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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.
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.
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