"It seems like just yesterday that the GNOME Project got its start, but actually it was a decade ago that Miguel de Icaza got the ball rolling. While de Icaza has largely focused his time on Mono recently, the GNOME community has kept making progress. To get some perspective on GNOME's history, I spoke to de Icaza and longtime GNOME contributor and GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh."
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Be careful with this guy.
Well, everyone knows that de Icaza is an important figurehead of Mono, but the two other points you mention have passed me by, care to provide some links about de Icaza's connections to OOXML and the Novell/MS patent deal?
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For his opinions on OOXML, you can read his posts on any of the MS blogs, such as:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/
(He comments on most of the blog entries. He's very pro OOXML, to sum it up.)
He's been working on adding OOXML to Gnumeric. He pushes OOXML when he can (But not too much to the open source people).
He works for Novell, and Novell signed the patent deal, but I seem to be wrong about him playing a part in it personally. After googling for some sources, it seems I was wrong about that part :/
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Thanks for the link. After reading it, I don't agree with your evaluation of de Icaza's point of view.
While de Icaza is certainly *not against* implementing an OOXML filter in OOo2 and Gnumeric he also is not pushing it, such as saying that it would become the default file format, not even in Novell's SUSE. He rightfully points out that OOo always had good import/export filters for MS file formats and that the public availability of the specification will help a great deal in keeping this tradtion.
He also has kind words for the whitepaper from MS -- as such as the paper gives greater insight into OOXML than the ODF whitepaper gives into ODF. I don't know if that's true, but I know that a proper process documentation for complex data processing is more often quite long than quite short
Whatever, I really have no stake in this issue. So kind regards and bye.
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Miguel DeIcaza was also a founding member of GNOME, created Gnumeric, is a kernel contributer, the founder of Ximian (which brought us evo amoung other things), and one of the biggest and most skilled contributers to GNOME software in general.
Edited 2007-08-30 18:34 UTC
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....and?
From a technical standpoint, .net is one of the best designed platforms out there. From a realistic standpoint, OOXML is going to quickly become the defacto standard as time goes on.
IMHO refusing to use technology just because it comes out of microsoft instead of on its own merits is dumb, and slamming one of the most influential open source desktop developers for not being religious about technology is even worse.
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2007-08-29
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Interview De Icaza about the current iteration of GNOME? what for? pre 2.0 gnome was (to be polite) effectively in-effective as a desktop environment. Having used (on and off) the 1.x series of GNOME, the only thing I can remember was trying to do something, which had a 50-50 shot at working or not. Of course the current version more than met expectations. It actually works. But really, what did he have to do with the GNOME 2.0 series? Was it not Sun and a bunch of other people/companies that should take credit for GNOME as it is today? Having the idea of GNOME is note worthy, but it's one thing to have the idea and another to actually deliver on that idea. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't recall him delivering much with GNOME.
No, I am not some embittered developer, just an end user of OSS, who just happens to be tired of the 'god' status given to some people for an idea, while the people that actually DELIVER the @#@$ live in the shadows and get next to no acknowledgment or recognition. Many may want it that way, including the developers themselves, but articles like this should at least toss a bone to ALL the developers involved, not just the idea man and one other developer.
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Come on now, it's just from his perspective and he did contribute a lot in 2.x. It's not taking away anything from the other GNOME devs at the time(Federico Mena-Quintero being another dev who helped start GNOME)
If you want a good history of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza is a good person to speak to, regardless of what he does now.
I think your trying to start a flamewar or are just ignorant because if you knew anything about GNOME, you should know Miguel contributed a lot.
Edited 2007-08-29 08:16
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Maybe I am wrong, but I don't recall him delivering much with GNOME.
Well, he did actually start Gnome! Whatever I may feel for Miguel personally, how he and other people have done things, and hyped things that weren't really there, whatever I may feel about Mono as the wrong way to do things - you can't argue with code.
Miguel started Gnome off with that first e-mail, Ximian people contributed stuff like Bonobo, Gnome has Evolution as its mail client (which it might never have had) and people can develop Gnome applications with Mono which is infinitely preferable to developing Gnome applications through any other method. OK, I question the need to clone .Net to do that, the memory requirements, whether you can develop large parts of Gnome to run in a VM and the effort needed to keep it maintained, but that's the way things are.
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>But really, what did he have to do with the GNOME 2.0 > series? Was it not Sun and a bunch of other
> people/companies that should take credit for GNOME as > it is today?
Besides having contributed starting the GNOME project with the GNOME 1.x series, Miguel worked on building the infrastructure in GNOME 2.0, that was quite a leap compared to the one in 1.x
Also, Miguel started work on Gnumeric and founded Ximian, that delivered Evolution (too bad it is not yet available under Windows.)
Finally, when GNOME 2.0 work started, Sun hadn't open sourced any of their jewels (no Open Office, no free Java and no Open Solaris: actually, at that time, Sun was criticizing the Libre movement *a lot*. To their credit they changed route since and are now the company that contributes to sw Libre the most.)
Ciao! chris
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Also, Miguel started work on Gnumeric and founded Ximian, that delivered Evolution (too bad it is not yet available under Windows.)
I use Evolution for Windows
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=159440&pa...
Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman and many other in the Ximian/Novell team contributed tremendously to GNOME 2.0 and more important, they still continue to incubate developers and ideas that are eventually folded in every new release of GNOME.
