AlwaysOn sits down with Ximian founders Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, now respectively VP of research and development and CTO for Novell, and Chris Stone, Novell vice chairman, for an update on Novell’s open-source strategy.
Novell: Company’s Shift Embraces Linux Code and Culture
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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and to think, he was trying just a mer 8 years ago to become a Software Developer at Microsoft. I would say that if he had been successful at MS, he would be a department head at the most….CTO is a MUCH better job and nearly on par with Bill Gates in the corporate structure (Minus the Chairman ship that Gates has)
nice work Miguel.
Nate and the guy from the board of directors were the only ones to say anything….nothing from Miguel. why mention him if he did not say anything worth writing up?
Honestly, if they would do as much for GNOME as they talk then we would be a big step ahead. People have the tendency to forget that they are up for their own business here. Neither Nat nor Miguel did contribute anything spectacular to the GNOME project within the past couple of years. The only thing we hear from them is blah blah in the public. But the people who actually do the work are a totally different user-/developerbase. 5-6 million happy GNOME users worldwide as if any of them went out and count them. I wish GNOME actually had that many users, then we wouldn’t sit here and whine that the GNOME Foundation didn’t get enough people for their Board or Release team to actually do the job [1]. Last call for candidacy was poor only 13 people (the same as the past years) stand up and offered themselves for candidacy. Election was poor as well since over half of the members didn’t vote [2]. No rotation in the Board member or Release team – We have permanent stagnation there. So where are the 5-6 million happy GNOME users ? It’s really strange that we can’t find 50 people amongst them who are willing to be part of our community.
[1] Follow entire thread
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2003-December/msg000…
[2] Read this
http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2003/results.txt
It seems the GNOME link on the Novell site has been removed again. Wonder why that is….
As it says at the bottom of the interview, it took place before the announcement of the SuSE purchase. When that happened, the SuSE logo replaced GNOME’s on the site. Nat mentioned this to me when it happened, there’s no weird backstory to it, etc. Just page real estate. 🙂
It says:
“This is Part One of a three-part interview. Parts Two and Three will touch on Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and the role of open source in desktop deployment.”
He’ll probably speak later.
CTO? Hm, makes me fear a bad future for KDE in SuSE again. KDE is perfect for the Enterprise desktop, with its stellar development framework and especially the kiosk mode, IM(H)O. But I don’t think Icaza would ever consider building upon it, even now that it (and considerable KDE know-how) is at his disposal – he’s “the Gnome guy”, after all. Don’t get me wrong, any big open source software deployment fundamentally makes me happy, however I’m highly attracted to KDE specifically and thus the lack of corporate backers leaves me pretty worried. To have someone “in charge” at the new Novell that I can’t see to be objectively considering all available options doesn’t help either. To reference a recent OSNews review, “fixing” KDE (I don’t think it needs much fixing, personally, but apparently many do – oh well) would be easier than getting Gnome to the same technological level – I think spending too time on that handicaps Linux on the desktop in general, personally.
“Don’t get me wrong, any big open source software deployment fundamentally makes me happy, however I’m highly attracted to KDE specifically and thus the lack of corporate backers leaves me pretty worried.”
Can you say; royalties for commercial development?
And yet another news item on osnews.com turns into a Gnome vs KDE debate flamewar^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdebate again.
Countries around the world are not converting to Linux, just because of ‘price’ issues, as mentioned in the article. It’s important to note that ‘the people’ or ‘the majority’ which is represented in society feels threatened by Microsoft and also other software vendors who market software product lines. On the other hand, Linux empowers the people because it offers the user opportunity to have control over factors of production, the knowedge that a new distribution could rise in the market if existing distributions were taking advantage of the people. Somewhere deeply buried in the minds of complacent modern day citizens is the right, and the desire and will to defend themselves, to hold the law repsonsible to the society, the law is based on the social contract which protects the rights of the majority, from which our defintion of truth is derived.
The Linux platform is more responsible than an operating system product, to the citizens that comprise our society, and it defends the reason why we agreed to society in the first place, for the good of the majority, for proection, and for quality of life.
If we are compacent and allow a power elite to control an industry which affects the citizens and the majority in a treatening way, than by nature, this enemy of the people, will be effectively removed, and replaced, even if it means violent revolution.
Since we are human, than we have to live by certain constraints. We choose to live in a society, and there are also constraints that result from representing the majority. In order for a power elite to succeed, it would have to circumvent society. These countries will not let that happen. The United States would have to nuke them all, the world we have to share, we breath the same air, it circulates along with the water, throughout the planet. Microsoft is not worth the destruction of society.
