MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-05-10 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Miguel de Icaza: Rest of the World to Eventually Force US Into Li nux
|
Miguel de Icaza: Rest of the World to Eventually Force US Into Linux
By Eugenia Loli-Queru - Posted on 2004-05-10 02:54:07
at OSNews [http://www.osnews.com/]
Last Thursday OSNews had the opportunity to meet Miguel de Icaza, founder of
Gnome, Ximian [http://ximian.com/] and among other things leader of the much
discussed, Mono [http://go-mono.com/] project. Miguel is a talented and
versatile developer but he is also a very intelligent businessman able to
understand the industry on many different levels. Talking to Miguel
guarantees that you are very quickly taken away by his enthusiasm and
optimism and his thoughtful strategies and vision on how OSS will take over
the world.
The patent issue
The discussion quickly got steered into the patent problem. Miguel is very
aware of the patent situation in US today and the dangers this [will] mean
for Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS). He acknowledges that most patents
today should be invalid, as they were filed over trivial technical
solutions, but the US patent office seems to be doing a poor job seperating
the valid ones from the trivial ones. This situation creates many lawsuits
every year in US and according to Miguel, this will only get worse with
time. Apparently, for many companies, this is a fast way to make some easy
money by suing other companies (over trivial technical matters sometimes).
The F/OSS developer community hasn't had the problem upon them yet, but as
F/OSS becomes more and more popular, Miguel believes this will eventually
become a real problem.
Regarding Mono and the Microsoft .NET patents, Ximian is now splitting the
"non-free" parts of .NET in Mono, and so OS providers can decide if they
want to include in their products the "non-free non-ECMA" portions or not.
Apparently, even without the non-free portions, Mono is fully usable,
complete with the GTK# bindings, database and other free parts. Miguel knows
that a completely "clean" Mono will still find resistance from some
OS/distro makers for political reasons, rather than legal or technical ones,
and he is prepared for it.
Ximian met with Microsoft executives a few months ago -- as part of a
symposiuym -- and it's not a secret that Microsoft is aware of the Mono
developments. Miguel explains: "If there is indeed a new technology that
Microsoft holds a patent to and they do not explicitly allow us to use, we
will remove that code, or rework the code in a way that does not infringe
the patent. We do not like the current patent environment in the US, but we
have to play by the rules." Miguel also gave us a number of technical
examples around Corba having technologies for years that Microsoft only now
starts to be using in their products. "Longhorn's Indigo or Avalon, all was
done before by us and others", said Miguel. "Most of the new technologies in
Longhorn have existed in the past in one way or another, but they failed to
get shipped with a vehicle as Microsoft Windows to users, so they live only
on CVS repositories, old research papers, and old systems." He has so many
such examples it that makes him sleep tight at night and not worry about
such things. Besides, "it doesn't make sense to not create something just
out of fear that it *might* infringe on some patents somewhere," he said,
meaning that if developers would be driven by this fear, no developer would
be able to develop something today with this huge number of patents in US.
But software development does go on, if more carefully than in the past.
Taking over the world
Because patents will most probably be the cancer of the tech industry in the
near furure in US, Miguel is having an alternative plan on how to 'take over
the world': starting with the third world. "Poor countries don't have the
money to buy and maintain Windows; this is where open source software is
becoming a real and powerful alternative," he said. More developed countries
also use Linux: Miguel mentioned the 200,000 Debian machines in Spain
running Gnome and many other smaller projects using Linux and OSS at many
levels: schools, government applications, servers, even on home desktops.
And long as EU won't adopt [http://swpat.ffii.org/news/04/cons0507/] similar
patent laws like US currently employees, Miguel sees Linux (and F/OSS in
general) becoming a major power in the industry, competing head to head with
Microsoft in a few years. "Even the Linux desktop is almost usable today",
he said semi-joking and continued "if the whole world is using Linux in the
future, US will have to 'switch' eventually too, regardless of patent
problems. And when that happens, there's no stopping".
But Miguel's world take over plan doesn't only go through the third world
first, but also through Windows. He believes that what matters are the
applications (and the OS as an extension), and if people are using F/OSS
applications on any operating system, this is a win-win situation for the
F/OSS future. He mentioned the Mozilla, OOo and Gimp examples, applications
that thrive on Windows as well as on Unix. Ximian is working on a native
port of Evolution 2.0 to Windows using the WIMP engine to make the
application look XP-native. Having replaced --with capable alternatives--
the browser, the office suite and now the corporate mail client/PIM
application on Windows, this situation can drive adoption of F/OSS faster.
Miguel realizes that while, for example, OOo doesn't have all the MS Office
features, "it's good enough" and that's a great start for the majority of
users.
