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Interview with Miguel de Icaza
GonzoJohn writes: "Linux Orbit editor-in-chief John Gowin contacted Helix Code to catch up on where their products and projects were heading in the New Year. Miguel de Icaza, GNOME evangelist and developer and Helix Code co-founder was kind enough to answer our ten question interview. Included in the interview is some new information on the Red Carpet Project, the next iteration of the Helix Update utility." Miguel also speaks here about the not-yet-feature-frozen Evolution (what happens when Evolution is declared "finished"? ;) ). Is anyone out there using Evolution in their own workplace?
palm-utils doesn't use it. yet.
Netscape, as you cite it, is really no better than vim -- the communicator and navigator packages each include a full replacement for the binary, rather than extra plugins loaded at runtime. If there were more options than merely "with/without mail/news/etc", this variant of the subpackage solution would be unable to handle it.
I agree that having better-architected apps is a Good Thing, too, but the overhead involved is often significant. Practical issues are involved, too -- I'm not about to go back and rewrite my old apps to use a plugin architecture, though I frequently do so with my new ones. A better interm solution is needed for today's users when they're in need of greater configurability. Right now, that's compiling from source.
Ah, then. Well, we agree on The Right Way.
Only thing is, when I'm writing an app, I architect things that way if it's conveniant. Frequently it is -- using a plugin-based architecture, if it's well-thought-out, is an excellent way to avoid the need to hack in features crudely. However, at times when that's not expediant, I'm not going to spend an extra few days that could be spent actually Getting The Thing To Work on modularising it just for the sake of binary packages.
That's a common problem with binary packages. If you compile Evolution by hand, it'll detect the lack of palm-utils and not use it. Done, fine, everyone happy. That the binary packages are compiled with palm-utils support in is their problem (unless you think it's important 'nuff to break off subpackages to deal with the problem). In short, it's an RPM problem, not an evolution problem. Use the source and you'll be fine.
SharkMail was doing the virtual folder (they called them persistent search folders) thing back in 1997. I think they were the first email client to have this feature, but I may be wrong. FYI.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
In the world I live in, developers, Open or closed, are attracted by platforms with large user bases.
Why, then, did all those people contribute to Linux in 1993? Why weren't they busy writing code for something with a wide user base, like Windows (very popular at the time, I gather).
ESR has said some odd things, but he was right when he noted that most Open Source developers do it to scratch a personal itch. If you want other developers to help out on a project -- make it something they'll be interested in *using*, and if it's something with a large scope, make it modular so people can write their own bits independently without treading on each others' toes (see Apache, the Gimp, Emacs).
UNIX originally attracted a lot of coders because the pipe mechanism suited programs that were small and acted as 'modules' -- "tr" isn't much use on its own...
I believe there is a set of applications that lack the glamour or the in-built hackability that makes them attractive to volounteer developers. Whether open or closed source, I think these tasks need coders motivated by a paycheque (or some other reimbursement).
--
Thanks, Miguel. I've started to read those docs, and some of my worries are disappearing.
With a bit of luck I'll also find that there are also (going to be) non-graphic front-ends to generate the intermediate XML to drive the back-ends, so that the remote, non-graphic or scripted installer is not left out in the cold.
Keep up the good work, and a Happy New Year to you!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You answer your own question in an oblique sort of way. Helix Code is focusing on providing an alternative to Windows. It seems quite obvoius, to me, that the best way to do this is to hire a bunch of competent programmers and start cranking out code. Now please tell me why, in God's name, would they want to waste precious time and money training the said "puke" to use an entire other operating system and mail client and God knows what else when they can just use those resources to improve their software instead? How is this not obvious to you? I've never really investigated the market for clerical workers before, but I'm almost positive that the benchmark for proficiency is being able to use Word, Excel, Windows, and Outlook. I for one sleep better at night knowing that Miguel de Icaza is harnessing his formidable coding skills to improve Gnome than wasting a week teaching Wendy the temp how to recompile her kernel and word process in StarOffice. Focus on the ends, not the means, man!
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The vision of the Helix Setup Tools is tightly integrated with our vision of component-based programming and interface/contract-based programming.
p -tools.html) and if you are interested in our approach to component programming and how we think these things should fit, look at http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.h tml. And finally, if you are hooked into an object name space and service location you might be interested in the Moniker white paper (http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/monikers.ht ml).
The whole vision of GNOME is to enable a level of scripting that has never been available before. If you are interested in the technical details that address your concerns you can read the Helix Setup Tools white paper (http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/helix-setu
Best wishes,
Miguel.
I was using filter expressions in Elm in 1991. It provides a view just a normal mail folder, but that of mail that matches the filter. The only difference was that Elm's weren't persistent. It's not a terribly new concept, and it certainly isn't going to revolutionize e-mail.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
please be careful about your generalizations. some of us use mutt (i don't know about pine) and love it. i'd rather read my mail with a bunch of thrown together perl scripts than use a GUI for that.
Actually, Helix will use Nautilus. The reason is that Helix is a distribution of the Gnome environment. As of version 1.4, Gnome will include Nautilus for file management, help browsing, and the like. Gmc is going out the window. It will be included with the Gnome 1.4 Extra Apps, for those who prefer it, but it won't be a part of the core Gnome environment. Nautilus is its replacement. Helix Code will ship Nautilus in addition to the other core Gnome packages. Nautilus isn't just some add-on file manager for the Gnome project. It will be the file manager for the Gnome project.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
actually, Helix will use Nautilus..see my reply to your previous comment.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
I can understand why this would be confusing. The Gnome software map you are refering to is just a list of Gnome software, not necessarily software that is part of the Gnome Project proper. If you check out the releng module in Gnome CVS you'll see a list of packages that will be included in Gnome 1.4. At the bottom of the list you'll notice that mc will not be included in the core release of Gnome. That's because Nautilus is replacing it. Nautilus is part of the Gnome Project, not just a third-party add-on for Gnome.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
When Helix ships Gnome 1.4, Nautilus will be included. Now, they may ship a version of Nautilus that doesn't contain Eazel's services stuff, that I don't know. You'd have to talk to someone from Helix Code. I do understand your question regarding the overlap of services between Helix Code and Eazel. I've often wondered the same thing. In addition, Red Hat has an update agent and the Red Hat Network. The internet services for upgrading, purchasing support and services is going to be extremely competitive, which is excellent. It'll be fun to watch how it plays out. My main point was that Nautilus (the file manager and its technologies) will be in Gnome 1.4, which Helix will ship. The Eazel Services I view as a business add-on akin to Helix's Red Carpet.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
I'd just like to point out the obvious; that you can easily extract the source tarball from an SRPM. Use 'rpm2cpio foo.rpm | cpio -i'. rpm2cpio is included the rpm package, or there is a seperate version written in perl here.
I don't disagree that helix is ignoring slackware, but it is a fairly small hurdle for anybody willing to build from source.
He already made the VC pitch, and a VC firm listened. Linux Global Partners. They're really a great bunch of VCs, who are really with it.
--dave
Window managers and applications that are dynamically and effortlessly updated is a good thing, and believe its the future of home computing.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
What are you advocating for? You want Evolution to be better than Outlook, why? You more users to use GNU/Linux from Windows, why?
Why would you want users to switch to another operating system if its just another propietary OS that restricts the user from the software by its EULA?
It is not just about being popular! There is the reason GNU/Linux is as nice as it is; there is a reason we have an entire community of contributors changing and sharing these changes across the internet or across the room---it all started long ago in this project called GNU. This kind of dynamic and helpful community only happens when the users have the freedom to do so.
That is what freedom is about.
Now I entirely sympathize with the fact that people often can't use free software because it isn't a viable alternative for them. But an alternative that isn't free is not alternative at all.
That is what Miguel was talking about. Freedom first.
"Red Carpet is a universal package manager. It has a pluggable architecture for doing package management and to handle dependencies in them."
It's like they say about standards, with so many to choose from...
Hate to say this since I'm a KDE guy myself... but I talked with the Helix guys at Comdex and they seem to be quite cool. Specifically, I mentioned the Slack problem to them and they kinda groaned, but Aaron came up to me and gave me the following URL:
http://primates.helixcode.com/~aaron/slack.html
If you want to go check it out, and if you REALLY want to try out that purty GUI installer, just follow his directions... and soon, you'll have Helix on Slackware. (I'm currently being tempted by the Dark Side - FreeBSD is awfully nice... ; )
Good question. Maybe she read the "It's in development" warning.