Hey, come on – I tried hard to avoid any flames. I post what I think/feel, and I explained my reasoning. Besides, it’s not an anti-Gnome thing. I prefer KDE, yeah – but that doesn’t mean I dislike Gnome. If it weren’t for KDE, I’d use Gnome. The minute Gnome better suits my needs, I will use Gnome. I have a strong preference for open software, both fit that need.
In my opinion (<- subjective by nature; if you disagree, fine by me), however, KDE is much better suited for enterprise desktops – development framework (RAD), powerful kiosk mode, and so on. I think Linux on the desktop would be better off if there was a strong contender to buy KDE solutions from. Icaza, now CTO at what is potentially the biggest Linux vendor on the market, does have the option to put resources into KDE development. With the SuSE crew, he got an considerable amount of KDE know-how at his disposal, including at least one core developer. However, I can’t see him ever going for KDE, because he’s so deepely involved with Gnome – certainly on a personal level, too.
Hope I made things clearer. I’m not trying to flame/troll/provoke/whatever, I’m merely stating my opinion and concerns. I guess many will disagree and claim Gnome to be the better software for enterprise desktops, or say that Icaza didn’t get where he is now by being stupid. Fine points. I just don’t see it that way.
Linux is a more efficient platform than the Microsoft product. It encourages, small, simple, clear, and general applications, in which text output and input is the glue and the standard that ties these applications together. Linux in particular has focused on providing a strong GUI environment, but it is wrong to place too much emphasis on the GUI, at least not the the exclusion of the command line interface, which is a powerful interface for leveraging simple, clear, and general applications. The software for Linux must work together, but each piece of software should be a complete tool that is fully capable of being combined with other tools under generic conditions.
This type of model is not aligned with vendor offerings, however if a vendor were to base it’s product line on the Linux platform, and to use a decentralized software layer, than the commerical product would be able to coexist with a true platform while not interfering with each other.
The effect of basing a product line on a platform is to enter a competitive environment. The users should be encouraged to purchase vendor product lines, under these conditions, but they should never be forced to depend entirely on the vendor. With Linux, the user will always have some influence, and some control, over their investment. This is not just a choice, it is the only logical and responsible decision for the benefit of our societies, in which the majority of the people matter, and the majority must have their investment protected by the law, in order to avoid violent revolution.
“Nat and Miguel’s team has spent a lot of time interning with our engineering teams, marketing teams, and sales force, on getting everyone to understand the culture.”
The GNOME culture doesn’t care for marketing, sales, …
Deeper explaination. The GNOME culture was about working together on a project so everyone can benefit from it. I also believe that the real majority of people working on GNOME care less about the marketing or sales of GNOME since GNOME is a free volunteer project. I find it quite disgusting from Nat and Miguel to create some sort of commercial touch around GNOME. I don’t want to disrespect them as human beings and persons but I do not agree with their way of propaganda.
“We … want … the big … company jumping into open source trying to get … capitalism and enterprise. Because quite honestly the open-source community supports capitalism and enterprise. You just have to do it the right way, and you have to be very community focused.”
What I always said but no one understands. The open source community is a hype and big sharade. Sure we all understand the benefits from it but it’s being canibalised from these said companies these days. I do understand above part as confirmation of my theory.
“I think we could be the largest Linux desktop development center in the world.”
GNOME is quite self-sustraining and does very well even without Novell. Now what did Novell actually bought from/through Ximian ? Did they buy GNOME ? NO! Did they buy MONO ? NO! Did they overtake the GNOME project dropping all the maintainers and volunteers who are copyrightholders of many programms and tell them to go away because the big player Novell has bought Ximian ? NO!
The only thing I saw is big commercial interests and defacto ripoff going on around GNOME. I don’t think this will get us new developers. I think this will make developers disappear because no one really understands what’s actually going on in this community.
Hey you! Do you know what’s going on there ? What are they talking about ?
“The intent of GNOME is to produce an open-source desktop operating environment. The desktop system user environment is a competitive alternative to Unix-based workstations and to Windows in certain key segment markets.”
My intentions working on GNOME were never to compete with Windows and I do believe that many other people simply share this. The majority of GNOME people I was talking with simply want a working Desktop, a cool Desktop, a Desktop to get work done. But not compete with Windows. Not to mention that GNOME is far away to compete with Windows anyways.
