Sun Increases Commitment to GNOME

Ur@eus writes "Mark McLoughlin of Sun mailed the gnome-hackers mailing-list today announcing the deal between Sun, Ximian and Wipro. The deal means that Wipro will assign up to 50 people to work on GNOME including hackers, QA people, documenters and more. These hackers come in addition to the Sun hackers already working on GNOME at their Desktop Division in Ireland. The official announcement from Sun will come in a few days."

Comments

all I go to say about this

[the_2nd_coming]

Cool.......soon, Gnome will be the best DTE around, undisputed. Hell right now, Gnome seems to have cleaner interface than KDE.

one of the things about KDE is that they have all these cool technologies, but they are not implimented by any one...what good is it if it is not used?

Re:all I go to say about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain to us how KDE is 'better' than GNOME. What can you do in KDE which I can't do in GNOME?

KDE's killer app is called Konqueror, and it should ke called KExplorer.

Re:all I go to say about this

[Lonath]

Please explain to us how KDE is 'better' than GNOME. What can you do in KDE which I can't do in GNOME?

I don't think that "What can you do that I can't do?" is the question. It's "What can be done in KDE easier than in GNOME?"

In KDE, if you want to create a custom widget, you create a class derived from a known base widget: You add a few variables and a few methods, and maybe a callback signal or two and you're on your merry way. It seemed like this process was much more painful in GNOME when I looked at it. What is the process of creating custom widgets in GNOME? When I looked at it, it looked much more complex and contrived. I look at it as the compiler is dealing with a lot of the details that I don't want to worry about.

Is anyone else confused by this?

[oooooops]

Okay, let me be sure I understand this - Miguel and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which is an open source implementation of .NET - which was developed to compete with Sun's Java - and Sun's throwing developers at this? No wonder why they are hurting so bad right now at Sun - wake up and smell the java Sun...

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, You beat me to the post :)

Seriously tho, what the hell are they thinking?
Does this mean they have given up? You'd think they'd be making press announcements about KDE becoming the official desktop after Miguel's comments.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[JanneM]

Ummm, no. Gnome isn't, and will never be "based on mono". Mono may become just another way to develop gnome apps, along with C/C++, Perl, Python and so on.

/Janne

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[restive]

Good point.
On the other hand, Sun doesn't always think through their decisions and announcements, and later changes their minds. However, they were planning on releasing Solaris 9 with GNOME originally. Now, it looks like it will be bundled in a later release of the OS.

What they're really trying to do is give people a classier environment than CDE bundled with the OS. At least that's my opinion. If the performance of GNOME/Solaris ever equals GNOME/Linux, I'll be surprised.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

And Java is not even in the list

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Spirilis]

Except for the java-gnome project java-gnome.sourceforge.net
which, unfortunately, I had nil luck compiling (just the java-gtk part) on my Debian 2.2 system the other day...
but still, I would LOVE to be able to write GTK/GNOME apps in Java :-)

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think they'd be making press announcements about KDE becoming the official desktop after Miguel's comments.

Yeah, you KDEers wish.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[miguel]

I do not think you have understood my position when it comes to Mono and GNOME yet. There is a detailed explanation about this here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002- February/msg00031.html

The short version of this is:

* I do not have any maintainership control over any piece of GNOME anymore.

* I like everyone else have an opinion on how GNOME would benefit the most.

* People will be free to use the tools the Mono project produces or not use them.

* Mono will integrate with GNOME right away, just like say, Java/GNOME is integrated with GNOME right away.

* So I believe that building apps with Mono will be a nice experience for people in the GNOME world.

I like different technologies from different companies. I like the .NET Framework a lot more than I like the Java platform, but that is my personal choice; And I do like the UltraSparc cpu over any other cpu, and I still love the fact that my IBM laptop is so cheap ;-)

So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies. There are choices for everyone to pick from.

Miguel.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, but how does this help me build a better mousetrap?

