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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.
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 Except that symlinks will have been replaced by ".shortcut" files, which are interpreted by the Mono implementation of GNOME-VFS.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
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.
So in other words, "user"-users like me aren't really welcome when it comes to Linux, because we won't "make Linux better" through code-contribution and timely bug reports?
Um, may I ask what is the raison d'etre for any operating system?
Following your logic, no one but automobile designers should be allowed to drive automobiles.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Not to pick on your nice thought, but if I put Linux on Mom & Dad's machine, you can be sure they'll be calling ME when something goes 'wrong', not the ISP.
In fact, if your parents don't call you already, even with their Windows questions, you must suck. Or be a bad child.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
What an incredibly arrogant attitude. I am not a kernel hacker, and if I can avoid it, probably never will be. When I first started using Linux, I didn't know C, yet today I hack on Wine, which is used by a metric ton of people, and am busy writing and designing autopackage, which from the feedback we're getting seems to be something that people want. It'll make it easier for luser types to use Linux.
Oh, and guess what. I use Red Hat 9, because I prefer getting stuff done to dicking about with my WM configuration. So sue me.
By your logic, I should never have been allowed in, because these people might *gasp* hassle you for tech support.
Let me make you aware of something. If it weren't for those legions of "lusers" out there, buying their Dell PCs and surfing MSN with Internet Explorer, it's highly unlikely most of us could afford a PC at all. The only reason I can have my own computer is because I can put together a decent little box for less than 500, and the only reason I can do that is because economies of scale caused by mass market acceptance make it cheap for me.
If those people didn't use computers, there would be no mass market, no economies of scale, and I wouldn't have a computer at all! I'd never have been able to learn C, hack Wine or write my software.
So, feel free to spit and vilify people who don't match up to your supposed guru-ness (though I really doubt you are as good a developer as you think you are), I for one will continue to enjoy cheap hardware and free software, and I won't bitch when newbies ask me questions. That's fair game, in my books.