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Posted: Sat, April 13, 2002
The ITW Interview: Dick Porter, Ximian Inc. Ximian Inc. is the software developer that brings open source applications to business. Whilst open source operating systems may be common to company servers, Ximian has taken open source that crucial step further, delivering it in style to the desktop. Ximian Desktop is a complete desktop productivity solution for Linux and UNIX that is easy-to-use and efficient. Already used by over 800,000 people worldwide, Ximian software is now challenging leading desktop applications such as Microsoft Office. itwales.com spoke to leading Ximian hacker Dick Porter to learn more about Ximian's desktop benefits, and the advantages of going open source.  How would you define your role at Ximian? I'm a hacker in the Ximian Labs. That is the group at Ximian that works on technologies that will probably be incorporated into the Ximian Desktop in the future. I worked on Soup (an implementation of the SOAP protocol) for a while. Now I work on Mono, the free implementation of the .NET runtime. How have you been involved in the development of Ximian Desktop so far? I was one of the original coauthors of ORBit, the CORBA ORB used by the GNOME component system. I haven't written any user applications for GNOME: all my work has been on the background infrastructure. At Ximian we believe in the whole company "eating our own dog-food", so everyone runs the latest beta test versions of the Ximian Desktop. This means the whole company is involved in finding and reporting bugs. I will also often send ideas, suggestions, and feature requests to the teams building Evolution or Red Carpet, or any other part of the Desktop. How did you become involved in working on open source applications? When I was a student at Swansea University, most free and open source software was published on Usenet news groups such as comp.sources.unix, comp.sources.games, etc. I would try these packages out, and many would be far superior to the corresponding packages installed on the Unix machines I was using. It seemed only natural that when I wrote a piece of software myself, I should make it freely available. GNOME utilises CORBA, XML and a host of cutting-edge technologies. How does this advanced technology benefit the user, and distinguish Ximian Desktop? Actually, if you can see the technology then the desktop is not doing its job. Having said that, we try to use technology where it is appropriate, rather than to score highly on "Buzzword Bingo". Therefore the advanced technology doesn't benefit the user per se, rather the appropriate application of it hopefully makes the whole system simpler to use. For example, CORBA gives us many benefits: flexibility in choosing programming language for components; it enables the GNOME desktop to be network transparent, as components can run on remote machines; it is a well-known standard protocol, so GNOME can inter-operate with other systems more easily. SOAP can fulfil many of the same roles, but it is more appropriate for connection to components across the Internet, whereas CORBA is more suitable in the intranet and local machine cases. By choosing CORBA or SOAP depending on the application, we can make the user configuration that much simpler, and the application more reliable. What are the advantages of putting SOAP into GNOME CVS? We put Soup (our implementation of SOAP) into GNOME CVS so that it could be worked on by any GNOME contributor. For example, if someone finds a bug, they can easily fix it themselves. It also allows Soup to become an officially-supported GNOME and Ximian Desktop product, so any application that requires SOAP functionality can use it easily. What's the key to producing a usable interface? Frequent testing on end-users, and not being afraid to abandon an early design in favour of one that works better. Ximian has expert staff working solely on user interfaces, and a user testing lab. One of Ximian's aims is make Linux and Unix as usable as the top consumer operating systems. How close are you to achieving this? I believe we are comparable to any other desktop operating system. The individual applications are strong, and the interface is clean and modern. When I set up a system for my father, who is totally computer-illiterate, I gave him Ximian Desktop. He doesn't seem to be having any trouble with it. One small potential problem occurs when someone migrates from one desktop operating system to another and requires an amount of retraining, but this will be the case whether the new desktop is the Ximian Desktop or any other. Usability isn't only about new features and pretty graphics, though. The upcoming GNOME 2 release will have many barriers removed that currently prevent people with disabilities from using a computer: screen readers allow blind users to navigate applications through either synthesised speech or Braille displays; on-screen keyboards can replace physical keyboards; screen magnifiers help the partially-sighted. It is worth bearing in mind that only a small fraction of the world's population has chosen an operating system and corresponding desktop, and those that haven't yet will tend to be in developing areas. Linux runs well on "obsolete" hardware, so is much more attractive to developing markets than the expensive alternatives. To this end, the next version of GNOME will also have good support for non-Latin languages and character sets such as Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and many languages from the Indian subcontinent. In what ways is Ximian spearheading to the GNOME project at the moment? Ximian was instrumental in setting up the GNOME Foundation, along with other leading free software companies. Ximian is also well represented on the GNOME board. In day to day work Ximian employs a large number of the world's top GNOME hackers, contributing to the project and developing free software. Ximian hackers are also an active part of the GNOME 2 development and release process. Does the open community help a lot when