“For anyone who follows Linux desktop development, today’s
announcement by Cambridge, Massachusetts startup Helix Code is
hardly a shock: the company, cofounded by well-known GNOME
developers Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, will ship and maintain
a “latest-and-greatest” easy-install GNOME binary distribution. But
the release also lays the groundwork for a far more ambitious
project, one that aims to plug a gaping hole in the Linux
desktop….”
“The new GNOME binaries rolled out today are the red carpet that
applications like Evolution will step onto a few weeks from now.
Helix Code’s software will be based on a componentized, open source
architecture designed to promote both flexibility and
ease-of-development – thus encouraging other developers and
companies to contribute improvements and new applications – with
the distribution’s standard set of desktop libraries serving as the
supporting layer between Linux and Evolution….”
“The GNOME components, originally written by de Icaza to provide
an fully GPLed alternative to KDE, are noticeably faster and more
efficient than their Windows-based counterparts. Moreover, Friedman
touts the component-based flexibility of Helix Code’s software,
which enables users (or their administrators) to process email or
calendar events through other applications, or even through a Perl
script. “We’re creating Unix pipes for the millennium,” Friedman
jokes, “except that instead of text, we’re passing data objects,
and the data can go both ways….”