member of the community and help as much as possible. We would like it if the community would also support us by spreading the word and buying some of our products.

Linux Online: Your development tools are obviously going down the KDE road and the trail that it's blazing. Should we understand by this where your 'Kompany' stands on the KDE vs. GNOME issue?

Shawn Gordon: Well, PowerPlant is agnostic, it plays with everything, and is meant to be useful for any Linux developer. A couple of our other projects will be multi-platform simply because they can be, this means Windows/Linux/Embedded systems. I don't want to get involved with the holy war, but I like KDE better from a technology perspective and how it was implemented, it seems like they delivered on the promise of Taligent and the Pink OS they were working on. GNOME certainly has a lot of eye candy with the themes, but you can do that with KDE 2 now as well, and corporate America doesn't care about the eye candy, it's actually seen as a distraction. I need to make a decision of where to go, and we decided on KDE, and we are very pleased with that decision. That said, we are doing some work on integration with GNOME on a couple of items. Specifically we are working on porting gPhoto to KImageShop (now Krayon), and we will work on writing a GNOME-DB plug-in for our KDB framework. They are similar projects, but GNOME-DB is CORBA centric. We didn't want to have all the overhead of CORBA in our system, but being able to make use of it if you want to is obviously a powerful option, and we want to make that available.

Linux Online: I get the idea that the main goal at TheKompany.com is to get Linux on the desktop in mainstream corporate environments and in a big way. After you get tools into the hands of developers, you expect this to come about. Should we understand that this is basically the focus of your efforts?

Shawn Gordon: : There are two angles here. You need to have applications to use, and you need a user base demanding applications that attracts developers. By helping out with things like KOffice, we help fill that immediate need of some core applications that corporations need. By providing development tools to programmers, we help them fill the more esoteric needs. There is a bit of the old chicken and the egg here, and there is also a limited window of real opportunity. I think this is a great time to be where we are, and I'm very excited about the possibilities.

Linux Online: Which project at the TheKompany.com are you most proud of or most enthusiastic about (although this may be like asking a father or mother which child they like the most!)

Shawn Gordon: I'm usually most excited about the new projects because they are new :). What really gets me excited when I'm talking about what we do is the incredible level of re-use and integration of our tools. Maybe it's because we are a small company and everyone needs to work together and be as productive as possible. I sat down the other day and wrote out everything we were working on and how it worked together to put down a road-map, and I was really blown away to look at it in its entirety. It had been in my head, but having to articulate it really brought it home. I think people are going to be blown away by what we are doing, it's truly innovative and not just a knock off of a Microsoft idea, that is in turn a knock off of someone else's idea.

Linux Online: I remember as a kid back in high school in 1980, the NBC news anchor John Chancellor was asked what he'd like to see by the end of the 1980's. He answered that he'd like to see a democratic government in Poland with Lech Walesa as President and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. By gosh, that came about- and then some. Nelson Mandela was even elected President of South Africa. Forgive my long introduction, but my question is: Now it's 2000. If we compare Linux to Solidarity and [name withheld] to the Soviet Union, what do you think is in store for the Linux and the Open Source model in 2010?

Shawn Gordon: Wow, if I was good at predictions, I wouldn't be doing so bad in the stock market :). There is the dark path where Microsoft decides to get involved and "embrace and extend", then there is the bright path. Since no company controls Linux, it will be impossible for Microsoft to gobble it up. You have people like IBM and HP that seem to be embracing it for what it is and not trying to control it. For them, it allows them to eventually replace AIX and HP-UX with something that costs them very little to implement on their machines. I think Linux will seriously displace Windows and mainstream UNIX in a lot of areas as well. It doesn't take long to have a paradigm shift sometimes, and it could be as simple as the next Windows upgrade away. It's not just the cost of updating a large company, it's the magnitude of the task. Do you know how hard it is to update even 100 PC's with a new version of Windows and Office? There is a tremendous cost of ownership involved, and this is our major opportunity to displace Windows in a lot of areas.

Linux Online: It's tough to make predictions in the IT world even a week in advance. If I may be so bold, where do you see TheKompany five or ten years down the road?

Shawn Gordon: Yes, that is tough. I think we will be a major player in the Linux software arena. At this point I don't really see our model changing, just growing. So maybe we have 100 employees and 10 offices. I would like to see us setting some of the trends and not just following them. We have a fantastic group right now, and they all are visionaries with incredible ideas. I think we will definitely be on the leading edge of some areas.

Linux Online: We thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.

Shawn Gordon: My pleasure, thanks for talking with me :).

Information on TheKompany.com's products and services can be found at their website www.thekompany.com