Xamarin, Ximian, Gnome, Mono and the Microsoft Buy Out
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Recently, Microsoft bought the open source desktop and .NET vendor Xamarin for between $400 and $500 million dollars USD. This is a surprising sum considering that Microsoft turned down the company's founder for just a normal programming job. So he made his first company, Ximian, instead reproducing Microsoft software (the .NET platform) as open source. Ximian is also famous for creating the Gnome desktop to compete with KDE and starting the first of the Linux desktop wars (there was a time when Linux had a single graphical desktop of any standing and it was pretty impressive.) Ximian was eventually bought by Novell, De Icaza made a VP but let go when Attachmate bought Novell.
De Icaza is actually rather a disruptor all around. He's always been a Microsoft fanatic and the world of Gnome and Ximian is often cited as being a major cause of keeping Linux out of the mainsteam for desktops by making too many choices for end users instead of just the one that existed before that. And he kept Microsoft from having the only .NET platform all of this time. De Icaza has long been famous for being deeply in bed with Microsoft and perhaps this purchase is to reward him for nearly two decades of "service"?
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@mlnews Yes, widely held theories. Hard to know if there's any truth to them.
What I also heard from people who should know (as in, people who contributed to KDE in its infancy) is that he first tried to contribute to KDE, was turned down, then to XFCE (which, indeed, predates GNOME), was turned down - then moved to create his own desktop.
Well, if this was all a ploy to harm Linux on the desktop, it succeeded, though it's a long play - far longer even than Stephen Elop destroying Nokia and MeeGo to give MS a chance with Windows Phone.
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@jospoortvliet said:
What I also heard is that he first tried to contribute to KDE, was turned down, then to XFCE (which, indeed, predates GNOME), was turned down - then moved to create his own desktop.
Only so long, Gnome started doing huge damage nearly from day one. It divided the community right at the start of competing for the desktop. Hard to say if Windows NT would have gained the traction that it did if people saw a unified Linux desktop option at the time. KDE was years ahead of Windows 2000.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Only so long, Gnome started doing huge damage nearly from day one. It divided the community right at the start of competing for the desktop. Hard to say if Windows NT would have gained the traction that it did if people saw a unified Linux desktop option at the time. KDE was years ahead of Windows 2000.
Very true, but if he did it for this reason, he only got rewarded now - that's quite a long time to wait
Of course, there might've been some money at an earlier stage and Novell, of course, bought Ximian - an even more brilliant ploy as it destroyed the strongest KDE distribution (SUSE) through infighting and allowed Red Hat to take the market, pushing inferior (to this day...) technology to the Linux Desktop.
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@jospoortvliet said:
Very true, but if he did it for this reason, he only got rewarded now - that's quite a long time to wait
Now THAT is true. Although he easily was just doing it out of hope and/or a love of all things MS, which we know has been part of his mantra for a very long time. And there have been a number of rewards all along the way. This was just the big, big payoff.
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@jospoortvliet said:
Of course, there might've been some money at an earlier stage and Novell, of course, bought Ximian - an even more brilliant ploy as it destroyed the strongest KDE distribution (SUSE) through infighting and allowed Red Hat to take the market, pushing inferior (to this day...) technology to the Linux Desktop.
Yes. Only good thing is that Cinnamon got creating along the way. But sadly that isn't the main desktop choice, yet.
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@scottalanmiller Cinnamon is nice but - building on GTK I don't see it going anywhere. GTK just isn't a platform anybody builds on unless they have a deep-seated hate for anything with a Q or + or K in it. And that kind of us-vs-them behavior is exactly what he triggered starting GNOME - and what keeps companies away from the platform. Luckily we see now a bit of a convergence on a reasonable enterprise-quality technology with many smaller projects as well as all of Canonical moving to Qt. That's good for the Linux desktop, of course - but coming 15 years too late if you ask me.
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I do hate that it is built on the Gnome libraries
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Have you seen KDE Plasma 5.6? It's looking pretty good.
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@scottalanmiller true, looking forward to packages of Plasma 5.6. Running 5.5 now, quite OK but some buggyness