I thought so.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[allenw]

IIRC, Sun committed to GNOME 2.0 shipping with Solaris. Since Solaris 9's gate is going to be closing in a few weeks, GNOME 2.0 won't be ready by then to actually integrate, test, and ship with the first cut of Solaris 9.

[Which illustrates a difference between open and closed source: with closed source, you actually have a date that you have to meet and produce a product. To make that date, sometimes you have to cut features/additions/etc.]

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[HeUnique]

Although I'm on the KDE side - I would like to correct you on this issue:

Miguel has expressed his desire to use some parts of MONO inside Gnome 4.0 (and maybe 3.0 - not 2.0 which is in feature freeze state right now if I'm not mistaken)..

I congratulate Sun for contributing some work towards GNOME, making it better. Help for open source projects is always welcome...

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[tve]

[Which illustrates a difference between open and closed source: with closed source, you actually have a date that you have to meet and produce a product. To make that date, sometimes you have to cut features/additions/etc.]

No, which illustrates the difference between commercial and non-commercial software. Commercial software has deadlines, because commercial software needs to make money before the company producing it goes out of business. Non-commercial software doesn't have this problem and therefore may not have deadlines (it may have deadlines due to other reasons though).

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Wdomburg]

>Okay, let me be sure I understand this - Miguel
>and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which \
>is an open source implementation of .NET - which
>was developed to compete with Sun's Java - and
>Sun's throwing developers at this?

A few things:

The only developer who has said they are interested in making Gnome "based on" Mono is Miguel. Your inclusing of "and his gnomies" seems to imply that this is a widespread intention; it is not.

The term "based on" is misleading. As Miguel himself said:

Rewriting GNOME in C# with the CLR would be a
very bad idea, if not the worst possible idea
ever.

And furthermore Mono is being based on Gnome technologies, not the other way around:

Libart will be used to implement the
Drawing.2D API; Gtk+ and the GNOME libraries
will be used to implement the WinForms API and
of course Glib and libxml will be used in
various places

If anything, it would be more accurate to say that Mono is being offered as an alternate API for accessing the Gnome libraries, and that Miguel has belief that this API offers signifigant enough advantages that future code may be based on Mono, or embed the Mono runtime.

The next thing is that this has nothing to do with Gnome 2.0, which is the project that they will be working on. Miguel stated he would like to see Gnome 3.0 have Mono ties, but he has also stated that his guess is that Gnome 4.0 would be when developers start seeing the benefits of it.

And of course, the more important point - Miguel does not have maintainer control over ANY package in Gnome. He has long since given maintainership on every project he worked on to someone else.

What this means is that the only thing that will move Gnome to dependency on Mono is if it is reached as a consensus among the Gnome developers.

Matt

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[flacco]

So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies.

It's that rough anal sex from Microsoft I could do without.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[real_b0fh]

not me. I just hope that GNOME will still be what it its right now, without MONO dependencies. If not, think i'll have to stick with an old version, which will not be a real pain, since i'm still using 1.2.1 ;-) and i'm quite happy with it.

MONO/.NET tech seems to be overkill to me, especially on the kind of hardware I use atm.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[luge]

If the performance of GNOME/Solaris ever equals GNOME/Linux, I'll be surprised.
Part of the Sun work will involve serious performance analysis and work. Hopefully this will benefit both GNOME/Linux and GNOME/Solaris, but obviously it'll be focused on GNOME/Solaris, and should make GNOME/Solaris a lot snappier.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[jsse]

I like different technologies from different companies. I like the .NET Framework a lot more than I like the Java platform, but that is my personal choice; And I do like the UltraSparc cpu over any other cpu, and I still love the fact that my IBM laptop is so cheap ;-)

Oh I love Java platform a lot a lot more than .NET Framework, get me my flamethrower!!...but wait, isn't that freedom of choice we are long for?

Hat off to Gnome dudes! Way to go man!

