GNOME has certainly come a long way since you were a major part of it. We assume you are no longer contributing to that project full-time? Can you tell us what you think of how GNOME has evolved and where it’s going?
I continue to use GNOME on a daily basis, and I continue to be amazed at the work that the entire community is doing.
GNOME is very well run. The project has managed to create various work groups that focus on the different areas of the project, from internationalisation, to usability, to accessibility, to application development to the promotion of the open source Linux desktop. It has grown into a very solid project, and the GNOME Foundation has played a very important role in its evolution.

What’s changed the most about Linux since you began working on it back in the Nineties?
For one, we went from a couple of hundred users to millions of users. I think that Linux did spearhead the open source revolution. Linux was the project that rallied the community to create a full open source operating system and which unleashed the creativity and got people thinking about many new ideas.

Today open source is everywhere, and I do not think it would have gotten here had it not been for the drive of all the individuals that felt very passionate back in the early Nineties to create a fully open source stack. The new users do not necessarily understand where some of us come from. When we started, barely anything worked. But we used open source and contributed to open source projects to make a difference and invent the future. Just the other day somebody was complaining that our Moonlight project was not finished and that we might as well give up. He later admitted that he started using Linux in 2007.

I think that we are in direct control of our future, now more than ever, and that great ideas and great innovations will continue to be created in the open source world and will continue to reach users everywhere. Many of the ideas that were pioneered in open source and the open source desktop ended up being adopted by the larger proprietary operating systems. We all borrow ideas from each other, but open source has given developers a chance to explore new ideas in areas that were previously locked down.

SUSE seems to be continually playing second fiddle to Red Hat. Is there any reason you think the public is so infatuated with Red Hat? How can SUSE make itself more distinctive, or is it already distinctive in ways that it may not be getting credit for?
I think that having a diverse ecosystem where multiple distributions exist is a good thing for Linux. I said that in the past about the major operating systems as well. It is not healthy to have a single provider, so I envision a world where we have a mix of Windows, OS X, Linux and various flavours of Linux.

In particular, having multiple versions of Linux allows innovation to take place in different directions. We have seen this over and over in the Linux space, and this will help all of the players come to the table to agree on fundamental issues like binary compatibility, common kernels and common infrastructure libraries.