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Helix Code Profiled in Boston Globe
bluebomber writes "The Boston Globe profiled Helix Code this morning on the front page of the business section. Here's the online version." Interesting tidbits: 250,000 copies of helix gnome downloaded so far. Also talks about how Helix hopes to make money.
Helix is doing two great things from what I can tell here. The first, and one that most people will see, is that they are producing a product (or at least helping produce a product) that is doing good for the whole community, or for any computer user actually -- assuming they will eventually use the product, or indirectly through competition. Even though Gnome isn't completely their baby, they are doing alot work for it.
The second thing that I see them doing, which is perhaps more important, is offering another example of the open source buisiness model. They are producing something open source and giving it away for free, yet they have a model for making money, which attracts investors. If they succeed this does nothing but give credibility to open source as a viable option for buisinesses and start ups. If they fail, this could have some repercusions, but then again, its not going to hurt open sources look to the buisiness world.
I had honestly never heard of them until the blurb a few weeks ago on here about their admin tools they were working on.
I headed over, saw one screen shot, and thought it was the coolest looking thing I had seen. So I grabbed it. Then I grabbed it for my other boxen.
The thing is slick. It correctly shuts down the LCD on my laptop when the screen saver kicks in - unlike KDE which just turns the screen black but does not turn off the backlight. It has not crashed once on me. It comes with gnapster, which totally rocks. And it has the coolest install/updating method in existance.
I love it.
I think these guys are wildly optomistic if they think that they can get 30 mil a quarter by 2002. I went and looked at redhat and they only did 16 mil their last quarter. I think redhat will be doing good to reach the 30 mil target by 2002.
I certainly hope they succeed though. HelixCode Gnome sure has impressed me. Maybe with any luck these big guys will license Helix Gnome for thier boxs. (maybe that's how they might reach 30 mil)
My Weblog
They were showing Evolution and the new "red carpet" installer at LinuxWorld. They both look GREAT. They mentioned that native Exchange server support would be in the second release of Evolution and the first release would use IMAP.
:)
The new installer is very nice. True point and click app install. While not to everyone's liking, I'm sure it will help a lot of new users. They also gave out cool shirts and some stuffed Helix monkeys.
IMHO, the publicity of GNOME and Helix could lead to a maintaining (or even an increase) in the rate of growth of Linux, currently standing at about 100% per year.
This still hasn't varied significantly, for many years now, which prompts me to repeat my prediction that Linux will overtake all versions of Windows combined as the most popular platform within 4-5 years.
In the end, it's the growth in Linux that'll make or break GNOME, Helix, KDE or any other Linux project. People burn out, die, develop new interests, etc. New blood fuels Open Source. Without that, the Open Source movement will die, in time.
By boosting interest, publicity and quality, GNOME may get that new blood in. And, with the hostility between KDE and GNOME fading (finally! - did Tux knock sense into them?), we might see code borrowing and idea exchange - the very essence of the Bazaar model.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
gnome is a desktop, with underlying infrastructure of libraries and gui tool kit, plus some applications based on said libraries and tool kit (gnucash, gnumeric, gedit etc. etc.), it has been around a while now (refer www.gnome.org)
helixcode, which hasn't been around so long, is a distribution of gnome (much like redhat is a distro of gnu/linux) so it bundles up the desktop, libraries, tool kit, apps etc. etc. checks for dependencies and then offers you a nice gui based update mechanism to make your life *so* much easier... (refer www.helixcode.com)
tell me, when was the last time you checked what updates were available for your distro / desktop ??
HTH
marty
"I can't buy want I want because it's free. Can't be what they want because I'm me." -Corduroy, Pearl Jam
Friedman says. ''We hope to make no money off the software.''
It's a great statement. It runs so counter to the current software industry that I couldn't resist quoting it. But it is a sign of the changing world model for IT business. Even here at IBM, that amount of money made from software and hardware is starting to be dwarfed by the income generated by the Services sector, and that seems to be where Helix Gnome is heading.
I used to have the impression that there would be some sort of subscription service to use Helix Gnomes update features or some integrated help-desk type solution. Reading this article seems to suggest a different path - it looks like the revenue stream that Helixcode is aiming for (they are a company after all) is based around providing a convenient integration layer between the user and whatever business out there exists trying to sell the user something, be it technical support, event tickets, book sellers or whatever. Handled right, this could be a fairly amazing utility - imagine planning a holiday trip by selecting the dates in your calendar and then calling up a travel planner which integrates buying plane tickets for the right days, booking hotels in the destination cities using advance search tools and having all that information written back into your electronic diary, along with maybe even collating responding emails from booked events as links. Then click the "Print Itinery" and get the complete information at the touch of a button (working printer not withstanding :-) ).
Why is this important? This is the sort of integration that MS's .NET project dreams about - complete integration of the available technology to make handling information more integrated and easier to access. Having an alternative to this underway NOW strikes me as of critical importance as Linux works its way onto more and more people's computers in order to prevent the .NET integration turning the commercial internet into a closed-off MS-only zone. We already see the spread of IE-only sites - I don't want a balkanized internet.
And if you don't want all those services, Helix Codes' extremely well organised and structured Gnome distribution will still be for free, complete with source code. So we can have the best of both worlds.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Helix Gnome is a Gnome distribution. It's analogous to the concept of Linux distributions, where vendors customize the kernel, integrate everything, do bug fixes, decide what packages they wish to include, and make it easy to install and use. That's what Helix Code is doing for Gnome. They've written utilities like the installer and updater to facilitate the installation/upgrading process. They've decided which packages they wish to include in their distribution of the Gnome Environment. And they're doing application development. They have some of the best Gnome hackers around working for them, writing Evolution (the Fifth Preview Release is out now, btw!), the Helix Setup Tools, and improving the desktop and development environment in general.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
You know, this is what I find so distasteful about the Gnome project. They do some nice work, and arguably some superior work, but they feel compelled to give the impression that everything they do is a revolutionary and unprecedented breakthrough courtesy of Miguel de Icaza's genius. This article reminds me of the scores of interviews with Gnome developers back when Red Hat was cranking up the hype machine for 1.0. I understand that reporters can misunderstand or misquote you -- but every single one of those interviews left the reporter with the impression that Gnome was the first ever attempt to give Unix a user-friendly desktop. And quite a few of them, like today's article, implied or stated that Gnome was the first GUI for Unix. I can't see that as anything but dishonest and irresponsible.
Round II of that is starting now, with all the hype about the Gnome object model. Miguel says code should be reusable! Eazel embeds an MP3 player in a file browser! What will they think of next!?!
Hello, this is 1990's stuff! Nextstep, Microsoft and Be have been doing this stuff for years, and KDE is delivering it to the Linux desktop today. But in the Slashdot universe, nothing exists until it's in Gnome.
I can sort of understand when Microsoft does this stuff. They're in it for the money. But in free software, where the currency is recognition and respect, failing to give credit seems like outright theft. I'm not saying that the Gnome developers should preface every sentence with "Of course, XXX did this first." -- just that they should stop giving the impression that they innovated everything under the sun.
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What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Their graphical update and secondary xml files which track installed updates makes automated systems management of Helix-gnome systems a complete nightmare. I need scriptable tools. The Helix web page makes no attempt to provide easy access to the .rpm files. They use a secondary database, other than rpm, to track which packages are installed with the helix-updater. They don't document how this all works in plain english. And finally, they plan to use this system to force ads down my throat.
I'm planning a large rollout of Helix at a University, and frankly, I'm not impressed. Where do I find a complete list of updates? Where might I find those rpm files? Where is the helix-updater database located? Why is it separate from rpm? Why do I need yet another package manager???
I want scriptable tools so that I can maintain consistency across a large number of workstations. I don't need a cute GUI updater, and I DON'T want to force my userbase to manage this stuff by hand.
I think it's fallout from the GNOME Foundation announcement of a week or so ago. The backing of big names like Sun means that GNOME is suddenly an editorial hot topic.
This is raising the hackles of some in the Qt/KDE camp. Most notably TrollTech, with their infantile comments on the Qt Developer page, and Matthias Ettrich, with his off the mark comments in a recent interview. This is a shame, because both projects should benefit from each others publicity. As long as both projects are producing great things, then people will want to use them both, if only to be different. Perhaps this is the only benefit of the `tribalism' that often surrounds software. The BSD's benefit because they're seen as a different `tribe' to Linux, and the same happens with KDE and GNOME. In the long run, they each feed of off the popularity of the other.
Chris
They use a secondary database, other than rpm, to track which packages are installed with the helix-updater.
/var/lib/dpkg/status file, depending on what type of system you are on.
I'm afraid this just isn't true. The current updater uses the rpm database alone, and the next generation updater we demoed at LWE uses either your rpm database or the
If you need technical assistance, please send mail to spidermonkey@helixcode.com.
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Ian Peters
You've stumbled across one of the limitations of the current updater system. The current "updates" we ship are represented as a group of packages inside of an xml file. Unfortunately, this means the updater may continue to represent some updates as still being available for your system when you've already installed everything you're interested in from that update.
The new updater we're currently finishing up, Red Carpet, takes care of this calculating full tree dependencies for packages, making it a full package management tool. In addition, we plan to add features to support your type of situation, namely, a single person managing a large number of machines which should be kept in sync.
If you're looking for our files, check out our ftp site (ftp.helixcode.com), which contains packages for all the distributions we support (this is where akamai comes to get them), along with the xml metafiles we use to describe them. If you're not already, subscribe to the updates@helixcode.com mailing list, which is where we post a message any time we push new updates.
I'd also like to ask you to subscribe and contribute to the spidermonkey@helixcode.com list. Getting GNOME onto as many systems as possible is the core of our business model, and we'd always like to hear feedback from our users about how we can make that process easier.
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Ian Peters
No, but you can embed GTK apps into KDE apps. : )
Just email Simon and ask him for that tarball.