"Even though it has a non-zero version number, this is not a "stable" release. You will not be able to use it as your real mail client, calendar, or contact manager."
Or the README, which says something like "This program may delete all your email if you aren't careful"... or something.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I think you're trying to say "if the source wasn't freely redistributable.." - please don't mix the terms up; free and open source code predates the GNU project and the FSF by years.
Freely redistributable (in original and modified forms) source != GNU.
-bugg
The most generous interpretation of the above is that freedom should be clearly secondary to functionality. A less generous interpretation is that freedom is not important at all.
Yes. Is this a bad thing? Many of us choose the best tool for the job, and simply want the solution that's going to work best. We don't use Linux because of the fact that its free, but because it is reliable and the particular featureset we neeed for a particular task. We know that Linux being Open Source contributer to its reliability, but when comparing, say, LInux 2.2 NFS and NIS to Solaris, we will benchmark and buy Solaris if the benchmark and other factors prompt us to do so.
You might find the concept unusual, but best tool for the job is actually more popular the OSS, though I'd like to think there's an overlap between the two. If closed source software produces good software, then I'll use it. Though being Open Source often acts as a feature in itself, and may even be necessary depending on the circumstances [eg, embedded devices]. But there's more to ther suitability of software to a particular task than licensing.
What non-free software has taken off on Linux that had even one half-as-good--or even just promising--free competitor? This is a major
hurdle to overcome.
Games. Right now, closed source games are vastly mmore popular to Linux users than Open Source games.
Take the sixth item in particular. It ties into your "best free mail client" jibe. In fact, creating the "best free mail client" is a pragmatic strategy, even if it means ignoring Outlook-ish features, because most free software developers use free mail clients. If you make the best free client, you get lots of enthusiastic developers interested, which gives you lots of momentum. So creating the "best free mail client" is a valid goal
I don't udnerstand your logic [and I think you're being rather rude to the original poster]. Developers make tools to atract developers who make tools to attract developers?
In the world I live in, developers, Open or closed, are attracted by platforms with large user bases. Good developer tools helps, but are a definite second [or lower on the list].
The free email clients that most Open Source developers use are fairly stagnant in their development. Actually, quite a few Open Source developers I know use Netscape Messenger. The rest use PINE/mutt and hate it.
VMWare, Win4Lin, StarOffice and Netscape 4.x are also popular closed source apps, vastly more so than their Open Source counterparts.
I think your vision of the Linux market is limited to yourself.
I guess `half as good' is fairly difficult to define. I think Plex86 currently falls in to the category of being half as good as vmware. I think Linux users will use VmWare over Plex86 for at least another two years.
There are many Open Source first person shooters which easily fall in to the category of `half as good as quake 3'. There are stacksa of OpenGL 3D games being produced by under Open Source licenses, most of which [same as their closed brethren] are crap, and a few of which are good.
But Quake 3 is, in my own observations, much more preferable to Crystal Space, or the Open Source Quake 1, or any of the other OS 3D FPSs. Its closest competition is Unreal Tournament, followed by Soldiuer of Furtune....get the picture?
Generally, Civilisation's genre isn't as popular due to the turn based nature of gameplay [most modern strategy games are real-time based]. Nevertheless, I'm quite sure the Open Source users that plays lots of Civilisation use Call to Power over Freeciv.
Although evolution works with --nodeps (for pilot), I'd rather just have it be more modular.
