GNOME Online Desktop: "We will have to include Windows"

von Redaktion  |  29. Juli 2007, 12:24

Red Hats Havoc Pennington in an interview about opening up new possibilities, the crucial advantage over Microsoft and why he doesn't just want to "make a desktop"

During this years GUADEC Red Hat developer Havoc Pennington proposed his idea of an "Online Desktop" to the developers of the GNOME project. Through deep integration with web services and "zero-maintenance" the Open Source client aims to get the "perfect window to the Internet". During GUADEC Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to talk to Pennington about advantages and possible problems of the Online Desktop concept, the necessity of Windows-support and about Red Hats "return to the desktop".

This interview is also available in a german translation.

derStandard.at: Judging from the reactions you got to your keynote about the GNOME Online Desktop, do you think there is a good chance to get this rolling?

Havoc Pennington: I hope so, it's hard to tell tough. It seemed very positive over all. There are still a lot of things to figure out, but it's not harder than when we originally got GNOME going in the first place. And you don't have to have everyone agreeing, you just need a few people who want to work hard on something.

derStandard.at: As Novell seemed to agree on your vision, does that mean, that both companies together just can go forward anyway? Do you need the community to join at all?

Havoc Pennington: I think so. People really overestimate both how much of open source gets written by companies and also the ability of companies to kind of do things on their own without having community buy-in. I don't really think it is workable without community support. That doesn't mean that we need community unanimity, it's fine if just some segment of the community is interested in the project. But neither Red Hat nor Novell is a large enough company to just go at it alone.

derStandard.at: In the past there have been a bunch of other endeavours in trying to get a better integration between web services and the desktop - for instance the "social" browser Flock - none of them really successful until now. So why do you think you can do better here?

Havoc Pennington: Whenever you have a general category description, whether it is cell phone or software that connects to online services there's going to be a few things that succeed and many more things that don't. It generally comes down to specifics, how the business aspects are done, how the community aspects are done or how the user experience is. Flock is actually - as I understand - not really aimed at a mass audience, so that might be part of it. Also it's just in the browser, they are not addressing the desktop as a whole, so it's a different thing, more like Firefox plus extensions.

derStandard.at: So you don't think that people might just be happy with what they have now?

Havoc Pennington: You know, that's always possible (laughter). But to me when I use a desktop today I feel like there are major negatives to it - there are all kinds of maintenance and backups to worry about. Just cleaning up the desktop background, cause it's cluttered full of junk to not having calendar notifications, having recent documents be the wrong documents and not the online documents that I'm actually using.

One way to think about it is, say you're a small business and buy Google Apps for your domain it keeps you from having to maintain your own servers, you know things like an IMAP-server. But you still have to maintain your Windows desktops. If we could offer a desktop, that is also self-maintaining, then you don't really have to do anything custom, you don't have to pay someone to maintain it for you, it's just completely off-the-shelf and just works. So I think that might be really compelling to lots of people, that's sort of the business kind of scenario.

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Links

Online Desktop

BigBoard

Further Information

Open Source-Entwickler rufen zur Online-Desktop-Revolution

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