Ximian
Products
Information regarding the Ximian product line can be accessed by visiting the following.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (latest generation of what once was Ximian Desktop plus SUSE Linux Desktop)
- Novell Evolution
- ZENworks Linux Management (formerly Red Carpet)
Resources
Ximian resources can be accessed by visiting the following.
History
Ximian®, now a part of Novell, was the leading provider of desktop and server solutions helping to enable enterprise Linux adoption all over the world. Ximian offered a complete Linux desktop environment and productivity application suite as well as enterprise software management solutions to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying and maintaining Linux systems. Ximian products, in use by over 2,000,000 people worldwide, provided the interoperability, management functionality and ease of use required to integrate Linux users and systems into mixed corporate computing environments.
Ximian had its genesis in the GNOME project, which was initiated in 1997 by Miguel de Icaza, Ximian's cofounder, now Vice President of Product Technology for Novell. The effort quickly attracted a group of talented architects and engineers, including Nat Friedman, Ximian cofounder and now Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Open Source for Novell.
The GNOME project was a breakthrough open source community effort drawing on the efforts of hundreds of contributing developers worldwide to produce an open source graphical user interface and essential desktop productivity applications for UNIX, Linux and other free systems. In October of 1999, de Icaza and Friedman founded Ximian (then called Helix Code), attracting many of the leading architects of the GNOME system, to create additional open source products, services and development tools based for GNOME.
Since its inception, Ximian moved rapidly to spur industry adoption of the Linux platform and the GNOME desktop. In August 2000, Ximian helped drive the formation of the GNOME Foundation, which today includes industry leaders Novell, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Red Hat, HP and others. In August 2003, Ximian was acquired by Novell, Inc. becoming a fundamental component of Novell's Linux strategy.
Now with the backing, endorsement and resources of Novell, key members of Ximian continue to play a central role in the open source community, providing leadership and core technology to key open source projects and industry groups, including GNOME, the Free Software Foundation, and the Mono Project, a community initiative to develop an open source, Linux-based version of the Microsoft.NET development platform.
