Learn About Ximian and Gnome From Nat Friedman

This week's interview guest is Nat Friedman, co-founder and vice president of product development for Ximian. Nat is also co-chair of The Gnome Foundation, and an all-around nice guy. Post your questions (one per post, please) for Nat below. We'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated ones to him, and will post his answers (verbatim except for HTML formatting) within the next week.

Re:Nautilus

[tempest303]

No offense to the poster, but moderators, please don't mod this up any further - it's a waste of an interview question, IMHO. Nautilus IS being *actively* maintained, and if one checks out the GNOME 2 snapshots or betas, Nautilus is MUCH faster now. The need for a "lighter" file manager is becoming less of an issue all the time. And if you really must have something lighter-weight, I hear lots of good things about Rox Filer... but let's not waste 1/10th of our questions on Nautilus 1.0.x speed issues, please.

Re:Mono and Windows compatibility

[alext]

a pleasant side-effect of writing future applications in C# will be that it's easy to make them Windows compatible

I realize that in attempting to douse extravagant claims for Mono is like persuading the tide to reverse itself, but for the record:

Mono does not significantly contribute to the development of cross-platform software since the main Windows APIs (WebForms, Windows Forms, Dotnet ADO etc.) are not standardized, and Ximian has no plans to implement them. The standardized classes make up about 120 of the 1200 or so Dotnet classes used for building Windows apps.

A much better approach would be to take the Java VM and work with that - IBM is already working on a GTK port of the SWT graphics library, for example.