Novell has hired Tor Lillqvist to help with porting some of their software to Windows. Tor has always been tremendously knowledgable and helpful and I really hope that works out well for him. He's helped me on more than one occassion when I had questions porting software to Windows.

Novell will be starting a project to port several GNOME applications to Windows including the Beagle desktop search tool and the Novell Evolution Groupware Suite. This, I think, is a great thing. Windows users will be able to migrate from Outlook to a functional equivalent which provides messaging, scheduling, task management support for Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise, IMAP, POP, LDAP, Usenet News, and other protocols. Beagle integrates with Evolution, GAIM Instant Messenger, and other GNOME applications to provide integrated desktop search capabilities.

Comment on SlashDot, "By porting all these commonly used OSS apps to Windows, it helps commoditize the OS itself. This is however a double edged sword. It makes migration to Linux from Windows easier, but also reduces the incentives (excellent Linux-only software) to make the move."

Firstly, Linux is the reason to switch to Linux. You get all these wonderful applications without any of the baggage from other operating systems. It is a fresh start. A clean slate. Linux is a chance to start your computer life, or start it over, without the extra blood pressure and stress of other systems. The OS should be largely irrelevant to the operation of the software running on it and it should certainly seem that way to you. If you are a Windows user and ever think to yourself "Why does Windows do that?" or "Why does the computer always do that when I do this?" then you are being betrayed by Windows. You shouldn't even notice that Windows exists. But the reality is that every time you let down your guard Windows smacks you in the face.

Secondly, I hear the "double edged sword" argument often. Early on, GNU was developed largely on SunOS because that's really all they had. The GNU folks realized that Sun had a fairly nice kernel but many of the user tools were, in my and others opinion, just absolutely horrible. And I think the failings of that OS taught the early GNU developers to strive for something better. You hear a very consistent response when you ask people about using SunOS in the early 90s or even Solaris today. It goes like this, "The very first thing we do when we get a brand new Sun Box is to spend 2 days installing GNU." As a testament to that fact, for several years Sun has been selling all of their systems with GNU, and often also Linux, preinstalled. GNU didn't just clone the UNIX System and its commands. They built completely new tools that worked in entirely new ways. But they never forgot what worked from the old system and they usually made it so the newer, better programs could drop right in place of the old programs.

I guess I'm saying that if you know why Windows, UNIX, a particular application or whatever sucks then you can use that knowledge to avoid the same mistakes. But if you blind yourself completely to the experience then you may become preoccupied with something that others know is a dismal failure. (For example, KDE Control Center truly is a dismal failure not because of bad design but because of the millions of useless settings in it. Sadly, they didn't get the memo because their mailbox is welded shut.) Much wasted time could be spent elsewhere if you learn from others mistakes.

Labels: linux, windows