Since I work as sales director for an Open Source company, you will know my answer.

Tell your partner, that not only will you keep your technological advantage, but you will always be one step ahead of any competition if you work with a community. Be a leader for that community. Provide an infrastructure that makes communication easy among contributors. Inspire them by giving directions and accept input at the same time. Tell the community about your goals, let them be part of the story, inspire them to contribute and make yourself a desirable target for talent.

What you need is a clear focus on your business model. As an Open Source company you will market your know how, your unique expertise and tell everyone that you and only know are the ones to support a customers into the deepest abysses of technical problems. Find partners and share your expertise. Identify key contributors to the project and hire them. Be the experts in your field of knowledge and make yourself independent from a product that others can copy. Develop a business case, a sales pitch that potential customers will easily understand and identify as something that will bring a distinct advantage to their business by using your product.

One last thing: You will have lots more fun building an OSS company than going the closed way. You will be part of a community, you will lead it and you will continuously get input from intelligent people, input that otherwise will cost you dearly when hiring external consultants.

Uh, where did you get your numbers from?

LA to SF ist roughly 381 miles.

Going from Munich to Kiel (That's North to South in Germany between large cities) is about 540 miles.

And of course there are direct connections between these two cities by very comfortable train, which takes 7 hours.

* you want Suspend2RAM work on a notebook. Even an old T60p doesn't wake up after suspend

* you want DVB - There used to be a driver, but with the USB-stack rewrite this doesn't work anymore

* you actually want to use Flash

* you want to use your ext2/3/4 filesystem, say from your old /home

I like FreeBSD, in fact I started my *ix experience with 2.2.6, but for regular desktop use, the above are true show stoppers, at least for me.

I am fed up reporting bugs to KDE4, because the general attitude is that nothing is broken and that as a user one should adapt to KDE4's behaviour.

The most annoying thing for me is the total nonsense of system monitoring, which was perfect in KDE3, where you could adapt values, drag&drop sensors, adapt individual colors and select every imaginable sensor and put it into the panel.

These days you have very, very limited options, no chance to integrate a remote host via ssh, have a sensible readout of stuff like network throughput. These graphic representations are no more than estimates and basically useless for true monitoring.

Oh, yes, I reported this as a bug and the resulting "discussion" was what put me off KDE4 for good:

http://old.nabble.com/-Bug-216002--New%3A-Useless-display-of-system-load-%28and-network-usage%29-in-widget-td26502388.html

I stumbled upon something interesting there:

Remember the conspiracies around Trig's birth, April 18, 2008? According to the mail archive SP was handling governmental stuff a mere couple of hours after the birth. Birth time was supposed to be 6:30 am, so I presume she had little sleep before that, particularly after the flight from Texas with a Vancouver stopover. And hours later after giving birth she is up in bed, reading papers and handling stuff?

I don't believe that.

<quote>Nobody begrudges honest and informed sales people. It's only the crooks that folks hate.</quote>

Amen, brother, amen.

I like to think of myself as honest and informed and funnily enough I spend quite some time talking to customers, trying to convince them that I am more interested in actually helping them with a problem than just making a sale that in the long term will actually hurt my income.

It's that kind of attitude among a very small percentage among technical guys that in the past made me furious. Today, I have nothing left but a knowing smile, making sure these people never get into contact with my customers before there is a signed contract.

People skills make money. Technical skills make products, which need to be sold and *may* make money, provided you have someone to sell them.

BTW, as head of sales my notebook is a Thinkpad running Linux. However, I drive a black company Audi, which in you eyes probably qualifies enough to be put into the "stupid sales droid" drawer.

Oh well...

Any salesman will be happy to share a commission with you, provided you actually sell something. However, from your description I can only see that you are reacting to a specific customer's wish to purchase something. Neither have you actively made the customer come to a decision to purchase something from your company, nor have you done anything with regard to the administrative side of sales.

In short: You have done what you are already paid to do, nothing more. Had you done anything less, you would have actively hurt the company that pays you to do your job.

I am head of sales for a software company and I expect support in sales from our engineers. That is covered by their salary. My base salary, however, is a lot less than theirs and I actually take financial risks to be compensated only when I or my sales team do well. You, on the other hand, want a commission on top of a risk-free salary and in that case I would either demand a cut in your salary if you ask for a commission, or I would tell you to be happy with what you earn.

You can't have both.

However, if you feel comfortable in dealing with a customer and if you are willing to put some effort into learning all the soft skills necessary to be a good sales rep, you will probably be an enrichment to both the sales and the technical department. Few sales people do actually understand deeply technical stuff and can rarely transport customers' technical input to the engineers.

Someone who speaks both languages is a valuable asset and I would immediately hire you and make sure you make lots of money.

Does it run on Linux?

man Kraftfahrstra&#223;e

You must all be very young, my friends.

Back in the old times, that is around 1980, I used a 4 speed tape recorder to decode high speed morse code signals on the VHF bands during meteor showers. Meteorites entering the ionosphere briefly made the E-layer reflective for frequencies on the 2 meter and 70 cm band.

Prearranged attempts at a QSO made it possible to go for speeds of 1600 WPM or more, thus packing the relevant QSO information into a 1 second burst or less. Well, you needed to copy 200 WPM to do that, but us old farts had no problem with that.

Peter, DF5JT

I remember an article about KDE's long term strategy to be just that: an enterprise ready Desktop with fine grained policies, central administration and all the fluff that makes windows enterprise-ready and the de facto standard for the desktop.

IToday, we have a colorful disaster that isn't even as usable as its predecessor. Developers should have focused on the need for an enterprise desktop that could actually make a dent in MS corporate sales. Instead we got useless eye candy.

The fault, of course, lies with the big distributions that pride themselves on providing enterprise ready Linux. Enterprise sans le Desktop. Useless wanking. The requirements for an enterprise ready desktop are out there for anyone to see and it's not just "applications" as everyone usually points out. It's the ability for administrators to create and maintain a usable desktop according to official corporate policies. No more and no less.