so why doesnt Shuttleworth buy Borland IDE
Everyone knows that the Gnome/KDE GUI toolkits are a mess, so why doesnt Shuttleworth put his money where his mouth is and create a common GUI standard for Linux. Borland has been trying to sell their IDE product division for a long time, that could be a pretty high end starting point. Its already proven as fast and streamlined. And maybe it could be integrated with Eclipse.
a Reg article about Borland can be seen here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/david_intersimone_embarcadero/
@Edward Rose
----"Likewise, have a common db that local installs can list what files they use, so the package manager can check it's own db (regardless of format) and the 'local install' db to see what files are loose. It would be simple to write a script to handle the install of ANY software then."------
OK, sounds good, so why doesnt someone in the Linux community do it? I say someone (like Shuttleworth) and not everyone because the average open source dev is only interested do-it-yourself geeky devtools, and not serving the general public. Shuttleworth is going to have to shoulder the burden himself if he wants anything serious to get done.