“if the right technology components come together, we can convert millions of users.”
Create the right technology first. A self-surstraining technology and nothing that plays catchup to Windows.
“There are major contributions from IBM, from HP, from Red Hat, from us, of course, and from Sun.”
Hewlett Packard dropped GNOME support around 1 year ago or something. It was announced on all places.
“We estimate now that there are probably about 5 or 6 million Linux desktop users out there.”
I heard it was 50-60 million
You can pretend that choosing or not choosing Linux is all about ‘price’, however it is not about that at all. The reason why Linux is gaining popularity is due to knowledge. It’s due to the realization that there is a danger in supporting a power elite. It’s not good for society. Price will only be a factor in a competitive environment.
“It’s due to the realization that there is a danger in supporting a power elite.”
Next power elite is already knocking infront of your door. I call them Sun, Novell, Red Hat. I’d better support a power elite where I know I can make a few bucks for my own so I can buy new hardware, feed children, buy new car. Rather than supporting a new power elite for nothing.
ANNUIT COEPTIS
NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
I don’t know why you get so nervous. This guys are working on Ximian, not Gnome. But they do contribute to Gnome (Ximian’s contributions are great and very welcome).
Victor.
I have no problems with contributions. I have a problem with bad and false PR and spreading wrong things in the public. And I have a problem with commercial ripoff of people’s work and doing big noise that they did so in the public afterwards. There are also other companies working on GNOME such as Imendio or Code Factory but they are fair people. They do their work, they try to make a living with what they do. They contribute to this community even more than I did but they are not going out and make ‘weird’ PR. They are true equal partners.
I wonder if the dip.ti-dialiners(aka Germans) can ever just calm down about anything related to Gnome. KDE is like some kind of national pride for them. Yes, KDE does have better technology under the hood and I wish KDE was the dominant desktop but having the qt library be gpl instead of lgpl just sucks.
.. I am working on/for GNOME and not KDE. You see that there are even GNOME people like me who don’t like all this ‘weird’ PR stuff going around on it.
oGALAXYo: You are being an ungrateful, clueless skunk again, and you by NO MEANS represent the general consensus or interests of the GNOME development community. Far from it, proven time and time again. It is not Miguel and Nat who are spreading misinformation about GNOME – it is you. They are trusted leaders of our community. You are a well-known troll, despite having slightly improved your behaviour in some respects in recent times.
I am constantly angered by your ungratefulness and lack of comprehension of the contributions made by these companies. They employ some of our best hackers. They work on some of our best code. They value our community greatly. You are destructive, ungrateful and unhelpful.
@RoyBatty: KDE is no thing of “national pride” for me. I use KDE because I like it – some reasons I wrote down here. I don’t use it because people of my nationality work on it. That’d be kinda irrational, don’t you think? Have I given you any indication justifying that kind of accusation? I think it’s you who’s blowing that connection out of proportion to discredit what we’re saying. Next time, try it with content relevant to the texts posted instead of baseless accusations
.
Jeff, we all know you are some sort ‘controlling’ GNOME of your desire. I do ‘listen’ to people and do share and understand them. Something you should give a try every now and then too. By the way you shamlessly abuse of your position to slander and libel people is disgusting and wrong. Not to mention that I do defend my own opinion here and I don’t force you or others to share it. Not to mention that I don’t need to ask you for permission to defend my position.
I also believe you are drastically abusing the terms of OSNews that you have agreed upon before pressing ‘Submit comment’.
Every freaking story about Gnome or Ximinan we have at least one dip.t-dialiner whining and bringing up KDE. This is a story about Gnome, Ximian, and Novell. And I’m coming from the perspective that KDE is better technology and should be the dominant desktop.
And what exactly does that indicate aside from the fact that there are disproportionally many KDE users in Germany? (Which has its reasons, SuSE being one.) How does that justify discrediting my words and my opinions based on my nationality? How does that justify accusing me of being motivated by “national pride”? There are more Gnomne users than KDE users in America. Most Gnome developers seem to be American. Yet I would never say something along the lines of “of course you prefer Gnome, you’re American and it’s about national pride” like you just have done with me. You don’t know me that well, Mister. Bringing nationaliy into this discussion was stupid.
Although Suse may save Novells’ server business, the desktop stuff is laughable and total hot air.
All of the ‘Gnome’ people I have read from seem to support Nat, Migual, Sun etc. because of the money and the false ‘credibility’ that they bring.
