Nat Friedman Quotations

A lot of that momentum comes from the fact that Linux is free.

We're not going to make Evolution or any of our other products depend on Mono anytime in the near future.

Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines.

Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to support RPMs and DEBs transparently.

This is what people need: an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use tool.

There are a lot of people who've been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop.

OS X is sweet: it's simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a lot of values with it.

We plan to support Exchange 2003 as soon as it is released. We already have the prerelease versions from MSDN.

Big Linux deployments have reached the point where it's become a real problem for administrators that they don't have nice tools to manage their servers and desktops.

It's probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher than with most software.

Mac OS X isn't a free platform, and it runs on expensive hardware. It is not a plausible Windows alternative for our desktop customers, who are mainly large government organizations displacing Windows desktops and big enterprise corporations replacing Solaris workstations.

One of the things that people like about apt-get is having an easy-to-use software catalog at their fingertips, so if you want to install some missing software on your machine, you can do it with a quick command.

Right now Linux on the desktop is siphoning workstation users from Solaris and HP-UX.

GNOME is aiming for simplicity and consistency; we're the first open source desktop project to have a documented set of human interface guidelines.

We're offloading a lot of the work to the hardware. The result is things look and feel a lot smoother.

Our goal of Desktop 10 is to build a really easy-to-use, powerful desktop for general knowledge workers. These are people who live in e-mail, in the browser, in the office suite -- not people who need a hundred different applications, but people whose lives really consist of just living in those applications.

Our turnaround time on fixes for document importing issues is actually averaging 24-48 hours, which is pretty remarkable.

Those little things give a desktop a sense of physicality.

We've really taken the product a long way in the past year,

We expect that developers from a variety of projects will come to Better Desktop.org and review these results to see firsthand how they can improve the design of different applications, desktops and distributions. Ultimately, improved usability will help Linux succeed on the desktop.

Now Linux has a world-class totally modern graphics system that will last us for the next decade.

Apple is cool. We like Apple. But we're not going to spend a lot of time porting and supporting our stuff on Mac OS X.

As a programmer, it's sometimes difficult to know how ordinary people with no technical experience are reacting to your software. Linux people tend to know other Linux people. In these usability tests, we selected test subjects who were experienced with Windows, but who had never heard of Linux, and asked them to perform basic tasks using the Linux desktop.

This is the right place to put it technically. The X windowing system lies beneath KDE and GNOME. All users, both GNOME and KDE, can take advantage of it.

There's a lot still to do in Evolution.

It makes it clear to people what a virtual workspace is.

I started hacking in Mono a few months ago for some personal projects, and was very impressed with how complete and usable it is.

I'm personally working on converting about 250,000 different Windows machines to Linux desktops, primarily in European government.

The whole youth-idolatry oh-god-not-another-birthday thing has to be the most sure-fire way to be unhappy about the way things are progressing in your life.

I have a G4 at home. Theyre great machines for individual users, and I even know a few core Linux hackers who are having a lot of fun with them. But if you want to move the needle on the non-Microsoft desktop, youve got to look elsewhere.

As Mono matures, people will begin to use it to write desktop components that take advantage of all the hard work thats gone into some of the meatier GNOME libraries, as well as the nifty language features of C#.

There are a lot of people whove been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop.