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Timothy Ney Hired As Gnome Foundation Director
Leslie Proctor writes: "The GNOME Foundation announced today that they have hired Timothy Ney as Executive Director. Tim is well known in the Free software community for his work with the FSF. More details at www.gnome.org." The actual press release is online, as well as Gnome news. Having worked/talked with Tim before, this is great news for The Gnome Foundation -- Tim's an incredible guy.
...this discussion won't degenerate into millions of posts yelling "Tim Ney! TIM NEY!!"
Between Covad, Loki, and god knows who else having financial trouble, it's really nice to see a company going in the right direction and hiring people. Especially in an area where Linux has been labeled as lacking, namely in the GUI department. I can't wait to see what GNOME has in store next. Good luck and congrats Tim!
I posted to
What a cool statistic! Now I'm really interested to see this statistic for KDE. Somehow I get the impression that the number of paid KDE developers is smaller than 100.
How is it that KDE is keeping up with them then? (surpassing, even, IMHO) Greater support from non-paid developers? Perhaps I am wrong about the number of paid KDE developers.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I'm having trouble believing that this Gnome-related story wasn't ended with a "Personally, I use Konqueror..." or "...even though KDE does blah blah....".
I think this is a first, ladies and gentlemen.
ZERO
I think the reason is political. KDE has a loose policy where lots of developers contribute what they want and the kore team accepts whatever meets their standards and has a logical place in KDE.
GNOME on the other hand is an official GNU project and subject to the squabbles that accompany that official political role. The developers get into arguments a lot more and it is much less clear to developers if their work will be applauded or ignored. Under the circumstances, they do pretty well.
Even for paid developers, who is to say that Ximian, Sun and Red Hat want the same thing as RMS and the steering comittee.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
KDE has it's base done (very well) by a whole other group called Trolltech. They make QT, and that leaves the KDE team to focus on things like Konqueror, Koffice, and all the other things that make up the desktop.
indeed.
Met him in World Social Forum 2000.
Will be better if the FSF got a team to work full time in GNUStep, IMHO, the next big thing, and technically better that gnome.
Linux is far from dying. As I see it, the OS is growing in popularity. There are dozens of new companies taking part in development for Linux which you don't have the slightest idea about.
About about Linux's final survival as a hobbyist OS - it was created from there and so it ain't so bad if it were still there. It's not gonna die anytime soon, particularly it's not dead! you windoze lover.
NB I am a FreeBSD user, but I get sick of hearing FUD like this - which I know is flaimebait
With the Foundation at 1.0, and the AppKit reaching it, all that GNUstep needs is a working Project Builder/Interface Builder and it will be the ultimate development environment for Linux, and hell, Unix in general. Not to mention, GNUstep is nearly source-compatible with MacOS X, so GNUstep could open a HUGE amount of software to be ported over to Unix from MacOS X.
For example. . . "eventssuch", "anadvocate", "toorganizations"
That should change after KDE 3 is released, since the API will remain stable (binary-compatible even!) for some time, allowing an application base to build up. I think it was the big change from KDE 1 to KDE 2 that made KDE fall behind in the apps department, and GNOME will likely experience a similar phenomenon with its next major release, probably occurring within KDE 3's lifetime.
Unfortunately, KDE 3 will break binary compatibility with KDE 2, which will definitely hurt KDE's application base; KDE 3 will have both API changes and use the new TrollTech Qt 3.0.
From the Linux Kernel Cousin archives "The Road Ahead: KDE after 2.2":
there was concern over third party developers as Waldo Bastian noted saying, "Although I understand the advantages, in general I think that major version updates are very bad for KDE because it fragmentates the efforts of third party developers. There are plenty of applications out there that have never been ported to KDE 2, hell, even in our own CVS we have tons of applications that still have to be properly adapted. (grep for QDialog to see what I mean) In think that KDE's current strength is its framework and that actual applications are its weak points. Moving to Qt 3 is a huge improvement for the framework, but it puts a strain on application developers. Development can go too fast as well, you know. Having a great KDE 3 desktop is nice, but not if we lose all application developers in the process."
cpeterso
holy crap! I almost thought you said "Timothy Rue!" the delusional comp.sys.amiga.misc troll!
(-1,Tim Rue)
Its the underlying library Qt. It supports C++ natively, and is developed by a company and a large team of paid developers. This makes people write KDE software.
I prefered a lot of things about GNOME, but wanted to write object-oriented C++, and unfortunatley, Gtk-- is written by a single developer, and doesn't seem to develop as fast. Its possible that a product done by a company could have longer longevity than a product by a single individual too.
So I went to Qt.
</joke>
"Unfortunately, KDE 3 will break binary compatibility with KDE 2, which will definitely hurt KDE's application base; KDE 3 will have both API changes and use the new TrollTech Qt 3.0."
GCC 3 also breaks binary compatibility
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I think the Abiword developers would disagree with you there. Abiword is part of Gnome Office. Its a testament to abiwords interoperability and cross platform status that you dont think its a gnome app, its a shame more Gnome apps dont try as hard to be cross platform.
http://news.gnome.org/998345737/
read this, scroll down to that big comment done by an user and read the truth behind gnome.
From kde-common/accounts
To be fair the number is slightly to large (you have to reduce the number by about 3).
06.07.00 329
10.08.00 344
29.09.00 360
06.10.00 366
21.11.00 391
10.12.00 402
16.01.01 415
23.02.01 431
22.03.01 454
20.04.01 471
19.05.01 486
18.06.01 506
25.07.01 529
21.08.01 546
As much as I apreciate the KDE efforts, I don't want Gnome to be left behind. What I like about GTK+/Gnome is that in contrast to Qt/KDE it is far easier to use in non-C++ languages. There a zillion of language bindings for GTK+/Gnome out, so I have the freedom to write for it in the language of my choice - hey, I can even use Haskell do write GTK+ apps :-)
Besides, I like the fact that Gnome performs notably faster and less memory consumpting on smaller machines (my notebook comes to mind) - as long as you don't use Nautilus.
BTW, any news on Nautilus? Although it's very bloated, I like that thing. Don't let it fade...
Yeah, this...
Binary incompatibility is unavoidable, since GCC 3.0 isn't binary compatible with GCC 2.x. KDE is simply using the opportunity to break everything at once instead of having several smaller breaks which would be much worse.
The API changes will be very minor. In fact, most KDE programs will probably be able to be ported with a Perl script or something similar. The idea is not to change the API so much as fix known problems with it in preparation for keeping it frozen for the future. This will be nothing at all like the KDE/QT 1 -> KDE/QT 2 change.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}