My comments weren’t aimed specifically at you and your comments weren’t the usual anti-gnome flamebait that we see from some dip-t.dialiners, but I think your worries about Novell, Suse, and KDE are unfounded. I’m sure you’ll always be able to put KDE on Suse and even if you couldn’t then there will always be other distros. Most distros are already KDE-specific.
I wouldn’t even make a comment if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s probably about the 500th time that anything Gnome/Ximian/Novell related comes up, we have dip.t-dialiners bringing up KDE. Some Gnome people are the same way. I guess it has to do with linux zealotry in general. Anyway, I’m in no hurry to install linux on my new Sager 5680 laptop. I know it’s going to be a pain to get the wireless setup, unless I want to pay for a wrapper around a windows driver.
It’s nothing to do with money or credibility – they are very generous members of our community, and the vast majority of GNOME hackers, contributors and users recognise them as such. Sun, Novell/Ximian, Red Hat, Wipro, Baum, imendio, Mandrake, and countless more companies employ *my colleagues* in the GNOME community, and contribute a huge amount to our project, and thus, I fully support them. Particularly as they have been so attentive to the needs of the community in general, including their cooperating competitors. That is the current reality in GNOME, despite conspiracy theories from twits like oGALAXYo.
I’ll stand with Jeff on this one. You in no way represent the GNOME community when you make comments like these against Ximian/Novell. The Ximian hackers have strong leaders in our community and on our board. They work with other GNOME hackers on core components of the release and have contributed many resources to the project. These people are a huge part of our community. They are, in addition to being our friends, our co-workers, in effect; just as the hackers who work for Red Hat, Sun, and those who aren’t paid for their GNOME work are.
As a german, I’d say that you are pretty much right on about this.
But it has nothing to do with national pride, it’s just that Germany has probably by far the largest KDE community, which is mainly due to SuSE beeing the number one distribution here and and many core KDE developers speaking german.
It will be interesting to see if GNOME can gain a little bit more sympathies over here once SUSE starts shipping with a top notch Ximian Desktop. I’m pretty sure though, that SUSE will not stop shipping their excellently integrated KDE desktop. The interesting question will be, which of both will be the default and on which of both further distribution specific tools will be based (and what happens with YAST of course).
Listen, if you want to clarify things here then be welcome and do so. I also want to encourage you to use some correct manners of conversation with other people – or didn’t your parents thaught you to behave when talking with others ?
Look, I know from various people in the GNOME community. Those that I usually talk with, that they seriously do not like you very much because of your harsh and disrespective manner, this doesn’t mean that you do not have ‘friends’ at all – so do I. You are playing a double sided game here, showing the cool guy in the public but behaving like a jerk as soon as people start disagreeing with you. I still haven’t forget the nice public speech you made somewhere in your country or wherever it was held where you publicly slandered me infront of an audience of people. Other people still haven’t forget how you embraced the art.gnome.org staff because they didn’t worked as you wanted. Not to mention the public response of people the day when you showed up your lazy ass with the http://www.gnome.org webpage, not to mention your averse to teamwork with those who wanted to help. You somehow managed to create your own world in the GNOME world, however you made it.
A lot of people whom I know about were showing their disapproval after you ‘once again’ made it in the GNOME Board but that wasn’t wondersome either since the same people applicated. Your seat in the GNOME world is only stabilized by the representative work you do for it and I hope that this will change next period once we managed to convince people how important the GNOME Foundation is, how important it is to get rid of people like you and how important it is that other people get the same chance. Maybe we manage to get a bit of normality back that we lost over the years and keep GNOME going.
I am well aware of the huge contributions that Ximian as well as SUN and Red Hat employees doing for GNOME and the same valid sentences for all the volunteer work of many friendly pariticpants. I appreciate it, I welcome it and I believe this to be a good and right thing to do. Although I do see that the commercial interests are dramatically increasing in the GNOME community which I am worried about and I believe that my worries are valid. You previously wrote that I can not know the majority of people’s interest in the GNOME community and yes I think you are right – I can not. But those I have talked with do share similar roots of ideals than I have and I do believe that a lot of people simply do not care enough or don’t really know what’s going on in the backroom of GNOME – since they simply install a desktop use it, contribute a few things and don’t know it better, or simply believe to better not tamper with the officials. Not knowing that there are no such things like officials because they are all regulary elected. My interest here is to get people interested to understand the Foundation a bit better so we get more people for next periods candidacy so we don’t stick with the same people for years. Other people, other ideas, other beliefs.