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
I think that the poster's intent is, sure let us create free software, but instead of trying to make the best free mail client (which from the perspective of say, an Outlook user, would still seem like a shoddy piece of crap), the goal should be the best mail client period, and have it be free software. He never said anything about ignoring freedom.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
the site is at: http://www.linuxorbit.com/features/interview3.php3
What non-free software has taken off on Linux that had even one half-as-good--or even just promising--free competitor? This is a major hurdle to overcome.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Your approach works great in an imaginary world with no trade-offs. Do you think Miguel ever says, "No, let's leave out that functionality. We don't need it, because we're Free!"? Of course not! But he does know that, to be successful in the long-run, GNOME and Evolution need to have the support of the hacker community. That means doing some things that you wouldn't do if you were a typical proprietary vendor aiming at Joe User:
- convenient source distribution
- smooth build process
- portability
- merging contributed patches
- establishing, maintaining, and participating in community fora
- building features that will attract developers, including features from the software that developers currently use
- including "hackability" features like ultra-configurability and an extension framework
- using (and enhancing) standard free libraries and components
- modularizing your code, so that other developers can use parts of it
- releasing early and often (with sufficient documentation for others to get started)
- addressing licensing concerns
Not every effort does all of these things in the same way; but no matter how you do it, there is a lot of overhead that goes into a good free software project. It's all worth it, in the end. But you don't get the benefits if freedom is an afterthought.Take the sixth item in particular. It ties into your "best free mail client" jibe. In fact, creating the "best free mail client" is a pragmatic strategy, even if it means ignoring Outlook-ish features, because most free software developers use free mail clients. If you make the best free client, you get lots of enthusiastic developers interested, which gives you lots of momentum. So creating the "best free mail client" is a valid goal.
In short, a person, and especially a company, are limited in the number of things they can focus on. If Helix were focused primarily on functionality and usability, they would be less focused on freedom, and would have less support from the community, and would have a lower chance of success.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
He never said anything about ignoring freedom.
Not quite, but nearly:
The most generous interpretation of the above is that freedom should be clearly secondary to functionality. A less generous interpretation is that freedom is not important at all."doesn't help anyone"--those are pretty strong words.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I also think everyone should consider hard why Miguel--who could probably code more functionality in a week than many of us could in a year--values freedom over functionality.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
VMWare had no free competition in sight when it became popular. I gather that Win4Lin is similar to VMWare, so the same applies. We will see whether this changes as Plex86 becomes usable, although head-starts carry some weight.
StarOffice, in my impression, is not that popular. I doubt it would have lasted long as proprietary software (and it may not last long even now that it's free). Most people in my experience use it grudgingly for MS compatibility. Again, no free program offered decent MS compatibility until recently (even now, many Excel and Word documents are not read properly by any free software I know of).
Netscape is an obvious case: there were no decent free graphical browsers until recently. Netscape had a long reign as the only reasonable option, which gives it lots of momentum. If Netscape 4 and mozilla were both new today, Netscape 4 wouldn't have a chance (on Linux).
Games are harder for me because I'm not much of a gamer, and because there are so many genres of game (not to mention that individual games periodically create their own genre). What proprietary games are you thinking of that have taken off on Linux? Shooters, and action games in general, had no free competition (Doom and Quake were eventually freed, but under unusual circumstances; I don't know how this has affected the popularity of newer proprietary shooters, do you?). The best case I can think of for your side is the Civilization genre. Freeciv qualifies as "half-as-good", and is quite popular, but I don't much about the popularity of the Loki Civ ports. You may score a point on this one, but I didn't doubt you'd find some example.
Here's the central argument: the free software community has two desktop/office projects that, while immature, clearly have basic functionality, strong developer support, and "long-term credibilty" (to use a term from the Halloween Document). Under these circumstances, I claim that no proprietary product that significantly overlaps with them will be successful on Linux.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Judging from other GNOME software 0.9 isn't necesarily the latest release before 1.0., it might very well be followed by 0.10 and so on.
But in any case version numbers don't mean a shit, often get the feeling that people actually believe that these numbers actually symbolises some objective measurement of a project's current status.
It is easy. Just say, "A group of people went and made KDE. Another group of people looked at KDE, didn't like it and made GNOME. They're slightly different, but for an end-user they're largely equivalent."
And don't go about licensing this and Qt that and GPL blahblah until the "newbie" has gathered some speed.
Now, I know I'm getting a little bit offtopic, but I think any distribution's ease-of-use factor for non-geeks (ie. people that don't have the time to fiddle and experiment, they just want to use a computer) if it included only one desktop environment.
And for that matter, install only one (or maybe two, but no more) word processor, one calender application, one way to dial out to the internet. It would make things a lot less confusing...
