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Interview with Havoc Pennington of Red Hat
JigSaw writes "OSNews published an interview with Havoc Pennington, the head manager of Red Hat's Desktop department, also known for his freedesktop.org initiative and his very active/leading role in Gnome. Havoc discusses the internal changes on Red Hat, the future of the desktop version of Red Hat Linux, the XFree86 fork Xoutert, GTK+ and Gnome while he characteristically says regarding Linux eating UNIX's marketshare: '...nails are firmly in the UNIX coffin, and it's just a matter of time.'"
Its Xouvert, not Xoutert.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
...somewhat of the time I said DOS was dead, soon to be replaced by OS/2 Warp... ...Well, not quite. But isn't it premature to predict the death of such a venerable OS?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Not to put to fine a point on it but your hyperlink is incorrect
http://www.freeesktop.org/
I don't think you can seriously say that UNIX is dying and say that Linux is killing it. Linux IS UNIX.
Unless you are trying to say that commercial UNIX systems are losing ground to Linux, it simply doesn't make sense to make such a false distinction between UNIX and Linux. They are one and the same.
Is it an earthquake? A herd of elephants?
No, it's all the SCO jokers, with their (+5, Funny)'s at the ready! Time to run for cover, guys!
I really, really doubt that all of these efforts to push Linux onto the desktop will tend to attract more "developer"-type users, as opposed to more "user"-type users.
New developer-users make contributions, bug fixes, and give intelligent feedback on problems and solutions. Your secretary, on the other hand, will probably not be much use when it comes to putting out bug reports. So I'm not all that excited by Redhat's ever-onward desire to convert the masses. Actually, I'm a little bit DIS-excited.
Nobody hassles a thing when it's a fringe-user, ubergeek phenomenon. There's a reason why SCO is fucking around with Linux and not the BSDs--Linux is getting popular and widespread enough now that slimeballs like D and the boyz see opportunities to milk it. Sure, it's nice that IBM contributed all they did, but it wasn't a free ride.
(Not that the BSDs are dying, or anything--give them another couple of years, and maybe they'll get sued by a huge mulitnational... oh, wait.)
I'm NOT saying that it's a bad thing that more people use Linux, just that the next 10,000 users of RH's pre-packaged, duh-whats-a-compiler will be substantially less of a pure good thing for MY Linux experience than the the first 1,000 kernel contributors were. Even if nobody else whips out a lawsuit for a while (knock wood), the new luser influx will be at least temporarily troubling until people start getting up to speed. Go check out what's happened to the Samba listserv, if you don't know what I mean--I unsub'd entirely because of the 1:100 ratio of {sensible questions|useful answers} to droolers who can't find a fucking man page, let alone a step-by-step HOWTO.
I swear, if Redhat ever actually gets into the black, I'm switching to Apple, stat. Fuck market share--I want something where nobody will bother me with free tech support requests.
You forgot that the developers are those that give birth and educate, but it's the users that become close lifetime friends. The people who use a software(even on some profan level) certainly are not so useful for the products development as the programmers team, but are crucial to its survival. A product will die without its users and gaining a larger user DB can not be a bad thing.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
I think the momentum linux has over Unix is a matter of its GPL license, which makes it widely and freely available, and ensures a constant flux, NOT that it's technically superior. I think it's generally established that Solaris or FreeBSD for example, are technically superior to linux, however, both Sun's proprietary or BSD licenses are the detriments of those two Unices in the face of the Linux onslaught. (do you like how I used Unices as a plural to Unix? I do.)
Linux, ironically, now fits into the legendary "worse is better" more so than Unix does.
Verisign could have made a lot of money by redirecting http://www.freeesktop.org/ and http://www.xoutert.org/ to their own ad pages
Dan Egnor says it best :
Somewhere deep inside the secret headquarters of the RedHat/GNOME/Ximian/Mozilla Cabal, there's a hidden document with a list of everything in Unix you know and love, marked with a date for its final expurgation. I think 'ls' is slated to be finally replaced with a symlink to 'nautilus' in 2007. Except that symlinks will have been replaced by ".shortcut" files, which are interpreted by the Mono implementation of GNOME-VFS.
Luckily the spirit on Unix lives on.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It is me, or does that sound like the name of the next Bond villain?
Why is it that all interviews online are posted as question, answer, question, answer... Why not do what grown up journalists do and actually write something?
Because most online tech-site interviewers are *not* "grown up journalists," or even writers, and their operations are in fact run on shoe-string budgets which do not provide for in-person interviews. Consequently, when the interview is being conducted over the phone, through IM, or across several e-mail sessions, it's kinda tough to get a feel for what type of sofa upon which the interviewee is sitting.
Note, too, that most of the readers of tech-site interviews are not as discerning as you. They are looking for "news" or "answers" -- and quickly. No one browses OSNews in anticipation of savoring the linguistic bons mots of some proto-Hemingway.
By definition a prediction has to be made before the event.
Nor does the statement "it's only a matter of time" seem that outlandish. Already we've seen Linux being adopted by major Unix vendors. It's not unlikely that it will continue to make inroads in core areas and gradually drive their traditional offerings to more "niche" areas which ultimatly may be too small to warrent the expense of maintaining a seperate offering.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It's a bit like naming your son Warlock or Judas.
Possibly his parents were thinking of his adult sex life, like "Go force young beatiful girls and wreak Havoc".
I think this is my worst post ever.
Desktop standards are critical to Linux achieving greater desktop market share.
ISP: Hello?
Mom & Dad: Hi, I can't connect. I'm having trouble getting the modem to dial . . .
ISP: Ok, whaddya got? A Mac? Some kind of windows?
Mom & Dad: Uh, yeah . . . it's a PC
ISP: Ok, click on "start" in the bottom left hand corner of the desktop . . . . .
Mom & Dad: Um . . . I can't see start, there's like a "red hat / footprint / dinosaur" in the "bottom left / bottom right corner.
ISP: OK, we only support mac and windows, right. Bye now.
-Click-
The issue in this example is that tech-savvy call centre staff with no more than thirty minutes training can be expected to support mac and windows dialups over the phone. But until the same can be done for Linux, ISPs (for example) will never support it. This is a big barrier to Linux take-up by "Mom & Dad" type users. Standardising (across distros) things like the location of the pppd configuration would allow (again, for the sake of this example) ISPs to provide quick training to staff on how to support Linux users.
Things like this are great for Linux penetration, 'cause when someone rings their ISP saying "My computer won't start up properly, it states that ntoskrnl is missing, and I don't have the CD or windows key", rather than saying "too bad call back when you have the CD", the ISP support staff can prod these "Mom & Dad" users in the direction of Linux. Not possible when the ISPs position is that Linux can't be supported and staff who try are wasting company time.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
Actually his real first name is Robert, Havoc is his middle name (iirc). Nope, I dunno why he flipped it ;)