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Ewan]

Interestingly, while Sun are funding a lot of Gnome development, IBM have already shipped AIX5L with both Gnome and KDE available alongside CDE as the desktop.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[bhsx]

I'm sure you've got better things to do than explain a month-old 'out of context' quote to everyone, but I really appreciated seeing you jump into the fray, as always. I have a question for you that has nothing to do with Mono... Have you tried the Rox file-manager/desktop? What are your impressions? I've just started using it, and love the direction it's going. Do you think we might see a 'gnome-lite' ditching some of the heavies like Nautilus for Rox or equivelent? I know I can obviously do this on my own without you; but I'm really curious what your impression of Rox is. I run a tiny little project we've dubbed The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project and I'm concidering ditching GNOME and KDE for the fast-as-hell Rox with sawfish/pygtk. Your impressions/comments are highly anticipated. Thanks.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[dhogaza]

MS has been notorious for late delivery (the NT replacement of the DOS Windows derivatives was originally scheduled for what, 1999? 2001, that's for sure).

Therefore WinXP must be 1) open source and 2) non-commercial.

Very cool ...

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

are you gay? nobody reads -1 posts except for other trolls anyways.

considering that, you are a XIMIAN NIGGER MONKEY&!^@#&*^&*!@^#&*@#

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Confronting the KDE propaganda machine.

oki choad, time to smash a stone to your head.

> The KDE project is famous for its funded and organised trolling of weblogs and
> message board associated with Linux and Free software/open source. Outrageous
> newbie impressing claims are made for the software and huge quanities of FUD
> are spread to destroy competitors. If this sounds familiar, then you are
> correct, most of these tactics were lifted straight from Microsoft's arsenal
> of dirty tricks. The Windows look and feel is not the only thing the KDE
> project has copied! In this short article I will address some of the lies and
> FUD spread by the KDE trolling teams. It is my hope that this, in some small
> way, will redress the balance and re-introduce two things almost eradicated by
> the KDE project: Honesty and facts.

shut up.

> * Myth #1 - KDE is more integrated than GNOME
> > The oft-heard cry of the noisiest KDE advocates. No explanation is given, the
> reader is expected to simply grok the wholesomeness of KDE and the lack of
> this mystical quality in GNOME. It is nonsense of course. Neither desktop is
> particularly "integrated" compared to Windows XP, and certainly not compared
> any version of the Apple Mac. Whatever "integrated" actually means.

yeah but compared to the other named ones KDE is not a commercial product, where rich companies put millions of money into the project. they pay for scienctists, big companies that does marketing research and stuff.

> * Myth #2 - KDE is easier to use
> > Again, such nebulous arguments are never explained, and the reader is expected
> to simply understand the truth of the zealots statement. Both KDE and GNOME
> have user-interface irritations (all systems do), but "ease of use" is not a
> simple thing to measure. KDE has never been subjected to detailed user
> testing, unlike GNOME [gnome.org], and the claims of user-friendliness are
> from crazed supporters and not average users. Furthermore, the KDE faithful
> rarely look beyond simple-minded copying of Windows, and forget that
> administering a desktop system is just as important as having widgets in the
> correct place on the toolbar. For example: What about application installation
> and removal? GNOME has the excellent RedCarpet by Ximian [ximian.com], which
> makes the installation, removal and updating of applications trivial. KDE
> users are expected to fend for themselves with brutal command line driven
> systems. GNOME also has the excellent Ximian setup tools to handle various
> tricky cross-platform and potentially risky system configuration operations.
> KDE offers none of this, only a few small half-assed Linux-only tools, which
> make no attempt at check-pointing to return to known working configurations.

you are mixing things here:

- redcarpet is a product by ximian. they move towards $$$ with redcarpet pro now to get some bucks for their support system.
- ximian is a company of its own they have NOTHING to do with GNOME. GNOME is an own project where some XIMIAN develops and depends on but generally we dont speak of XIMIAN GNOME (since XIMIAN is not the legitimate owner of GNOME)
- the idea behind redcarpet aint that bad but the problem is getting the packages just in time :)

