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0 pointsajross13y ago0 comments

I really didn't intend it as a swipe against Miguel, but I think it does inform his perspective. And I meant "platform fan" in the advocacy sense: he has a tendency to "fall in love" with favorite products. That's not uncommon in the general population (it's pretty much the norm at HN!), but it certainly is among core Linux people who tend to prefer doing new things in different ways.

> His early world was Midnight Commander, Gnome, Gnumeric, and Evolution.

Clones of Norton Commander, Windows, Excel, and Outlook. To be fair, Gnome 1 wasn't really a "clone" (though it did mimick more than innovate) and mc was chasing a Symantec product, not a Microsoft one.

But to claim that these were innovative new projects is silly. Miguel's career has been one of seeing something he loves in an existing product and duplicating it in his preferred free software environment. There's no shame there. But it's absolutely the same thinking that drove the Mono project.

0 comments

migueldeicaza13y ago

Pedantically speaking, I wrote Gnumeric not because I loved Excel, or enjoyed using it or because I was trying to be innovative. In fact, I did not even know how to use a spreadsheet at the time.

Gnumeric was the product of the mood in the early days of Gnome: we need to provide this to have a complete desktop offering and we were talented hackers that could get it done. So I did.

migueldeicaza13y ago

I forgot to mention.

Once I started, I enjoyed writing a spreadsheet every second of it. It was both a very educational process, but also the one that made me grow fonder of strict compiler warnings and errors. And from this experience, most Gnome software after this was compiled with warn-as-error.

keithpeter13y ago

Well, I'm glad you did write Gnumeric. The graphs module with that tree like properties box is really nice to use.

migueldeicaza13y ago

Jody Goldberg and the Gnumeric community deserve the credit for the graphics module, not me.

But I am glad you enjoy Gnumeric.

1 more reply

batista13y ago

>And I meant "platform fan" in the advocacy sense: he has a tendency to "fall in love" with favorite products.

Well, for one, C#/CLR was not a favorite product when he fell in love with them, were they? At the time lots of people thought MS was foolish to try to overtake Java, and it took a couple of years for people to accept and like .NET.

>But to claim that these were innovative new projects is silly.

Sure, they weren't, but it's not like Linux in general has given us much innovative things in the desktop space.

MatthewPhillips13y ago

> Sure, they weren't, but it's not like Linux in general has given us much innovative things in the desktop space.

O.o

Two off the top of my head: workspaces, app stores.

flatline313y ago

Workspaces? You mean virtual desktops? Those date back 1986, implemented at Xerox PARC (and patented!).

As for appstores, I assume you're talking about the packaging systems, which are similar only if viewed from 50,000 feet.

The packaging systems were not stores. You couldn't buy packages. They didn't serve as an agent to sell other people's personally submitted packages. They had "apps" but no "store". The applications weren't sandboxed to make it relatively safe for them to sell 3rd-party submitted packages. The applications were expected to be open-source.

The only similarity to the app stores is that they had a repository of software and an automated installation system used to install it.

2 more replies

batista13y ago

>Two off the top of my head: workspaces

Much older than Linux.

>app stores

You mean package managers. Similar in functionality (getting programs) but not the same thing. Both have nice things going for themselves though.

nirvana13y ago

You can't name innovative things amongst a crowd that rejects that innovation can happen. They'll tell you someone else did it earlier, even when they didn't.

For instance, cars were not an innovation according to hacker news, because Horses!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsajross13y ago0 comments

> His early world was Midnight Commander, Gnome, Gnumeric, and Evolution.

0 comments

migueldeicaza13y ago

Pedantically speaking, I wrote Gnumeric not because I loved Excel, or enjoyed using it or because I was trying to be innovative. In fact, I did not even know how to use a spreadsheet at the time.

Gnumeric was the product of the mood in the early days of Gnome: we need to provide this to have a complete desktop offering and we were talented hackers that could get it done. So I did.

migueldeicaza13y ago

I forgot to mention.

keithpeter13y ago

Well, I'm glad you did write Gnumeric. The graphs module with that tree like properties box is really nice to use.

migueldeicaza13y ago

Jody Goldberg and the Gnumeric community deserve the credit for the graphics module, not me.

But I am glad you enjoy Gnumeric.

1 more reply

batista13y ago

>And I meant "platform fan" in the advocacy sense: he has a tendency to "fall in love" with favorite products.

>But to claim that these were innovative new projects is silly.

Sure, they weren't, but it's not like Linux in general has given us much innovative things in the desktop space.

MatthewPhillips13y ago

> Sure, they weren't, but it's not like Linux in general has given us much innovative things in the desktop space.

O.o

Two off the top of my head: workspaces, app stores.

flatline313y ago

Workspaces? You mean virtual desktops? Those date back 1986, implemented at Xerox PARC (and patented!).

As for appstores, I assume you're talking about the packaging systems, which are similar only if viewed from 50,000 feet.

The only similarity to the app stores is that they had a repository of software and an automated installation system used to install it.

2 more replies

batista13y ago

>Two off the top of my head: workspaces

Much older than Linux.

>app stores

You mean package managers. Similar in functionality (getting programs) but not the same thing. Both have nice things going for themselves though.

nirvana13y ago

You can't name innovative things amongst a crowd that rejects that innovation can happen. They'll tell you someone else did it earlier, even when they didn't.

For instance, cars were not an innovation according to hacker news, because Horses!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse