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No GNOME For Solaris 9

Posted by Hemos on from the bad-news-for-the-boys-of-gnome dept.

Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."

5 of 481 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Do we Really Need Gnome? by corky6921 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "do we need all that prettyness and niceness eating cpu cycles on a webserver?"

    If Sun ever wants to compete with Microsoft's point-and-click server GUI, the answer is a wholehearted YES. That's the big reason why Sun bought Cobalt... they needed a server with a point-and-click interface. Think about it: as a small business owner with 3 employees, none of whom are very technical, which solution would you buy? A solution that requires you to keep a UNIX sysadmin at least part-time, or a system that allows your secretary to set up distribution lists in her spare time by going to a website? The second group is what Microsoft markets to, and Sun needs an offering that can compete. That's why they are simplifying things with web-based tools and now with GNOME.

  2. That would make no commercial sense for Sun. by mj6798 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If Sun shipped KDE, they'd be shipping a desktop based on a toolkit that another company has complete commercial control over. Anybody who wants to write commercial software for Sun and fit in with the "standard" desktop would have to pay thousands of dollars to Troll Tech. And if TrollTech wanted to, they could jack up their commercial license fees for Solaris to whatever limit the market will bear. It just doesn't make sense for Sun to place the keys and toll-gate for commercial desktop application development on their platform in the hands of some company they have no control over.

    Sun would have to get a transferable binary license for Qt on Solaris, but even then, they'd be the only UNIX vendor standardizing on Qt. Or, Sun would have to buy TrollTech outright, likely to be an expensive proposition.

    Sticking with Motif makes sense: it's very widely used commercially (far more than Qt), there are lots of widgets and tools for it, it is a de-facto standard, and Sun already has rights to it. There are also several C++-based APIs for Motif. (Technically, I think Qt and Motif is a toss-up, but that's another matter.)

    1. Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun. by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 5, Insightful

      • Third party: "Hello, Sun? We like your operating system and would like to modify our application to fully intigrate with it."

        Sun: "It is GPL."

        Third Party: "But our application is commercial. Can't we link to the underlying libraries without being affected by the GPL."

        Sun: "No, you can't do that, that would require the LGPL, like what Gtk has."

        Third Party: "Why isn't Qt LGPL?"

        Sun: "Because it is owned by Troll Tech. They charge flat fees for commerical development. You will have to contact them to find out the costs for developing commercial apps which take advantage of our GUI."

        Third party: "What's to stop them from charging royalties in the future?"

        Sun: "Nothing."

        Third party: "uhhh... Thanks, bye."


      This IMHO, is why Gnome has all the commercial support, and no matter how technically superior KDE is, as long as Troll Tech controls commercial development for the GUI, KDE will always be a fringe desktop environment.... even if that means that Linux never makes it to the desktop.

      Just like Sun decided, the only option was their old GUI was CDE or Gnome.

  3. Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? by mj6798 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If Sun adopted KDE/Qt, they'd let another company set the cost for any commercial GUI development on Solaris that integrates with the standard desktop. The cost would instantly be much higher than it is now, it would be much higher than competing platforms, and there is no guarantee that it wouldn't go up even further since Sun has no control over TrollTech's pricing or development direction.

  4. I seriously don't believe it by GauteL · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Watch me get modded down to hell for this.

    I've never seen such a huge amount of trolls getting modded up with insightful before. Is this just because the average Slashdot-user is a KDE-fan, or do you seriously think these deserve insightful:

    1. Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Rant) (Score:4, Insightful): (..)"In my experience Gnome was a dysfuntional, unstable pig of a desktop, full of garbage apps were a pain to use and rarely worked correctly"(..)

    Constructive criticism is always good, this is just trashing, which I cannot understand, having tried out CDE.

    2. 5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete (Score:3, Insightful) (..)"GNOME is based on the GTK+ library, which was fine for its day, but is now decidedly outdated. (..)It doesn't offer exciting components like KParts, KDE's analog to COM. The closes thing to that will be Bonobo, but its development is far behind even GNOME 2's release schedule and won't make it in until at least 2003."(..)

    First. GTK+ still works fine, besides there might be a reason why GNOME 2.0 will be using GTK+ 2.0 instead of GTK+ 1.2. Second. Qt doesn't offer KParts, KDE does. GTK+ does not offer Bonobo, Gnome does. Besides Bonobo is already out in stable versions, and has been used extensively by Nautilus, Evolution and Gnumeric.

    3. Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:4, Insightful): "Why does Sun continue to ignore KDE as a viable alternative to GNOME. KDE is very mature and incredibly stable. I don't see why Sun doesn't just go forward with packaging it with Solaris. Do they stick with GNOME because it's built on a 100% free toolkit? What's the driving force? As far as I can see, KDE is a solution to many of the problems Sun's UI trials of GNOME came up with. It just doesn't make sense... for one thing, if they want easy of use, KDE is much nicer than GNOME, IMHO."

    This is not so much of a troll, as uninformed, and I don't object much to the posting, I object to it being modded up to heaven just because the crowd loves KDE.

    • SUN has already invested lots of money and effort into GNOME
    • SUN employees are much more comfortable with C than C++
    • SUN happen to like Gnome (WHAT???)
    • Gnome is also very stable and quite mature. KDE is not better at all areas

    I realize being objective is hard when you have a situation like this, but please don't just mod up people because you agree. Mod people because they argue well and have thoughtful and well written comments.