Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

Posted Feb 2, 2008 10:23 UTC (Sat) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
In reply to: Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld) by henning
Parent article: Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

I stand corrected, I was being a little binary in my thinking. No reason why someone has to be
just one or the other.

However, I still find the quote a tad odd. A company doesn't work 'with' its employees, the
employees work *for* the company. The way he phrased it, it seems to be a partnership of
equals, which I believe it isn't.

But his point that Nokia has pledged to work with the community is a valid one.

to post comments

Equals ? No. Partnership ? Yes.

Posted Feb 2, 2008 13:19 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

A company doesn't work 'with' its employees, the employees work *for* the company. The way he phrased it, it seems to be a partnership of equals, which I believe it isn't.

High-level hackers certainly have more symbiotic relationships with companies. Take a look on "Jeremy Allison vs Novell" case, for example: you can bet that the fact that Jeremy left Novell hurt Novell more then it hurt Jeremy (who found another high-profile employer immediately). Was it enough to cripple and kill Novell ? Of course not - let's not kid ourself, the weights are too different. But equally well you can see that Samba community and Jeremy refused to play Novell's game - despite their employer/employee relationship.

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

Posted Feb 2, 2008 17:53 UTC (Sat) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link] (1 responses)

> However, I still find the quote a tad odd. A company doesn't 
> work 'with' its employees, the employees work *for* the company. 
> The way he phrased it, it seems to be a partnership of equals, 
> which I believe it isn't.

Although you're right on paper, I think it's worth looking at the situation a bit more
nuanced.

While Aaron is being paid by Trolltech, he's not directly working on any of their product or
showing up at the office from 9-to-5. He's being sponsored with the express purpose of
enabling him to work on KDE (after years of prior contributions), which used to be in
Trolltech's interest and, according to their statements so far, will continue to be in Nokia's
interest. Obviously you'll also find him proclaiming the virtues of the Qt toolkit from time
to time, but that comes natural with being a KDE developer: Most of us do that, because, well,
we really like working with it. And Aaron's certainly not trying to hide his connection to TT
in any way: It's permanently stated in his email signature, and he mentioned it in the
interview after all.

As a KDE developer myself, I don't feel that I have any reason to suspect a conflict of
interest there, and perceive it as perfectly obvious when Aaron refers to himself as part of
the community - after years of contributions both technical and social, and serving the e.V.
as member, board member and now president, he is without a doubt, and more so than most. 

As for Nokia and the KDE community, don't forget that there's been some contact in the past
already - Nokia was present at and a sponsor of our 2006 developer conference (as they started
using the KDE KHTML-derived WebKit on their S60 devices around that time). There will be other
opportunities to get to know each other better in the future, I'm sure.

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

Posted Feb 2, 2008 19:30 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Plus it depends on the company.

Many companies do work "with" their employees. That's the point of a 'company'.. a company of
people working together to accomplish some goal. And often that goal is not profit oriented,
although profits are certainly wanted. Money is more then just providing for your basic
needs.. by pooling resources it makes it possible to accomplish other life goals that
otherwise would be impossible to accomplish on your own.

Everybody is different, and so is corporations. Generally larger corporations are all pretty
soul-less.. and this is because the original people that made the company are usually all long
gone and they are publicly traded. The board of directors in a publicly traded corporation are
generally just profit oriented and most people high-up only care abotu their paticular segment
of the business. When businesses get very large there has to be internal divisions and such to
keep in managable by humans.

But that sort of thing is actually the minority of cases. At least in the U.S. . Most people
work for small to medium sized businesses that are mostly privately owned. Also the they are
the most productive sort of businesses providing most of the manufacturing and services for
the economy. (the large corporations own most of the capital though, they have the big bucks
to do big projects) This is why paying to the ebb and flow of the stock market in order to
gauge our economy is largely pointless... it's largely illusionary anyways.

With the case of QT and Trolltech there are many ways that they can survive mostly intact
inside of Nokia. They seem to be productive sorts of people and thus it would be more
attractive to treat Trolltech as a seperate company inside of their own company. A sattilite
group that they have oversight control of.

There are cases of software companies getting tired of their larger corporate owners and
breaking away from them.

One big example of this is Bungie Studios, the people that created the 'Halo' franchise, was
purchased by Microsoft in 2000 and integrated into Microsoft Game Studios division. They
produced many games for Microsoft and in 2007 they purchased their company back from Microsoft
to create the now independant Bungie LLC.