you're developing a product? What's the process? Has using applications from OS developers worldwide led to a better desktop package? With over half a million hackers using beta test versions of Evolution, we benefited greatly from lots of testing, bug reporting and feature suggestions. During the Evolution feature freeze before version 1.0 was released over 10,000 bugs were reported and fixed, making Evolution a ".0" product that actually worked well. That kind of scrutiny and testing can only happen with an open source project. When developing open source applications, would you say Windows applications are inevitably used as a yardstick, or is your desktop strategy different? It really depends on the application: for example, Evolution is designed to replace Outlook, so replicating features is important. On the other hand, Nautilus (the graphical file manager) had no equivalent anywhere else when it was first released, though I believe some of its innovations have since appeared elsewhere. What is Evolution capable of achieving for the desktop user, and what will it be capable of in the future? Evolution is a personal and work-group information management package. It integrates email, calendar, task lists, meeting scheduling, and contact management. It uses published standard protocols to inter-operate with other products such as IMAP mail and LDAP directory servers. One of its nicest features is the "vFolder" system, that allows multiple views of emails. For example, you can set up a vFolder that shows all emails from the Marketing department with the words "Sales figures" in the subject and received less than 3 weeks ago, and another one with the same criteria but for older messages: as time passes, messages will automatically vanish from the first and appear in the second. Evolution also features extremely fast searching of mails. The new "Ximian Connector" product, which recently started shipping, allows Evolution to function as a Microsoft Exchange 2000 client for email, group calendaring, contact management, access to corporate address books and task management. As for future features, work progresses all the time but Ximian doesn't pre-announce feature lists. Why has integration - in terms of integrating different functions into the desktop, and integrating with other messaging systems such as Exchange - been so important in the development of Evolution? Integrating email with the address book, and the calendar with the task list, just makes sense. When the calendar coordinates meeting requests via email, it also makes sense to bind them together. Finally, with a consistent user interface the application is much easier to use as a whole. One of the obstacles to putting a Ximian Desktop machine into day to day use at some companies is the proprietary email system already in place. The Ximian Connector allows those companies to take advantage of the Ximian Desktop without disrupting the existing infrastructure, or resorting to suboptimal solutions such as having a second computer on the desk. Linux's founder, Linus Torvalds, recently suggested that the Linux kernel is no longer the `issue' with regard to Linux's future, improving usability is. How important is it that Linux gains an easy-to-use graphical interface? Do you see Ximian playing a large part in Linux's future because it brings it to the desktop? As Linux seems to have conquered the server market, particularly web servers, it seems the next target is the desktop. Linux already has several easy-to-use graphical interfaces, and the competition between them is only making them all better. Ximian is the only company that specializes in a complete Linux desktop software solution, so it is fairly certain that Ximian will play a large part in the future of Linux on the desktop. Why should SMEs choose Ximian Desktop? The obvious first reason is the lack of per-seat licence charges, and no forced annual upgrades (for more money, of course). Secondly, Ximian Desktop offers a complete graphical desktop environment and productivity applications across all leading Linux distributions, and also UNIX variants such as Solaris and HP-UX. Thirdly, Ximian Desktop is free software. This means that it can be easily customised to meet particular needs by anybody, not just Ximian. Additionally, Ximian Desktop is built on Linux which is legendary for its reliability, leading to far less downtime and much less lost work due to crashes. There is also a vastly reduced danger from destructive viruses, for several reasons: firstly, no Ximian Desktop application will blindly run an executable received over the network; secondly, it is far harder to "infect" an executable file on Linux and Unix machines due to the clear separation between user and superuser. Another Ximian application, Red Carpet, makes it easy to keep Linux systems up-to-date with the latest software fixes. Red Carpet Corporate Connect is a web-based service that automates the central management of software configurations on desktops and servers. What's the future for Ximian? Will you be concentrating on Mono services, the OS equivalent to .Net services? Ximian will continue to deliver products that make Linux and UNIX users productive in a heterogeneous environment. With regard to Mono, Ximian has no plans to develop .NET services, concentrating only on the platform. The rationale behind Mono is to develop a free implementation of the .NET Common Language Runtime. There is a lot of confusion generated by the ".NET" tag: it can mean the .NET development platform; web services; Microsoft Server Applications; new tools that use the new development platform; "Hailstorm", sorry, "Passport", sorry it's now called ".NET My Services". Mono is an implementation of the .NET development platform. We intend to implement the infrastructure needed for web services, and any other classes that will be useful for developing applications. For more information on Ximian Inc. and the Mono project, follow these links: http://www.ximian.com http://www.go-mono.com |
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