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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.'"

8 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. hey by Mohammed+Al-Sahaf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its Xouvert, not Xoutert.

    --
    Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
  2. This reminds me... by PakProtector · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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!?"

  3. UNIX is dying? by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:UNIX is dying? by Chris+Sontag · · Score: 5, Funny

      He has it the wrong way round, my friend. Do not listen to the lies. Linux is like a snake we are going to cut into pieces. Unix will rise again! We will push those crooks, those mercenaries back into the swamp. They are retreating on all fronts. Their legal effort is a subject of laughter throughout the world.

      --

      Chris Sontag - Senior Vice President and General Manager, SCOsource
  4. Gnome will kill Linux by DrSkwid · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 Except that symlinks will have been replaced by ".shortcut" files, which are interpreted by the Mono implementation of GNOME-VFS.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
  5. Re:Not that I have a bad attitude, but... by Illbay · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    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.
  6. Re:Havoc Pennington has the right idea by Azghoul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Not that I have a bad attitude, but... by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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

    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.