I think the problem is elsewhere. More newbie-compliant installers would do wonders. Yes, there has been great progress, but we're not quite "there".
Like XML, you say? I agree. Actually, it seems the GNU crowd is ahead of M$ on that one. Of course, such an approach is anathema to M$'s monopoly-through-file-format-obfuscation modus operandi.
You know what kills me about Helix? My LUG got an email from them a while back, take a look at the header. Thats right, they use WINDOWS. I realize she is just some marketing puke, but wouldn't you think a company formed around the idea of *nix software would atleast eat their own? If Evolutions is so great... Why arent they using it themselves?
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apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
Here's a quote from the article that bothered me:
I am a big fan of free-speech software, but unfortunatly, to 99% of corporate America, free-speech is not an important feature for software. The goal of Helix Gnome and Evolution are to make Gnome a viable alternative to Windows. I understand that to mean that Evolution should strive to be absolutely better than Outlook (since it can't continually play 'catch-up'). 'Better than outlook' would be it's most important feature, since as I have previously mentioned, corporate culture doesn't care about 'free-speech'.Keeping
Bonobo doesn't even come close. It doesn't provide a common runtime, fault isolation, or garbage collection. Compilers don't generate type information for it. In fact, as far as I can tell, even if it were implemented fully and perfectly, Bonobo would basically just give you the same functionality COM/DCOM give you, with all the problems that that entails.
It's depressing to me to see how much projects like Mozilla, KDE, and Gnome have followed in the Microsoft footsteps and are repeating the same mistakes. To me, Microsoft is bad because they are using 20-30 year old technology for their GUIs and object systems. Cloning their implementations of outdated technology isn't going to propel Linux into the 21st century.
The fact is that there isn't a single piece of software that makes everybody happy. The problem with Windows is not that it's universally bad, but that it wants to be the one platform everybody uses. And I think it's not all that desirable that Helix/Gnome and KDE are trying to give us more of the same stuff. Using KDE2 is almost like using Windows now, down to the senseless editor bindings, and Gnome seems poised to follow suit.
The thing that worries me Miguel is that a lot of functionality is going into graphic apps directly, instead of going into utilities that are managed through graphic apps. Since graphic apps are almost entirely non-integratable using linguistic glue, we're in severe danger of losing touch with the key element that made Linux/BSD/Unix the powerhouse that it is, namely programmable integration through non-graphic scripting.
Your comments about Red Carpet brought this to mind vividly, and raised other spectres as well. We all hope that Red Carpet will become a great generic package manager, but alas it seems that the power user that is doing remote or scripted non-graphic installations is not going to be able to make use of your good work.
Frankly, graphic-only apps suck, or more technically, are not as powerful as graphic apps that interface to underlying non-graphic utilities. Why is Helix going down this non-optimal road towards Microsoft-style systems of low intrinsic power? Why not have your cake and eat it too by using graphics for interfacing only, not for implementing new functionality?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Well, I originally heard of query-based folders in the Paquiderm mailer (Jim Gettys showed this to us a long time ago). Paquiderm, and the help of Nyao Nguyen (who was a VM author). Jamie Zawinski later pushed for the current setup which is: work the way people expect using files-as-folders and add vfolders, and let people migrate.
Now, I did not claim it was a new invention, just that we hope that Evolution will help popularize this way of handling e-mail.
Miguel.
As I said on the interview (but it seems the url got lost somewhere), we have been working on a cross-platform set of tools to configure and customize your Linux system.
You can see Arturo's screenshots here:
http://primates.helixcode.com/~arturo/hst
Miguel.
An Intereing note, As much as they spout 'Free! Free! Free! Source Code!!', HelixCode's site does not have Any packages in either the SlackWare .tgz format (big deal, most slack users like to compile from source), or Source Packages other than in SRPM format...
I can't speak for Slack users, but I can tell you that you're dead wrong about source packages for Debian.
This directory is full of tarballs and diffs; using "apt-get source [Helix package of choice]" with the appropriate lines in your sources.list file will get you a source tree.