> * Myth #3 - KDE is more popular
> > In what sense? Arguably more people use KDE, but it is a close run thing. Most
> KDE zealots use the results of online polls as proof of their superior
> userbase - which is, quite frankly, complete and utter nonsense. Online polls
> are the joke of the century; it doesn't even require a motivated script kiddie
> to render then worthless. A single post alerting the faithful on a
> zealot-ridden site can skew the result so much it makes American presidential
> elections look fair and well organised. Popularity is also difficult to
> measure when *both* GNOME and KDE are frequently installed on the same system.
> The systems can co-exist and even run at the same time, except for certain
> applications such as panels. Many KDE users actually run GNOME applications
> for their superior features and stability, not realising that by doing so they
> are barely running KDE at all.

yes, and no one has anything against mixing systems and software. no one said anything negative about that. but thats the problem if people had worked on one desktop as we gonna repeat this here. then there would have been powerfull apps for that desktop so there would be no need to mix applications but no... someone needed to start another desktop and reinvent the wheel with the apps. now the unix community in general are 20 steps back.

> One of the few solid measures of popularity is commercial use of a desktop,
> and here, GNOME is far ahead with both Hewlett Packard and Sun committing to
> using GNOME as the desktop for their Unix systems. This also ties in with the
> previously mentioned ease of use. Sun's major contribution to the GNOME
> project is in the areas of user/developer documentation, testing, accessiblity
> and user-testing. Three of the less glamourous parts of desktop development.
> The arrival of the GNOME 2.x series will see these contributions reach
> fruitition and allow GNOME to make a quantum leap ahead of KDE in most of the
> basic computer/user issues.

- yeah and dont you see it now ?
- dont you see the eyewashing things behind it ?
- didnt god gave you a brain to use ?

sun, redhat, ximian... these 3 companies work on gnome. as you correctly said SUN is acting as beeing the OWNER of gnome now. you read a lot of mails on a couple of gnome mailinglist where they act like 'NAZIS' giving orders and tell people what to do and what not (instead asking quietly). sun is following their own business interests here e.g. substitution of CDE with GNOME 2 (anyone realized why gnome 2 comes up looking like CDE default installation ?). practically gnome is already under their control, people from outside who wants to contribute or want to bring in their own ideas are beeing rejected. its opensource but the roadmap is clear so forking it is getting impossible not to mention that the developerbase is a closed community.

now some problems:

ximian wants .NET and C#. sun the inventopr of JAVA. now dont you think both will collide when it comes to gnome 3 or gnome 4 ?

> * Myth #4 - Konqueror is the best Linux browser
> > Oh for a penny every time this lie is told in any KDE story! Konqueror not a
> bad piece of software. It's authors deserve praise for the work done on it.
> However, the sheer amount of orgasmic gushing by the KDE faithful is
> completely out of proportion to its actual quality. It is quite unreliable
> and even simple standards compliant pages can crash it quite comprehensively
> It is also lax in its support of basic web standards compared to either
> Mozilla or Opera. It is also extremely slow - much slower than the latest
> incarnations of the GNOME Nautilus filemanager/browser (a target of much KDE
> FUD during its development).

you are a clueless person.

- konqueror is more than a browser it integrates browser, filemanager in a nice plugin system way AND it is FASTER than NAUTILUS. ask me i have tested all 3 versions. nautilus for gnome 1, nautilus for gnome 2 and konqueror for kde 3.
- nautilus on the otherhand is STILL unusable. ok definately faster under gnome 2 but accessing the menues with the changed new widgetset is QUITE UEBERSLOW. still not compareable to konqueror.

but dont worry, kde 3 offers a browser and filemanager at least. we on gnome 2 can wait months before we get a halfway usable browser not to mention that nautilus still sucks. if you dont belive me wait until the official release dates then you see how many persons actually rant about that.

> * Myth #5 - KDE applications are better/more advanced than GNOME ones due to
> the ease of developing in C++ using the Qt toolkit
> > See also: Qt/TrollTech. This is the most common wail heard by KDE developers,
> and yet it is easily disproved by looking at the actual applications for
> GNOME/GTK and KDE/Qt. KDE applications often have larger version numbers than
> GNOME ones... an old trick played by commerical software developers. Most KDE
> apps seem to jump for 1.x releases long before they are ready - KOffice being
> the best example. None of the components in Koffice are worthy of a 1.0
> release, let alone 1.1 or 1.2.

then get your ass moving and enchance the software. not to mention that using a OOP programminglanguage is the best decission for writing an entire DE the QT widgetsset is more enchanced QT3 with its new database support etc.

> GNOME applications get much more testing in their 0.x stages and despite
> shorter development phases they mature and reach stable featureful release
> states much more quickly. Some examples of this are: the superb Evolution
> (groupware/email), Gnumeric (spreadsheet), Pan (newsreader), The GIMP (image
> manipulation), Abiword (word processing), RedCarpet, X-Chat (IRC client), XMMS
> (media player), Galeon (web browser), and for developers: Glade and Anjuta.
> All of these packages ooze quality, and far outclass their KDE counterparts.
> It is no understatement to say that GNOME is at least 18 months ahead of KDE
> in applications, and pulling still further ahead.

sorry did you say testing ? dude i am into that shit better than you. lets pic that stuff out.

- evolution, ximian product. its gpl'ed but the exchange server support is what matters. thats the purpose why evolution is so (more or less good it is still full of bugs and the addressbook is worthless). ximian paid the evolution hackers to do this product for free they get the money from selling exchange stuff to customers and companies.

- oki gnumeric is perfect. no doubt.
- pan is GTK only so its not gnome related.
- the gimp is GTK only so its not gnome related.
- abiword is GTK with some support of GNOME mainly done by abisoftware a company that pay their employee so abiword finally is not gnome related it doesnt support the gnome framework at all.
- redcarpet: see evolution.
- xchat the chatclient with the most problems ever but oki i am using it myself now.
- XMMS is not gnome related.
- GALEON is indeed a good BROWSERFRONTEND but thats almost all on gnome i need to start 2 apps galeon to browse and nautilus to manage files on kde i have konqueror 2 things in one app not to mention it is mozilla independant. wait until gnome 2 comes out then wait another couple of months until the GECKO engine of mozilla is ported to gtk2+ currently mozilla native is ported to gtk2 but it still requires glib1 (so i need to install gtk1/glib1 and gtk2/glib2) to get mozilla compiled using gtk2. not to mention that the embedded gtk mozilla part is not yet done. blizzard is investigating into these things but they are not done and as long as this is not done as long you dont get a new galeon 2 for gnome 2. (oki galeon 2 is under development its nearly finished now because they #ifdef'ed the mozilla components out. temporarely you see a window with menues and full galeon support but no rendering engine in the middle of the window)

> It's not only in the area of user applications that GNOME is vastly more
> advanced. With the forthcoming 2.x release, a number of impressive behind the
> scenes technologies will finally mature: component technology (bonobo), media
> (Gstreamer), internationalisation (pango). As a developement platform, GNOME
> 2.x is, conservatively, 2-3 years ahead of KDE. And what is more, because it
> is not tied to a lowest common denominator cross-platform bloat-fest like the
> Qt toolkit, the lead (as with applications) can only increase further.

seriously no one belives this. even apes wont belive you. 2-3 years ahead ? 2-3 years back yes. gnome 2 will be slower than gnome 1 from UI usage. a lot of ports cant be done correctly just in time for gnome 2 so they mainly port some stuff now (because they are under highly pressure now) sure they have written a a lot of stuff new and changed a lot of the framework, doesnt change the fact that it is never 2-3 years ahead. while you stick on a gnome 2 desktop with no serious basic programs for a while (like email client and browser) you can use KDE3 fine without problems. all necessary applications are there already and you dont care if 1-2 applications still needs a while. on gnome you need to wait for the BITTER NEEDED tools. even gnome developers tell you to use gnome 1 with gnome 2 together. what crappy idea is this ? so why does one want gnome 2 at all if he still requires running gnome 1 to get his beloved applications running. even your beloved evolution (soon 1.2 will be out with soup and .NET) support wont be ported to gnome 2 until evolution 1.4 is out (which takes another couple of shit months).

