Slashdot Mirror
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."
If you kiss Microsoft's ass, you'll contract Mono.
"Oh, yes! Writing code and squashing bugs. I usually get here at 7, 7:30 a.m., and I learned not to turn on the lights, because there are probably people who have been here all night coding, who are asleep on the couch or the floor."
Many studies say that modern day UI must "look like a Microsoft product". Sorry to break it to you, Sun et al., but this simply isn't true.
If only UI developers would take that to heart....I look at Gnome, I see a windows knock-off. I look at KDE, I see a pretty windows knock-off, with OSX knock-off bitmaps.
Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?
Well the project sounds ambitious and all... but I tend to gauge the success of a company such as this by how cool their logo is. I think these guys are going to have a great future. Anybody else as shallow as me?
Ximian GNOME has a number of advantages over the standard desktop GNOME that comes with your distro.
For the desktop itself, we put a lot of effort into making sure it's more attractive, easier to use, and better updated. We focus on the desktop, we're desktop experts, and it shows.
* 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).
* 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.
* 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.
* Companies like HP and Sun pay us to perform custom development work, including accessibility improvements and platform ports.
* Individuals like you sign up for Red Carpet Express to get faster downloads.
* Linux ISVs can ship software through Red Carpet or Red Carpet Express. This isn't a really big business now, but it has potential.
Is that a reasonable enough answer?
For more information about Ximian desktop software and other products and services, feel free to visit http://ximian.com, write to us, or fill out the information request form at ximian.com/about_us/contact/information.html.
Yours,
Aaron Weber
Ximian, Inc.
Thank you for not using the words "productize", "big picture", "methodology", "consumers", "leverage", "methodology", or "proactive" in your description of what your company does. I could actually understand every word of what you wrote.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
A lot of responses here seem to say "it must look like MS for people to understand it" and assumme that "innovation" means totally different, like some sort of 3D interface. This is not what is needed, and I agree with the original poster in being unhappy with Gnome/KDE's windows-copying.
Here are some ideas I would VERY much like to see:
POINT TO TYPE!!!!!! Goddamm it, make it the default. Complete novices learn it very very quickly and it makes it almost impossible to return to a click-to-type system. This is the biggest way to get Linux converts. It also does not confuse Windows users, if when a new window openes or otherwise grabs the focus, you warp the pointer to the window.
STOP RAISING WINDOWS WHEN YOU CLICK ON THEM. This is one of the biggest problems with the systems today (because both KDE and Gnome and even NT let you turn on point-to-type, even though it is not the default). This stupid behavior, which was eliminated in f**king 1982 by X11 (see X10 for the last version that did this), makes overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor completly useless because it is impossible to refer to one piece of data while working on another. Click-raising is also the reason for monstrosities like "MDI" and "paned windows", which seriously limit the ability to display large amounts of data in a window.
RESIZE AND MOVE WINDOWS WITHOUT RAISING THEM! Here is a bit of cleverness from X11 history that seems to have gotten lost. If you click a window frame without moving, it raises. But if you move or resize it, it stays where it is! This can be done even if click-raises or click-to-type is left on.
GET RID OF "LAYERS". This crap appeared with NeXTstep and refuses to go away. I WANT to put a window atop the toolbar. Just let me raise the toolbar by clicking on it. There, that wasn't too hard, was it? The only windows that should be forced to stay above others are "modal dialogs", and the ONLY thing they should do is be forced to lie above the windows they are blocking interaction to, they should have no effect on other applications.
GET RID OF "APPLIACATION ACTIVATION". There is aboslutely no reason that all windows created by a program have to stick together in a layer. PLEASE make it possible to raise a dialog without raising the underlying window, so I can copy data from another window into it!
You can try my window manager fltk for my attempts to do these ideas. It really isn't hard, in fact the window manager is much shorter than most.