Inside Ximian

An anonymous reader writes "Linux and Main is running a story of a visit to Ximian headquarters and a talk with Nat Friedman, Miguel de Icaza, and Jon Perr about GNOME2, Ximian 2, and getting Linux onto the corporate desktop. Interesting and funny, with lots of details about the place and the guys."

Comments

Why do people use ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've often wondered why people bother with ximian. Are the packages it releases any better than the ones released by gnome itself?

Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat, .... And if you install it then your installation seems to be not quite compatible with a standard gnome install.

Is it yet another linux company that is going to crash and burn once it runs out of VC? Just what is there to encourage people to pay them money?

Corrin (sounding really like a troll...)

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[bcboy]

On the other hand, Red Carpet remains the quickest way to destroy a perfectly functioning Linux box.

How old is this program, now? And the latest versions still segfault in the middle of rpm transactions, leaving the system unusable. I've lost track of how many times I've seen this happen.

Having nicely polished gnome packages is good, and all, but with an installer that routinely eats the rpm database, it's not really worth it. Amusingly, after it does this, the installer is no longer able to install or remove anything because dependency checks always fail.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Sanity]

Just for sh1ts and giggles, let's pretend to be a smart VC taking a cold hard look at Ximian's business model.

If you're using it in a large company, it's cheaper because it's the same on more than one platform: this consistency makes both UNIX and Linux systems less expensive to support. (This portion, by the way, is free).

So is RedHat's Gnome, so is the default KDE installation, so is the default Gnome installation. This doesn't differentiate Ximian's offering from most of the other ways you can get your hands on Gnome, and since Ximian Gnome is Open Source, there is nothing to stop Redhat or others integrating your work into their product, removing whatever competitive advantage you have.

People buy Ximian Connector because they want to be able to connect to Exchange 2000 systems without having to use Outlook Web Access and without having to use a Windows box. Especially in large corporations where engineering is a Linux/UNIX installed base, it's important to be able to schedule with the management and use the shared address books and so forth; if you can't, you might as well not exist.

Fair enough - but it would be better if people used Open Source alternatives, Connector will be useful until a viable Open Source alternative to Exchange becomes popular. Is Connector really a long-term viable revenue generator? Doesn't it pit your Open Source friends against your business model?

People use the Red Carpet CorporateConnect service in order to have a stable, cross-platform way to ship their own software, plus operating system and desktop software from multiple vendors. They need to manage software installation sets and updates across multiple platforms, without vendor lock-in.

This is nothing apt-get can't do, but apt-get can do it automatically on a cron job.

Individuals like you sign up for Red Carpet Express to get faster downloads.

Is there really a shortage of mirrors and bandwidth for Open Source software distribution? The bandwidth utilization on one popular (and very fast) mirror of a number of distros (mirrors.kernel.org) hardly ever seems to use more than half of its available bandwidth. Why not mirror Ximian at kernel.org and let people get faster downloads for free, or does your business model depend on people only having slow free access to Ximian?

Linux ISVs can ship software through Red Carpet or Red Carpet Express. This isn't a really big business now, but it has potential.

You wish. I repeat my point - Red Carpet doesn't really do anything that apt-get with a simple GUI (or running as a cron job) can't do. Hardly the basis for a viable business.

Is that a reasonable enough answer?

They are good answers, but something tells me that you would get laughed out of any VC's office that really understood Open Source and Linux.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[mgv]

On the other hand, Red Carpet remains the quickest way to destroy a perfectly functioning Linux box.

Its sad that someone chose to moderate your statement as flamebait. What you say is true. I lost a linux install from Red Carpet, and no longer touch it. I'm sure its an intermittent fault, but its pretty major to me. Its clearly a world away from the open source linux kernel which is rock steady

Having said that - I love evolution. It meets all my expectations and more for eMail. I'm sure that other people see a need for Kmail, etc, but personally I would be happy if it were the only eMail manager in a distro (thats a personal opinion, not a flame).

So I'm hardly going to criticise ximian for their software overall. However, poor installers mean a serious hit to the credibility of ximian, which is unfortunate. In the long run red carpet will do more damage to ximian than anything else will.

BTW, IIRC, Red carpet is closed source, yes?

Michael