Editorial Prize

by Miguel de Icaza

My friend Mancha (Fernando Magari�os) worked for two years on and off doing the typography for a physics book in Mexico, and the book was just awarded the prize for the best typesetting, layout and editing in Mexico.

Mancha composed the book with TeX. Will post links when I have them.

Posted on 27 Nov 2003


Sun's Linux Desktop in China

by Miguel de Icaza

Congratulations to Sun on getting the deal with the government of China. We are competitors, but still the software they are delivering is open source.

I know various of the hackers and developers at Sun that have worked hard on this: on Gnome, in OpenOffice and Java, and I am glad that their hard work is going to in such a large deployment.

A few years ago, we met with John Heard and Marco Boerries who were working on various angles of Sun on the desktop. It was back then that John had seen a future for Gtk+ as an ISV platform, and that Marco would bring up the idea of open sourcing StarOffice (which we have been very excited about contributing to). They wanted to see Gnome mature: and they were two important driving forces for the establishment of the Gnome Foundation. Through all these years of work, Sun has funded big parts of development of various components of the open source.

Despite all the criticism they get from Jonathan Schwartz quotes about Linux, Sun is a massive contributor to the open source pool. OpenOffice alone is a big chunk of functionality. But their daily involvement in Gnome 2 has been a pleasure to watch: they were the first to push Gnome to be fully accessible to comply with government regulations.

Anyways, good luck to our competitors. Tonight is a big win: at least 1.3 billion people will be running Evolution.

Royalty-Free Office XML file formats

Microsoft announced the specs for the XML markup for Office, and they are royalty free. The actual license text contains:

If you distribute, license or sell a Licensed Implementation, this license is conditioned upon you requiring that the following notice be prominently displayed in all copies and derivative works of your source code and in copies of the documentation and licenses associated with your Licensed Implementation:

"This product may incorporate intellectual property owned by Microsoft Corporation. The terms and conditions upon which Microsoft is licensing such intellectual property may be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odcXMLRef/html/odcXMLRefLegalNotice.asp?frame=true."

By including the above notice in a Licensed Implementation, you will be deemed to have accepted the terms and conditions of this license. You are not licensed to distribute a Licensed Implementation under license terms and conditions that prohibit the terms and conditions of this license.

It appears that the above *might* be incompatible with the GPL. It sounds like the BSD advertisement requirement. Further study is needed to really understand the issues.

Posted on 18 Nov 2003


Chema Celorio, we will miss you

by Miguel de Icaza

Chema Celorio, a good friend for the past four years died yesterday on a skydiving accident in Mexico City.

The Gnome folks might remember Chema for taking over gEdit, the Gnome Printing platform and later on managing the Ximian team in Mexico and the Ximian Desktop effort. He was became famous for being the #1 bug reporter to Gnumeric, and a close friend to everyone that met him.

He helped bring newbies by fueling the Gnome-Love project, a project, where developers would be hand-hold, and no question was too simple to be asked.

Chema was passionate about skydiving, technology and free software. He was preparing for a mexican record of skydiving in the upcoming weeks. We had dinner frequently when he was in town, and he would always ask the right questions, and make us laugh all.

Just two weeks ago Maria and I had him for dinner at home, and we taught him to cook crepes. We will miss him.

There is a skydiver's forum: in Mexico.

Chema was thinking about moving to Europe.

I have a few pictures I took from Chema, from Barcelona in September: here, here, here, here, here and here.

Nat has a picture of Chema last year at the Cave.

Nat comments

Posted on 10 Nov 2003


Back from the PDC

by Miguel de Icaza

Am back in Boston from the PDC. Lots of improvements to the .NET Framework in the short-term, and some very interesting but still early work for the long term.

Will post all my notes on Monday, once I decompress.

