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Miguel de Icaza Quits Day Job
Posted by
Hemos
on Tue Oct 26, 1999 06:54 AM
from the coming-to-america dept.
from the coming-to-america dept.
Foaf writes "According to his activity log, Miguel of Gnome and Gnumeric fame is quitting his university job and moving to the US to provide 'kick-ass applications for users all around the globe.' " And, yes, now I can rest easy knowing that Miguel will be unfettered in his attempts to consume all of the world's coffee *grin*. Seriously, this is the continuation of a wonderful trend - more time developing Linux applications is good for everyone.
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Miguel de Icaza Quits Day Job
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Working for Open Source Projects (Score:3)
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
I wonder who the investor is? (Score:3)
I wonder who the
is?Theory 1: Transmeta is actually not building a chip at all, but has a new, increadible Linux distribution which the need Miguel to work on the GUI for.
Theory 2: Microsoft has seen the light and are going to open source Windows, and need Miguel to fix the bugs - after all, he has some experience with GNOME. *S*.
That was a JOKE!
But seriously, I do wonder who it is - I doubt Red Hat, because they tend to announce things like that. I suppose it is a company and not VC funding, though. Intel or Oracle, maybe?
Also, what it Migel's company called?
Gnome is not a Linux application... (Score:4)
"
Gnome isn't a Linux app anymore than Netscape is, or MySql is or Apache is. It is an application that may or may not run on a number of platforms. Likewise KDE, or 98% of the other things you find on you linux box.
You may argue that this is just semantics, and that any app that runs on Linux is 'a linux app', but that's misleading.
However, as we see this more and more "Gnome, the linux desktop system" or "KDevelop, and IDE for Linux" it starts to look like people are thinking only in terms of Linux and its applications. This brings back the bad old days when OS's were judged on what apps were available, and apps were judged by what OS they ran on, or what OS they were native to (if they were later ported).
Linux isn't the de-facto host system for all OS apps, whatever you may think.
Here's the full diary entry... (Score:3)
So many things have happened since the last time I wrote stuff:
So, I am quitting my current job and moving to the US to pursue this new venture with my friend Nat. Exciting times.
--
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Yes, he'll be paid (Score:3)
Now then, I have to say I disagree with you about duplicated efforts. In some sense, I feel there has to be a level of duplication. Not that there should be acrimony between competing projects -- interoperability and user choice at a fine-grained level should be the goal, which requires fairly close coordination in things like desktop environments (and is something I commend and encourage for the GNOME and KDE teams).
As an example where duplication is good: GMC is a nice fairly traditional file manager. Doesn't break any new ground, but provides a familiar starting point to the user.
But several developers wanted something more advanced. They wanted to seamlessly integrate networked and local filesystems at the conceptual level via a virtual file system, extending the way the Windows Explorer lets you browse samba shares on your network to include FTP and other file sharing methods. The result is the (still experimental) GNOME Explorer (for lack of a better name). It's an interesting project, but it would have been inappropriate to abandon earlier efforts half-complete in favor of the new one. If developers constantly did that, nothing would ever get finished
In addition, different projects have quite different cultures and backgrounds. Calls for the GNOME and KDE teams to merge are just silly -- they don't reflect that the projects have different approaches to the same problem. I think that's disrespectful to the developers, especially coming from non-programmers (I find programmers experienced in large projects, or better directly involved in the projects in question, have clearer perspectives on the whole thing).