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.

Gnome & KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you doing to further intergrate code with KDE?

When?

[iamsure]

The global answer for open source projects is always "when it is ready", but even developers have rough ideas around timeframes whether they are a decade, a year, a month, or a day.

So, I would love to know, "When will we see OpenOffice and Mozilla integrated into Gnome more effectively?"

Mono & Miguel

[Sircus]

OK, this is three question marks, but I figure they go together in one answer:

What are your feelings regarding Miguel's stated preferences for future integration of Mono and Gnome? Since you're a major part of Ximian, does it automatically follow that you're in agreement?

How do you resolve the potential conflicts of interest over issues such as this one between your role at Ximian and your position with the Gnome foundation?

First (and most obvious) Question!

[fm6]

There are a lot of failed business models that begin, "we can give away software and charge for ..." How is Ximian's business model different

my question

[rosewood]

"What is the hardest part of working in such a hard-core, community driven work sector?"

The idea for this question came with that article about Lindows and not releasing their source. I ask this here because of the hard core community that seems to side so staunchly on this KDE vs Gnome idea.

Future Plans for Ximian and Gnome

[Everach]

How does Ximian intend to leverage the Open Source movement for continued economic growth?

Exchange Like Product

[Kaypro]

Currently the Exchange Connector seems to integrate quite well, are there any plans to create a standalone server with similar capabilities to Echange Server?

gnome and mono

[Anonymous Coward]

How will MONO project affect GNOME project in the future?

My question: MS Licensing Plan Version 6.0

[joebp]

In many ways, Microsoft's introduction of the infamous Version 6.0 on August 1st might be a watershed for Linux desktop usage in business.

Are you looking forward to an increase in private-sector uptake as Microsoft makes its licensing arguably less attractive, or do you feel there are still 'holes to fill' WRT the feasibility of Linux desktop usage in business?

Nautilus

[ahde]

What can you tell us about the future of the Nautilus file manager as it relates to Ximian Gnome? Is Ximian planning to continue development where Eazel left off, continue using and maintaining it, or replace it with something a little more ...uh... lightweight?

Future of gnumeric?

[Tet]

Miguel has stated that he believes the GNOME project should stop putting its effort into gnumeric, and instead concentrate of openoffice. Can we take it that this is an official Ximian position? I believe it's the wrong one, and while the code will remain available for anyone to pick and and modify thanks to the GPL, it's hard to see a long term future for gnumeric if its lead developers are advocating switching to something else...

Mono and Windows compatibility

[AirLace]

Ximian has explained that it is developing [ximian.com] the Mono [go-mono.com] .NET runtime and C# implementations to provide a modern development environment for the GNOME / Linux desktop. Of course, a pleasant side-effect of writing future applications in C# will be that it's easy to make them Windows compatible. Do you see a future in producing cross-platform software solutions or will Ximian remain devoted to the Linux desktop? Will Ximian use Windows.Forms (in conjunction with a GTK# compatibility layer) or will GTK# [sourceforge.net] be used directly by Ximian programs? After all, the two toolkits have fundamentally different philosophies behind widget packing/placement etc.

My Question

[magnwa]

Over the past few years, there have been plenty of dependencies and what not in GNOME. One package upgrade seemingly shatters the entire setup. Now Gnome is many years older but doesn't seem to have approached the capabilities of the KDE. In this day and age when people are choosing KDE for their distributions in order to attain user-friendliness, what do you think Ximian can do to catch up? How do you plan on bridging that gap?

Microsoft and Mono?

[zoward]

Nat,

Have you gotten a sense of how Microsoft views the existence of an open source alternative to .NET? Do you think that, over the long term, Microsoft will grow to love, ignore or loathe (and perhaps seek to undermine) Mono?

Core Gnome technologies

[wrinkledshirt]

Despite its relatively short lifetime, Gnome's been really great about embracing all sorts of different technologies -- gtk, ORBit, bonobo and now Mono. However, it's sometimes difficult trying to figure out how this all ties together (if it's supposed to at all). Generally speaking, if someone's going to want to develop for Gnome in the future, how should they prepare themselves? What should they want to learn?

Useability research

[nakhla]

One of the big problems facing GNOME and other open-source software is that of ease-of-use. Microsoft and Apple spend millions of dollars when developing new operating systems or UIs in order to ensure that their product is easy to use for the non-geek end user. What kind of useability studies has Ximian conducted? What is Ximian doing to correct any problems that the research has brought to light?

Conflict of Philosophies

[polyphemus-blinder]

I would like to know:

What is your take on the apparent paradox resulting from:
1. the goal of uniformity on the Linux desktop, and
2. the many, many, groups who have this as their own special goal?

Mandrake and RedHat work toward this on the OS level, and Gnome and KDE battle it out on the desktop integration level, and many others espouse some sort of a "grand unification theory" of Linux.

Do you subscribe to the theory that less is more, or that multiple groups with a common goal will result in the goal's earlier acheivement?

As a buisness

[Fizzlewhiff]

Is it frustrating to see potential revenue lost due to offering the same products for free? Do you ever run the numbers to see what your income potential might be if you stopped giving away the same software you sell or do you believe that the Linux community, as a whole, cannot and will not support companies who only sell Linux software?

Co-existance of Red-Carpet and up2date/RHN

[yusufg]

Hi, Red-Carpet seems to offer functionality similar to up2date/redhat network. However, there seems to be a very substantial lag between packages made available via Ximian's redhat channel and up2date.

An example being (till now, RPM 4.0.4) is not available via the Redhat 7.2 channel. Is Ximian going to ever make a policy statement as to what is the maximum duration their userbase will be diverged from receiving the latest updates of their respective distributions.

If there are specific packages which are likely not to be made available via red-carpet, can their be an official statement on this so that users are aware of the pros/cons of using multiple update mechanisms

The Future of Gnome

[I_redwolf]

What do you think about the future of Gnome in the usability arena. With the advent of Sun donating the usability team that worked on CDE and tiny little things (ie: not being able to manage the menu system without being root) where do you see Gnome fitting in amongst users. Will Gnome be only for power users, or experts only or for that matter users in transistion? (By the way I know who's working on the menu system and I'm currently trying to help figure something out). KDE has it's niche defined but Gnome seems to be in a little bit of a haze as having a defining role in the OpenSource desktop movement lately. What is it's defining niche and target audience if there is any at this point?

Also if I can squeeze another one in; With MONO being cooked and simmered in the pot how do you see the usefulness of the Compiler and .NET as a language affecting/detracting/helping opensource and Gnome in general. As MONO is a Ximian funded open source project there must be some plans to use it in Ximians' version of Gnome. If I might ask whats coming down the pipe from Ximian in the aspect of MONO/.NET and Gnome?

Re:Mono and Windows compatibility

[dthable]

To generalize the question, Ximian is putting effort into the Mono project. How does Ximian plan to leverage Mono and .Net in the future released of Ximian software? (I don't think they would put so much into Mono just for the sake of creating a .Net for Linux.)

Personal feelings

[mapnjd]

Question for Nat: "How do you cope, on a personal level, with all the negative and sometimes ill-informed comments that people make about GNOME and Ximian?"

People reading this: I am a GNOME user, and I love it. I understand that you may prefer KDE and that it does do somethings better than GNOME. It's just that GNOME suits my needs better.

I only ask as I personally don't deal with these sorts of things well.

nic

Red Hat 7.3 - Remove Ximian

[spudnic]

The first step in the installation instructions for upgrading to Red Hat 7.3 was to remove all Ximian components. How are ya'll going to resolve this issue so we won't have to jump through hoops to keep Ximian updated and Red Hat Happy?

Usability

[Khazunga]

The two main desktop environments for Linux (KDE and Gnome) do not offer usability improvements over mainstream desktop Operating Systems -- namely MS Windows and MacOS.

Gnome does have a usability project. What is your opinion on its actual impact on Gnome? Do you feel the open-source movement can attract non-programmers -- like usability experts -- with the same intensity it attracts programmers?

Lack of documentation for GNOME internals

[Tet]

Are there any plans to increase the amount of documentation on GNOME internals? While GNOME seems to have plenty of trivial documentation (such as the GNOME User's Guide [redhat.com], there's virtually nothing that explains what's going on underneath. Are there any plans for a "GNOME Administrator's Guide"? I'm thinking of something that documents usage of files in $HOME/.gnome, what session management is and how it works, what controls the contents of the GNOME menu, and so on. For example, when GNOME fails to correctly save session information, I'd like to be able to check the documentation to see what should be being written to .gnome/session. At the moment, I just have to guess. Some of it is reasonably obvious from context, but it's the sort of thing that really needs formally documenting.

.net Integration

[fabiolrs]

I would love to know how Ximian expects its products to integrate MS .net strategy. Will Ximian products integrate with .net? If so, how Ximian is planning to do it? When it is planning to do it?

Thanks

External Compatibility

[dspeyer]

What plans do you have to improve compatibility with the non-GNOME world?

For example, do you think it's practical to implement Xaw as a front-end to GTK? That would get OpenOffice integration real fast, among others. What about a unified theme format with KDE? Or a common protocol for copy/paste?

It seems like this sort of stuff would be really helpful -- what's actually in the works?

embedded gnome?

[Lumpy]

Gnome is great for the overpowered computers of today, and I am glad your group brought us Gnome (just like I thank the KDE people for KDE) but I have a very important question....

Is there any plans to make a Gnome lite or an embedded Gnome? something that would work on minimal hardware (P133 as a target)? Having available a "desktop" that is very similar to the workstation desktop on embedded or small devices would be a huge advantage for linux in general (look at winCE and PocketPC os or whatever microsoft calls it today)

Is it possible to release a mini-gnome?