Chatting with Miguel, Page 2/2
Mono on Gnome and Mac OS X
We asked about Mono getting included with a Gnome of the near-future, but
Miguel is not overly occupied by this thought. If the Gnome community would
like to use Mono, great; if not, life goes on and Mono will find application
on other parts of the industry's ecosystem.
We asked whether a Mac OS X native version of GTK# or Cocoa# is planned, but
the answer was negative. Ximian is not working on OSX native toolkit
bindings (and he doesn't think that Apple is working on something like it
either), however all the other parts of Mono 1.0 will be able to work on Mac
OS X natively (and with GTK# via X11). Miguel told us that Quark is using
Mono for their next major Quark Xpress release! Apparently Quark is working
on Obj-C bindings for Mono. However, the graphical toolkit bindings will be
minimal (an update on this here
[http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6989#234389]), so he hopes that
Mac enthusiasts will jump in to complete a full Cocoa# solution, or natively
port GTK+ 2.x ("shouldn't be too difficult," he said) in order for GTK# to
work on top (using the Appearance Manager) and without the use of the
awkward (for many Mac users) X11 on top of Aqua.
Novell's competition
Not everyone is as enthusiastic to use Mono though. Mr Curtis Sasaki of Sun
Microsystems told us last September that there are zero chances of Sun
including Mono in their Gnome-based JDS desktop. We asked Miguel what he
thinks about this and he replied, "That is good news for the Novell-based
Linux desktop! This means that they won't be able to use the new Evolution,
or F-spot or the handy iFolder. This adds more value to our solution at
Novell." He believes that the Glow [http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/]
project (an Evolution-clone based on OOo and Java) started out by Sun
exactly because of Sun's fear that Evolution will be using C# in the future,
but Miguel is not concerned about Glow, as Evolution is already 4-5 years
ahead in development, and he is confident that the high level language of C#
will speed up their development even more. Besides, Ximian is also working
to achieve interoperation between Evolution with OpenOffice.org.
We expressed the thought that the purchase of Ximian and SuSE by Novell must
have being quite a shock for Red Hat -- the number one Linux provider in US
--, however Miguel is optimistic. The two companies work together on Gnome,
and in fact, he believes that the relationship between the two companies is
better now than it was in 2001.
Miguel is actually a Debian fan: "In terms of adoption, Debian is larger
than anything else. What we hope to bring to the table ourselves is not
direct competition to Debian, but an enterprise/commercially supported
version of Linux." He is aware of how widespread Debian is: "you can find
Debian maintainers everywhere else in the world, something that isn't the
case for other distros. If anything, we want to *learn* and work with Debian
as much as possible, given that its users are a huge contributor to
enhancing open source in general." "Its community commitment is fantastic,
but is a very hard platform to support for an ISV," he wrote last year on a
paper.
We asked Miguel about Mandrake, and he said that Mandrake was kept a bit
behind developments the past year because of their financial problems, a
problem that happened because "they kept funding every F/OSS application out
there that they found 'interesting,' without evaluating sensibly if some of
that money can come back to the company," Miguel said.
Gnumeric and desktop plans
The internal co-operation with SuSE and Novell is going great, we were told,
with Nat Friedman (co-founder of Ximian) heading and steering the desktop
happenings at Novell. Novell itself is moving on deploying SuSE Linux
internally to more than 3,000 desktops, and that's a very exciting moment
for the company.
We asked Miguel about the Gnumeric spreadsheet, a project that Miguel
started many years ago. "Jody Goldberg, the new maintainer, loves the
project," he said. Miguel is very happy with the developments of Gnumeric,
he mentioned that it is now possible to separate the GUI from the engine
part, and to use Gnumeric as a library inside other applications.. When
compared it to its KDE counterpart, Miguel said: "Last time I checked
KSpread had more subtle problems: the computational engine was behind (no
dialog box poping up, but definitely not as advanced as Gnumeric, but its
not visually obvious from a screenshot)."
Near the end of our meeting, we asked Miguel to consider developing a home
video editor, as part of Novell's new desktop initiative. Miguel
acknowledged the need for such a tool on Linux that is well-designed and
usable by normal users, but he mentioned that "in the F/OSS world things are
created only if the developer needs them" -- a point he believes is one of
the shortcomings of the F/OSS system. "Developers should realize that they
don't make applications just for themselves anymore," he said earlier over
our UI/usability discussion too. However, Miguel told us that he has already
talked to Nat Friedman about a Ximian video application, and that the idea
is under consideration while he asked us enthusiastically "and you do know
what language that would be written in, right?".
"GTK# on Mono, of course," I replied smiling.
( Original Story URL at http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6989 )
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