interesting article:
Miguel de Icaza Hopes Gnome
Can Battle Windows Dominance
May 15, 2000 WSJ
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The computer screen in front of Miguel de Icaza shows a familiar arrangement of icons, menus and windows. It looks pretty much like computer screens everywhere running Microsoft's Windows operating system.
But this isn't Windows. It's something called Gnome, a program that makes a Linux computer look and act a lot like a Windows machine. Mr. de Icaza, a programmer from Mexico City, created Gnome. Now he wants to put it on a billion computers.
Even as the U.S. government struggles to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the computers we use every day, Mr. de Icaza is gearing up to battle Bill Gates the old-fashioned way, in the marketplace. "We are going to level the playing field," promises Mr. de Icaza, 27, who was once rejected for a job at Microsoft. "This is about helping the consumer. This is for everybody."
Miquel de Icaza
Mr. de Icaza's arsenal includes a crack programming team, a well-designed computer system and a weapon forged by Microsoft's own lawyers: Years ago, Apple complained that Windows was a ripoff of its Macintosh, but Microsoft prevailed in court. Thanks to that victory, Mr. de Icaza isn't worried about Gnome looking like Windows. But his most potent weapon is the Internet, and the pace of innovation it fuels.
To understand what Mr. de Icaza is up to, you need to know about open-source software, the philosophy that spawned Linux. First of all, it's free. (Amazingly, you can make money selling free software, but more on that later.) You can tinker with it and improve it. And brilliant young programmers routinely spend hundreds of hours doing just that, for free, often collaborating with others over the Internet. They do it for the challenge, the greater good and perhaps a little bit of glory.
Gnome got its start in 1997. At the time, Mr. de Icaza was working at the Institute for Nuclear Sciences, part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, in Mexico City. He was a passionate believer in the open-source software movement. Linux, which relies on arcane commands, had established itself as a top-notch operating system for Web servers. But Mr. de Icaza knew that Linux couldn't win over average users without a snazzy, friendly, Windows-like interface to replace those obscure commands.
So Mr. de Icaza beamed out a message to thousands of Linux programmers asking for volunteers to create such a system. Over the next two years, the Gnome project grew to encompass more than 400 programmers coordinating various pieces of the puzzle, and hundreds more working for them. (You can learn more at www.gnome.org.)
Along the way Mr. de Icaza met Nat Friedman, a computer-science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They became good friends, and last April, when Mr. Friedman said he wanted to start a company, Mr. de Icaza was intrigued. Gnome itself is free. But so is Linux, and companies like Red Hat make money off it by gathering up the right pieces of free software, packaging them with instructions and offering support services, like toll-free "help."
Now, from an office in Cambridge a few blocks from MIT, Messrs. de Icaza and Friedman have started a company called Helix Code to bring Gnome to the world. Mr. Friedman is the president and Mr. de Icaza is the chairman and chief technical officer. They have a staff of 28 -- all talented programmers recruited from the Gnome project, and many working over the Internet from places like San Francisco, Italy and the Czech Republic.
Join Tom Weber, Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman for a live discussion on the future of Gnome, Monday at 2 p.m. EDT or a bulletin-board discussion with Tom Weber and other Interactive Journal readers.
Their two main projects: beefing up Gnome in a version called Helix Gnome and developing an e-mail and personal organizer called Evolution. Mr. Friedman calls Evolution "our Outlook-killer," referring to the ubiquitous Microsoft e-mail program.
Why do they think they can take on Microsoft? For starters, they're making everything compatible with Microsoft's products. A spreadsheet program for Gnome, called Gnumeric, looks very much like Excel and works just fine with any Excel document. Evolution can use the same address books and calendars as Outlook.
You can e-mail Mr. Weber at tweber@wsj.com or visit the E-World Center.
They also think their products are better because they've been constructed with the Internet in mind every step of the way. Evolution, for instance, doesn't just handle e-mail messages and calendar appointments. It also makes it easy to file away your chat-room and instant-message conversations. And it will index everything, offering users the equivalent of a Web search engine for their personal organizers.
Mr. de Icaza doesn't expect corporate America to suddenly renounce Microsoft. Instead, he's counting on Gnome spreading the way Linux has, silently making inroads until it's a major force. And he's counting on wide acceptance outside the U.S., especially in developing countries that can't afford Microsoft products.
The folks at the Justice Department might be interested to know that Messrs. de Icaza and Friedman don't want to see Microsoft broken up. "It stinks," Mr. Friedman says. "I wanted to beat them without government assistance."
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If Gnome becomes a household name, Helix Code stands to become the Net's next billion-dollar company -- thanks in no small part to all those programmers who labored without pay on Gnome. Mr. de Icaza admits it's an awkward issue. But, he says, Helix Code has already hired some of them.
"All these people are our friends," he says. "As we have more money, we'll hire more friends. As soon as we have infinite money, we'll hire infinite friends." |
