Remus

I cannot point my finger on what exactly I like about Joel, but ideas like this and a perfect implementation are a good hint.

Taking four interns (three in development and one in marketing) and putting together a product from the beginning to the end is just, hm, how to say this a brilliant idea! Or maybe I’m absolutely wrong it’s the right idea.

Just think about it, if you want a new product, it has to be fresh. How do you get fresh ideas? Definitely not from tired, locked on statistics and technologies brains but rather from fresh and young minds. How do you pull a product from beginning to the first launch in 3 or 4 months if not with fresh and young people fully charged with energy and eager to prove themselves?

I was rather sceptic about their first two products, a bug management system (issue tracking) and web editor in a saturated market with both free and commercial products. I still think that if you remove Joel from Fog Creek they would remain with two 20$ shareware products. But this one sounds great, and not because of the technology since it is nothing new, Unix had it since the beginnings of X, VNC is out there from some time and it’s even free, and every version of Windows XP Pro ships with it, yet still they found the market to it, made it a bit simpler (not that it was too complicated) and definitely know how to present it.

As a matter of fact I know now what I like about Joel, he’s cult for simplicity and doing what feel right no matter what anybody else is used to do.

Well, finally it happen and I hope, will be huge. For those of you not so familiar with Linux, QT is a C++ cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) development framework which happens to be the foundation of the KDE window manager. KDE was and still is my choice of Window Manager under Linux for it’s maturity, multitude of well integrated applications.

QT is developed by Trolltech an Norwegian company who was smart enough to get involved with the Linux community and dual license they tool kit both GPL and commercial, which basically means you are free to use their tools as long as your application will be free (GPL), otherwise you can alway buy the licenses. Now, Trolltech got famous, had a rock solid and smart toolkit, the only problem was that they dual licensed only the Linux version of their toolkit and recently the OS -X version, which means, free apps but only under Linux and Mac, no Windows. With version 4 of QT also the Windows version is made available under the same terms as the Linux and Mac versions.

Now the big thing is that the road is free for some great Linux/KDE only applications to be ported under Windows. I would love to see my all time favorite applications available for free to the Windows users. What I miss mostly is KMail & Kontact (the best email client I used), Konqueror (the cool/fast/standard web browser), Quanta (the best free editor for PHP, CSS, HTML coding), Koffice (a good and simple enough office suite), I’m sure I miss many other applications.

What Gnome/GTK could offer for a long time (windows binaries) now KDE can too. Let’s not forget the cool: Gimp (Photoshop like graphic application), Inkscape (vectorial, svg graphical application), Gaim (multi protocol IM client) which are some great native Gnome/GTK apps but which also run under Windows.