This doesn’t mean that I disrespect the people who do the work now. There are no doubt many nice people working on the Board or the Release team. Unfortunately there are also some weirdos like you who I believe should not be part there because they shamlessly abuse their position. I think every other person is suited better for that work than you. I don’t think it’s a good idea to force commercialism and make a religion out of it. I belive that it would be better to keep GNOME what it was. A throughly autonomous community project.
Miguel de Icaza is not THE CTO at Novell, he is A CTO at Novell (the CTO for the Ximian Division to be precise).
well, that is not what the report said, and aFAIK, most companies only have ONE CTO. he people in the divisions are usually VPs.
You are a very bitter and confused person, Ali.
Any story about Novell and Linux is also a story about SUSE…
And, BTW, SUSE was bigger, more expensive and more important than Ximian when Novell bought ’em, so it doesn’t matter what Miguel and the Ximian folks want (Gnome), it all depends on what SUSE’s customers (KDE). And if those customers want to stay with KDE (pretty certain, at least in Europe – and that’s the most important market for Linux now, anyway), then the Ximian folks have to develop KDE apps nad forget about Gnome – it’s as easy as that.
Your KDE dip.t-dail…-assumptions goes a bit astray here. The explanation is way more simple: World and dog has ADSL in Germany these days — and the maaaaajor amount of contracts for DSL are via german Telekom (= dip.t-..). Since this is a geeky forum and every geek has DSL, you have most german comments via dip.t- for *everything* here, not just KDE-comments. Since I know my own comment will show with dip.t as well, I would looove to say something positive about Gnome now, only to negate your goofy assumption. But I can’t. Not because I don’t like it, only, I once made a decision to go for either of them because I hate switching desktops. Since my first “Linux-friend” used KDE, I did so, too. Last time I got a bit more involved with Gnome was when we fooled around with the gentoo-live-CDs — the plain granny-gray desktop didn’t exactly tempt me to give it a deeper look either, but I will admit that I have seem some of the coolest user-customized desktops submitted here on Osnews based on Gnome. But that’s not my thing, I don’t even have the nerves to choose Desktop-abckground images and other fancy stuff.
No rotation in the Board member or Release team
This statement seemed to slip by without anybody else pointing out how wrong it is. Yes, it’s unfortunate that the candidacy turnout was low. But “no rotation” is dead wrong. I count four of eleven board member that are new. I consider four to six to be a decent rotation. We do not want to rotate everybody out every year.
HA HA HA…yeah, I think you will find that it is Novell and their new CTO that will decided the direction SUSE goes. perhaps what they will plan is to let SUSE be SUSE but also make a Ximianized version for their enterprise services.
it is certainly not the customers who decided on a product though.
Well, I think we’ll see – but as far as I remember, Miguel is not Novell’s CTO, only ‘CTO of the Novell Ximian Services business unit’, and he has to do what the board of Novell wants. And at least one of the SUSE management staff will join the Novell board.
Source:
http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/08/pr03051.html
Don’t think Ximian was that important, it was only some small, unimportant company, a joke compared to SUSE.
The Novell Ximian Services will mostly focus on .NET integration/ Mono, not Linux desktop development.
Yes right, someone on the foundation list mentioned something similar. My main point was – if more people would deal and understand the Foundation stuff (elections, aim, people, everyone the same chance, what’s going on) that this will be a huge benefit for us all. We can all decide a bit what GNOME in general should be, where it goes and if people seriously want it to become some sort of corporation desktop. Right now the decisions are made by the same people who sit there for the past years, not leaving room for others.
I believe – no I know – that there were/are quite a bunch of people who find the way how Nat and Miguel were doing these announcements quite offensive. I want to remind the interview where Miguel pointed out that MONO will be part of GNOME 3. While this was his own idea but probably not the idea of others and I do remember how the people reacted.
I do understand that corporate interests can’t be avoided on a longer timeframe because where there is success there also are companies who want a bit from this cake. But I think that Miguel as well as Nat should do it in a less intrusive way and probably a bit more diplomatic. I for my own find it really annoying to listen to all this PR stuff as well as I believe people are annoyed with my replies here. But I do want to clearify here. Even if I do contribute to GNOME myself I do not want to be abused for PR stuff as if I am one of the happy 6 million Linux Desktop users who is interested in the coporate Desktop or in competition to Windows or care what Novell’s interests are. I, like many others probably want a neutral plattform to work on, to do our stuff as we did before. As if it wasn’t enough to drastically change GNOME to fit a questionable usertarget, now we also want to make another Windows out of it.