Re:Future of gnumeric?

[miguel]

I believe that Gnumeric is a very advanced spreadsheet. But it will take 5 years to get to the point where Excel is. In some areas, Gnumeric is more advanced than Open Calc, and in some cases, Open Calc is more advanced than Gnumeric.

Open Office is an integrated office suite, so that does help a lot in terms of a unified office suite to deploy to people. To move more people away from Microsoft Office and into an Open Source/Free Software product, I am encouraging people to use OpenOffice.

That being said, Gnumeric has a beautiful code base, and will likely be a nice testing ground for new technologies (as it has always been).

Gnumeric is better suited for people who want to do build a spreadsheets for PDAs which are compatible with Excel, for a works-like scenario, or as a reusable engine. Open Office is a lot harder to hack on currently.

So I see both existing. I am in love with both products.

Miguel.

Why subscribe?

[JThaddeus]

I was considering subscribing in order to improve the performance of downloads (which have gone to a snail's pace since the subscription program began) but two out of three of my last update attempts have ended in file not found errors. This type of error doesn't give me confidence in how well RedCarpet setups are tested. So why shouldn't I just forget about subscriptions and go with KDE?

Ximian & support

[finasf]

How Ximian can be so slow by publishing compatibility to Mandrake 8.2? This cannot be the way to work because Mandrake is one of the major distros! Shame you! You will lost many possible clients if you wont bring compatibility to latest versions asap. Is this gonna be same on Red Hat v7.3???

Gnome sans-X?

[emil]

The KDE project is attempting to develop a version of KDE/Qt that does not require X.

They've been at this for awhile, and I don't know their status, but have you any thoughts on similar work?

Gnu ROPE question

[Anonymous Coward]

When will GNU ROPE be released? A few years ago you (Nat) and Miguel made a lot of noise about the fact it would speed up the loading times of Mozilla by 30%. However it never came out. Did the project die?

Integration with distributions

[daeglin]

I like Ximian but it is only GNOME Desktop distribution. It "sits on" some Linux distribution. Unfortunately the integration with the leading distros is poor (I explain it later).

So the qestion is: Are you going to cooperate with some Linux distro more?

Explanation what concerns me (I currently use Debian, RedHat, Mandrake on different comps for different purposes -- all with Ximian desktop):

With Ximian I have basicaly two sets of config tool -- one from distro (in distro menus) the second one from GNOME/Ximian (in Ximian menus) -- neither of these sets is complete. This is the main Ximian stopper for me.

Two different menu systems. Some application are accesed from distro menus another from Ximian menus.

It seems to me it would be logical if RedHat and Ximian cooperate. (but I'm gonna to change distro if Ximan chooses somebody else :)

Methodology

[shomon2]

I have just finished a computing degree where I devoted most of my final year to studying the methodologies used in different open source projects... I looked at a lot of the things which are being used to make larger open source projects work, such as python's PEPs, apache's voting structure, the enlargement of the CVS writing and code review heirarchy etc. What other technical or non technical methods are you thinking of implementing (or are already doing) with regard to the gnome project, and the way software is built within ximian, to allow for it's continued growth?

Also, are there any suggestions you could give towards getting smaller projects to bridge the gap and grow to optimal sizes?

Thanks

Ale

Assbarn?

[huberj]

Can you tell us more about your efforts with the assbarn [assbarn.com] project?

Thanks!

What are your favorite apps?

[n8willis]

What are your favorite unsung GNOME applications; in particular which ones strike you as clever, original or just plain well-done?

Release schedules for distros?

[Black Art]

I am curious what the plan is for keeping up with the various versions. I have Mandrake 8.2 and would like to install Ximian. I can't do it because you don't support that quite yet. I have another box that will go to Redhat 7.3 as soon as that is out of beta (and I can get the hard drive clean enough to do the install). Will that be a long wait as well?

Evolution

[Firewheels]

Evolution is one of the finest email applications I have used, bar none. Unfortunately, as a Windows admin, it sometimes becomes difficult to monitor my email while I'm working (and I absolutely REFUSE to use outlook).

Are there any plans to produce a win32 Evolution build?

How to pay for good UI

[TheFuzzy]

Nat,

I don't think that there's any question that Ximian has the vision and talent necessary to produce excellent, extremely user-friendly tools for Linux and Gnome. However, there's no question that such an undertaking is expensive ... not just for the programmers, but for Q/C, tech support, refunds, documentation, etc.
In three parts:

1. How successful has the Red Carpet Subscription been in funding Ximian development, or at least itself?

2. What other ideas do you have to make people want to pay for Ximian software?

3. Where do you think that you can use the resources of the Open Source community to reduce costs?

I ask because, as a member of the OpenOffice.org project, we are looking to become more independant of Sun/StarOffice and need to answer these questions ourselves.

-Josh Berkus
OpenOffice.org