Posted on 01 Nov 2003


Vietnam goes Open Source

by Miguel de Icaza

The Vietnameese government goes Open Source. WOW

Posted on 30 Oct 2003


Mono Get Together at the PDC

by Miguel de Icaza

Mono people: Lets get together on Tuesday 28th at 6pm at the West Tower Lobby in the LA Conventions Center at the PDC to discuss Mono. Pass the message.

After this we can head over to the "Meet the Experts" session at 7pm.

Posted on 28 Oct 2003


More Mono at the PDC

by Miguel de Icaza

Tomorrow we will devise a plot to get more people interested in Mono to get together; My plan right now is to take over one of those empty areas around 7pm and just get together around the tables. I spotted a few places that seem to be deserted, will confirm tomorrow, and we can have a massive Mono love-fest.

Posted on 27 Oct 2003


Mono Meeting tonight

by Miguel de Icaza

The fine folks at the `Microsoft and Academia' BOF have welcomed us to participate on their track so we can discuss Mono from an academic perspective.

The BOF is at 7pm at the Conventions Center.

BOF Patching

We just arrived to the PDC, and we put open source in practice and did some patching of the BOF announcements to reflect the Mono session.

Posted on 26 Oct 2003


PDC time

by Miguel de Icaza

After a nice evening improving the new System.Drawing foundation built by Alexandre am ready for some airplane hacking. Will be arriving early to LA for the Microsoft PDC.

In LA

I have arrived to LA, we are staying at the Hyatt, feel free to leave messages to get in touch with me. and Lluis will be arriving later today.

C# 2.0 specs have been published

The language specs for C# have been published

Posted on 24 Oct 2003


GDI+

by Miguel de Icaza

As I upgraded the hard drive on my machine today --which took a few hours to copy the rats' nest that is my home directory-- I begun the process of assimilating the GDIPlus Flat API.

A few weeks ago, Alexandre Pigolkine, Jordi Mas and myself were discussing the development roadblocks that we had with System.Drawing (as part of the Windows.Forms effort). The problem is that we made one of the most common engineering mistakes: when faced with the issue of multiple choices, instead of choosing one, we chose them all.

Being seasoned C# developers, we created an internal interface, and had each backend implement the interface. Then the official System.Drawing API was implemented and it became a multiplexor for the various implementations. We had Win32, Xr and Gtk backends. Of course the issue is that improving the backends becomes fairly hard: a change has to be reflected in five places: three backends, the interface and the multiplexing call site. Not terribly hard for one or two API calls, but it starts to become hard with an API as big as this one. I take all the blame for the mistake.

After some discussion, we decided on a new strategy: System.Drawing would only have one implementation, and this implementation would be based on GDI+. On Windows, the implementation would just call into the real GDI+ library, and on Unix systems we would provide a full implementation of it. To implement GDI+ on Unix, we have based our implementation on Cairo which has pretty much the same imaging model that GDI+ (and PDF) have.

This has several advantages: we maintain and write less code; we can test against the real GDI+ implementation on Windows and remove a variable in the debugging process; and we can contribute this code back to the Wine project.

But plenty of assumptions we had made before do not apply necessarily now. Before we had a managed implementation of the image loaders: it was just as fast as the C code and by virtue of being C# code, by extension it was cooler. But now in this GDI+ world, we will move things like the image loaders into the C code API, and the C# code will become thin wrappers around it.

The above also explains why there is a regression in Windows.Forms and System.Drawing on CVS as opposed to the latest official Mono release. So now I should be able to assist the System.Drawing developers.

Mono Installers

The upcoming Mono not only will add Cairo as a depedency (if you care about System.Drawing), but our internationalization support will also require the International Components for Unicode library.

We will continue to provide packages on Red Carpet, and RPMs on the site for downloading, but we are seriously considering reusing the Ximian Desktop installer to install Mono on a machine. That means that instead of downloading a dozen packages from our site, you would only download one. This hopefully will reduce the number of problems that people have with installations and we would also ship the Apache module pre-configured in the distribution.

Duncan is researching this, and we will keep people posted.

Posted on 21 Oct 2003


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