The reality is that GNOME is a wonderful community to work in and very receptive to input, but your behaviour has alienated you from it. It has nothing to do with any kind of corporate agenda, PR, members of the community trying to control it, or any of the other conspiracy theories you’ve regurgitated in the past. Everyone is responsible for their own participation, and the trust and respect granted to them by the rest of the community. You haven’t earned my trust and respect, far from it, so you attack me instead. This does not help your standing with the rest of the community.
Interview with Richard Seibt, CEO of SUSE:
CW: What’s going to happen with KDE, which SUSE strongly supports? Will Gnome/ Ximian Desktop replace it?
SEIBT: No, we will continue to support both products. Since KDE has so many advantages [over Gnome] our customers in Europe like, we will keep to focus on KDE. […]
Source (German):
http://www.computerwoche.de/index.cfm?pageid=254&artid=54907&catego…
I have no idea why that comment was directed at me. I’ve never stated that GNOME is going to push KDE out, or even that it should. I like that we have choice, and I think the efforts of freedesktop are important to ensure that we can continue to have choice while having stable and supportable platforms. In fact, I’ve recently been involved with KDE developers on freedesktop in creating a shared documentation system. I have nothing but respect for our KDE friends. The desktop war is a myth.
I always used Mandrake. I saw KDE first. When I saw bugs I tried Gnome, but found it to have more bugs and went back to stay with KDE. I remember the excuse for pushing gnome was that it was totally ‘free’ and kde was not quite. But then kde became so and gnome still kept doing their own thing, so I don’t believe that was their real reason in the first place. That’s what I remember.
Besides that Miguel wrote about how great of an environment .NET is, blah, blah, blah. This seems to me to be a big waste of time trying to play constant catch up with Microsoft’s C# and .NET. Linux has C and Java and linux/unix, and KDE/X, (and Perl, and Apache and Tomcat, etc…); why waste time constantly trying to play catch up!? We have a great thing. Just press forward.
If SuSE was KDE centric, that’s great, but if Miguel and Gnome are going to be Novel’s focus, I’m not so sure about them and sold my stock. Red Hat seemed very Gnome centric too; which also stinks, and even Sun. I don’t understand this. I thought Novell really did a great thing by switching from Netware to Linux. I hope they do it right at some point.
Jeff you are seriously embarrassing me. You do sound like Mother Theresa with your last reply. Unfortunately you wear the same whitecoat as G. W. B. does (dirty work) Let me know if you go into the church and pray. I will go donating for you and light on a candle. One day people will see your true colors.
SUSE will stay with KDE and Ximian with gnome. Theres no need for this DE bashing as both are good for the desktop. I’m disgusted on how some people have hijacked this news article for their own KDE vs. GNOME battle.
As this seems the most interesting question, since Novell aquired SUSE, why didn’t the interviewer ask THAT question? Everybody and their dog is wondering what’s going to be with KDE, so why not just bloody ASK it?
As for De Icaza being CTO of Novell: this is NOT the Novell I knew for many years. De Icaza represents the exact opposite of everything Novell used to stand for: reliability, honest-to-God efficient code and management tools, platform openness and interoperability. And no hype. I shake my head in disbelief and conclude that this company is not one I would want to associate myself with.
an ex MCNE and CNI
He isn’t…
Miguel is only CTO of Novell Ximian Services, _not_ CTO of Novell, or Novell’s Linux development – only Ximian. He was CTO of Ximian, and he’ll stay CTO of Ximian. That’s all, folks, nothing more…
Jeff you are seriously embarrassing me. You do sound like Mother Theresa with your last reply. Unfortunately you wear the same whitecoat as G. W. B. does (dirty work) Let me know if you go into the church and pray. I will go donating for you and light on a candle. One day people will see your true colors.
After that reply you want to still deny you’re trolling? Ali, you know I’ve discussed with you many times, but I’m always surprised at your reactions. Trying to get politicals into the discussion to insult Jeff is just something very low. Even for you.
I only wanted to point out that he is not the Mr. correct as he always claim to be. Insulting Jeff ? So many times he was insulting me and my friends in the public ?
Sorry, but after Novell having taken control of SuSE this interview looses significance.
What about SuSE in this picture ?
What about KDE in this picture ?
They should not publish old stuff, this is totally misleading.
They talk about Gnome, but thereafter they acquire a strongly KDE oriented company.
SO, I consider this interview meaningless to the current state of things.
Alex.