Jay (=
It's not about "copying windows." It's about using the good ideas from a variety of platforms and paradigms, supporting and implementing existing languages, and providing freedom. If you don't like Visual Basic (I'm not fond of it, myself), there is no reason why you have to use it. However, if you want to read an Excel spreadsheet in Gnumeric that uses VB scripting, the gnome basic support that's integrated with Gnumeric comes in handy. And if you're a windows programmer familiar with Visual Basic, this allows easy migration to the GNU/Linux/Gnome platform. Once there, hopefully you'll see the merits of other languages such as Perl and Python.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Miguel de Icaza: We have counted around 450,000 installations of the full Helix GNOME desktop from our main site. We have also distributed around ten thousand CDS. So we figure we have over half a million people using Helix Code GNOME now.
I realize that "total number of Helix GNOME downloads" and "users" is difficult to estimate, but does anyone else think that 500,000 is an overestimate?
450,000 installations & 10,000 CD != 500,000 users (No, I'm not arguing that the simple math is wrong).
Many of those installations are probably reinstallations. I've completely reinstalled Helix-Gnome onto this desktop right here 4-5 times.
I did the newbie http://go-gnome.com thing once, I downloaded & installed the RPM's manualy (After accidently deleting/overwriting something or trying to satisfy a mysterious dependancies for some some nifty-sounding-but-experimental package), and I completely reinstalled the entire thing from the source on Saturday. So that's 4-5 installations, yet I am One user. (And I did the same thing to my work Computer, but I imagine that counts as a second user in their stats).
Many of my Helix Gnome friends do this thing (But less often then Crazy-agressive-maybe-reinstalling-will-make-pilot link-and-esound-work! me).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
If Miguel's goal is to make Evolution very "windowsy", is Miguel going to add in Gnome Basic VBA scripting abilities? It will be very interesting to see just how far Helix takes the whole "let's copy windows" thing.
Given, Slackware isn't the #1 distribution, or anything, but if they've gone through the effort to port to Solaris and HPUX and package for them, they ought to make source .tar.gz's available... After all,the Helix gnome is a lot prettier than the normal GNOME one... And Slackware users shouldn't be left in the dust here just because .rpm (and to a lesser extent .deb) is overrated...
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Virtual folders have been around for a while, among other places, in the Emacs VM mail reader. It would be nice if open source projects would acknowledge other open source projects.
(Gee, Miguel is beginning to sound like he's making a venture capital pitch.)
For many years i used pine and/or emacs as my mail reader. I tried kmail and it was not too bad for a while, but I don't run the K Desktop exclusivley (I run blackbox...roar) and K apps aometimes suffer negative effects from being run outside of the entire K environment. So it was back to pine
I tried Balsa for a while, it was pretty, but at the time, it was not threaded and died, alot. Once again back to pine.
A month ago or so, I decided to give Evolution a try. I must say, it is one hell of a good mail client , yes it crashes once in a while, but I just start it up again and there are no corruptions or anything. The mail filtering system works really well. The user interface is dead simple to set-up, and *heck* it's pretty.
I couldn't begin to compare it to MS Outlook (or Outlook Express), since I haven't used that mail client in many years.
But from a guy that has used alot of the new email clients kicking around, and has always reverted back to good ol' pine, Evolution is my mail client now.
Of course there is a soft spot in my heart for pine, it's still configured to read my Evolution mail box (easier for remote mail checking). And the uh *calendar* I dunno, it looks pretty, but I'm not a big calendar user...I prefer mass disorganization in that dept. *grin*
From a pure free software perspective, Evolution is designed to be the best mail and personal information manager free software product
I'm pretty sure that most users, and especially those coming from the Windows platform, couldn't care less. Software like Outlook Express has been free for ages, so that's pretty much the norm (not the exception) for this kind of software
Having used Evolution for a while, I'm really, really happy with this product - it's the first viable replacement for the POS Netscape mail client I've ever seen. However, I think that a focus on how GNU-compliant the software is doesn't help anyone: let's work to make this the best mail client available anywhere, period!
I know of a lot of Solaris users who wouldn't mind paying a sizable client license fee for a working GUI mail client equivalent to Outlook Express but without the enormous overhead of the Microsoft product (or even the Netscape client, for that matter...)