Original OSNews Interviews Archive

The Tcl programming language has been immensely successful in its almost 15 years of existence. Tcl, stands for 'Tool Command Language' and is pronounced 'tickle' by those in the know. It's probably most famous for the Tk graphical toolkit, which has for years set the standard for rapid, scriptable, cross-platform GUI development, but the language is used throughout a staggering variety of applications, from the open source web server that runs AOL's web site, to code for network testing, to code to run oil rigs.

This article we host here today is a must read for all Gnome and KDE users. We are happy to feature an exclusive interview with Waldo Bastian and Aaron J. Seigo from the KDE project and Havoc Pennington from the Gnome project. Waldo and Havoc are developers working on many "under the hood" places of their respective DEs, but they are also "sensitive" at UI and usability issues, so we could also call them "usability engineers". Aaron is the head of usability in the KDE project. All three of them were... brave enough to answer twelve hard questions about interoperability, standards, UI etc. between the two leading Unix DEs. Note that this is not a Gnome Vs KDE article, it is in fact exactly the opposite: 'KDE for Gnome' and 'Gnome for KDE'. The begining of a deeper collaboration and sharing that will bring the Unix desktop into a new era.

Omni Group is well known to most Mac users and NeXT ones back in the day. Omni Group today is a MacOSX-only company, writting high quality applications in Cocoa, apps like OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and 3D game ports. Today, we talked to its CEO, Ken Case, about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari and the future.

This weekend was the official launch of a brand new platform, by Genesi. New platforms are rare these days, so this one is something to watch out for. MorphOS is a fully 32bit, pre-emptively multi-tasking operating system for the PowerPC range of CPUs, and is included with each Pegasos motherboard sold. We have some information about the system, three screenshots, and we also talked to Nicholas Blachford, Eclipsis project manager about MorphOS.

Arguably, the new unified UI on Red Hat 8 was the talk of the town for the whole summer since the Limbo betas. Today we talk with two of the leading people behind Red Hat's enhanced usability and UI found on 8.0-Psyche, Havoc Pennington (also known for his work on the Metacity window manager) and Owen Taylor (lots of cool stuff on XFree's side). We discuss about XFree and its capabilities, about Linux's ability to fullfil a modern desktop for every user, about the unification of Qt and GTK+ and more.

It is always an honour to interview people who have 'served' and worked on operating systems at the "golden" times of the operating systems, the '80s and pre-Win9x days. Today we interview Adam de Boor, who was the CTO at GeoWorks, developers of the GEOS, in the begining of the last decade. Adam today works for OpenWave Systems. We discuss about GeoWorks, its past, its future, where it should have been.

We've had a couple of conversations with the very affable Greg Estes, SGI's VP of Corporate Marketing, over the past couple of months. Here they are patched together. Greg talks to us about SGI, Hollywood, tough financial times, Linux, and everything. On related news, SGI now owns a... world record.

TheKompany is one of the very few companies creating truly multi-platform products, even if they are mostly a Linux/KDE company. Among their products you will find Aethera, Kapital, BlackAdder and a whole lot of apps for embedded Linux, mostly for the Sharp Zaurus PDA. Today we are happy to host an interview with the company's president, Shawn Gordon. Dive in and read our interesting chat with Shawn about their products, Linux's future, Qt and KDE, porting to OSX, their embbeded apps etc.

The news from the Gobe Software front seem to be slightly sad, but only at first glance. Sad because, Gobe as we know it is no more, as it sold the gobeProductive source code and rights to FreeRadicalSoftware, Inc. However, FreeRadicalSoftware's business plan requires them to GPL the popular office suite, allowing everyone to access gobeProductive's source for Windows, Linux and even BeOS. The official announcement is expected next week. FreeRadicalSoftware was created recently by the ex-boss of Gobe Software, Bruce Hammond, and some other ex-Gobe and non-Gobe people. Read more for our exclusive interview with Bruce regarding the open sourcing of GP3 under the GPL.
Update: And an additional comment from Gobe's Tom Hoke.

If there are two individuals in the Linux game scene today that they brought a lot and very good Free games to all Linux users, these should be Michael Speck of LGames and Bill Kendrick of NewBreedSoftware. Their games have been played not only by Linux users, but by users on all major platforms via the portability of the SDL game library. Today, we interview Michael Speck, regarding his games, his opinions about the Linux game market, about Linux's performance as a multimedia platform, his future plans and much more.

As the founder and leader of the GNOME Foundation, Miguel is one of the foremost luminaries in the Linux development community. He brings this same excitement to his role as CTO of Ximian. Miguel was instrumental in porting Linux to the SPARC architecture and led development of the Midnight Commander file manager and the Gnumeric spreadsheet. He is also a primary author of the design of the Bonobo component model, which leads the way in the development of large-scale applications in GNOME. Today, his primary project is Mono. Read more for an exclusive mini-interview with Miguel.

OSNews today hosts a very interesting interview with Xandros' Vice President Michael A. Bego, discussing about the new Xandros Desktop and Server 1.0, the Linux market, Microsoft and a lot more. Read more to also see a full size screenshot of the Xandros Desktop too.

OSNews is pleased to host today an exclusive interview with Waldo Bastian, the well known KDE developer and SuSE employee. Waldo has been involved pretty much in all levels in KDE's code, from Konqueror to kdelibs, to games and Kicker. Waldo speaks today about the success of KDE, its future, UnitedLinux, development and much more.

David Dawes is maybe the most active XFree86 developer and he is also the lead founder of the project. He works for Tungsten Graphics, which is the main company working on the XFree, DRI and Mesa codebases today. We are happy to host an interview with David, discussing the present and future of XFree86 project. Update: Still confused how a VSYNCed desktop look like? Read here.