> Yet despite all this, we are still regularly fed the lie that Qt and C++ makes
> application and desktop development easier. Judge for yourself.

i judged and my conclusion is that you are wrong.

> * Myth #6 - KDE is faster and takes less memory than GNOME
> > KDE is written in C++. While this is not necessarily a problem, it can be when
> Visual Basic reject programmers (which the KDE project is overrun with) do not
> know enough to avoid important pitfalls that plague C++ software projects.
> Stupid use of autoincrementing operators and iteration with C++ objects; and
> masses of unnecessary allocations and deallocations of memory are two of the
> most common. KDE suffers badly from both problems.

not to speak writing a widgetset in C like GTK that does raceconditions on the system over and over. not to mention about the garbage collector stuff within kde. a lot of gnome applications are leaking memory over and over because the coders are dump jerks.

> Perhaps the most cretinous of all problems is blaming the extremely slow
> startup times of KDE apps on GCC. The GNOME 1.x releases were hardly svelt
> (2.x fixes many of these issues), but GNOME is a fashion cat-walk superwaif
> when compared to KDE's 500lb fat-momma cheese-burger scoffing trailer trash.
> One need only look at the recent fuss over ugly KDE hacks (such as prelinking)
> used to bandage up the design and coding flaws in the decrepit KDE
> architecture to see the truth.

try some sex dude.

> * Myth #7 - GNOME development is slower. KDE releases faster.
>
> Fundamental misunderstanding. The KDE project releases as one big lump of code
> due to its use of C++ and the many problems this causes with libraries. The
> project bumps the version number of the entire KDE system for the smallest
> modifications. GNOME, on the other hand is componentized and each component
> releases on a (almost) separate schedule, bumping it's own version number but
> not the main GNOME version (1.4, for example). Occasional releases of the
> entire GNOME system happen, and that's when the GNOME version number is bumped
> (currently it is at 1.4). To see this in action, use RedCarpet and you will
> regular updates to GNOME components. GNOME development is not slower, it is in
> fact faster and more advanced. Lamers and newbies, however, fail to understand
> the advantages of this method and just see KDE 1.1.1 followed a few weeks
> later by KDE 1.1.2. Wow! KDE roolz.

hahaha you gave me a final laugh dude:

i like the way kde release stuff. they take their time, get the stuff working and do some intensive testing before releasing packages. gnome in the otherside does exactly the different here an example of gnome-utils changelof for gnome 1.4:

- changelog:

01-01-2002 - added de.po, hk.po (version changed to 1.4.0.6)
20-12-2001 - changed some *.c and *.h files (version changed to 1.4.0.5)

what i want to say is they change some minor fucking unworthy to mention things and bump the version. same for gnumeric once you get gnumeric compiled and installed, go to ftp.gnome.org and leech another new version.

> * Myth #8 - The Qt toolkit is cross-platform and yet takes advantage of each
> individual platform
> > The Qt toolkit (the software at the heart of KDE) is supposedly a
> cross-platform toolkit allowing the lucky developer the opportunity to write
> Windows/Linux/Mac software all at once. And yet, among the magical mythical
> claims made, the most nonsensical is that it makes applications which take
> advantage of the distinct features of the different platforms. This is of
> course, nonsense. Qt is a bloated, slow layer that is slapped over a native
> system's APIs in an attempt to make all the systems look alike. It no more
> takes advantage of Linux/Windows/Mac than Java does - in fact it offers many
> of the disadvantages of Java with few of the advantages. If you have ever
> wondered why the KDE desktop looks so much like Windows... you need look no
> further than Qt. Qt is a lowest common denominator toolkit, and that LCD is
> Windows - Trolltech's, the creator of Qt, real market.

at least you can port qt and kde apps. look on gnome it depends on so many different programminglanguages, it depends on so many other (wherever you get them applications) that you need ages to get a basic system ported to either windows and wherever.

> * Myth #9 - TrollTech is a friend of Free software
> > To Be Written. Ideas: Qt started out as non-Free. KDE developers knew this
> violated the GPL, didn't care, stole others' GPL code by porting it to link
> (in violation of the license) with Qt and are therefore untrustworthy. KDE
> core developers work for TrollTech. Expensive per developer licensing for
> writing closed-source with Qt, and hence KDE. Trolltech only moved towards the
> GPL because of the success of GNOME. Labyrinthine licensing nightmare (3
> licenses to deal with). Gradual migration of features belonging in KDE into Qt
> (and so into TrollTech's IP portfolio), allowing easy porting of apps to the
> revenue generating Windows world (see TheKompany for a perfect example),
> thereby making KDE an irrelevant launcher of Qt applications. Claims made that
> Qt is GPL, while true, hide the real truth. There cannot be a real fork of Qt
> for the KDE project: Core developers work for Trolltech; any fork would need
> to be full GPL and hence ban any closed-source apps from KDE altogether (all
> KDE apps must link with Qt); Any commerical licensees of Qt (non-GPL) would
> and could only follow TrollTech. KDE is stitched up good and proper.

you are totally clueless once again you proof it.

some years back there was only 2-3 widgetsets out one of them was the leading MOTIF widgetset which was closed source and during this time outdated. people tried to write a DE and searched for a OOP compatible widgetset so they found their way to QT which filled all their needs. sure QT during this time wanted to earn some money or do you think a company could exists, feed their family and pay the bills by writing free software ? thats plain sick and plain wrong. we should be thankfull to trolltech that they offer QT under a GPL compatible license now and you fuckign shithead have nothing better to do than piss around. what kinda asshole are you ?

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Korgan]

Okay, let me be sure I understand this - Miguel and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which is an open source implementation of .NET

Nope.. Not correct at all. Think again. Miguel said he would like it to go that way, and was talking about Gnome 4 which doesn't even have a road plan yet, let alone any code for it. You have not followed up those stories I take it.

Gnome will not be based on Mono. The devel lists and more were seething when The Register made those announcements and Miguel quickly followed up with a clarification. His standing is that he would like to see it go that way. Not that he fully and completely intends to push it in that direction. Remember, Miguel is just one man on the foundation and just one man in the sea of developers. He can have his opinion, but he still has to go with what the majority recommends.

Besides, Mono is no where near completed. And with the change in the license, I doubt it will get much usage at all when it is anyway. I personally would rather the effort put into Java or something more open. As a result, even when Mono is finished, I don't intend to use it or anything based on it if I can help it. However, that said, I guess it depends on what apps are released down the line.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[alext]

How about IBM's SWT library on GTK? Dig in the Eclipse site to find it.

cheers
alex

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[miguel]

Yes, I have seen the Rox file manager, and I do like it.

You have to understand that the different file managers that you see have different requirements and target audiences. For example, although most of us are running high-end computers these days that have enough CPU power to do all kinds of graphics intensive user interface improvements, and can handle all sorts of situations and combination, many users in the third world countries are stuck with very old machines.

There is no reason why we should marginalize them as users. And I believe that both Rox and gmc fit that bill nicely.

I do not believe that there is a single true solution to all problems. Unix is being used in so many scenarios that it is hard to predict or generalize its use. You see people making Linux run on extremely low end PDAs, sometimes you are memory constrainted; sometimes your are CPU constrainted; Sometimes you are constrainted by the size of the application, and not by the size of available memory; Sometimes you have plenty of CPU to spare.

Although I would love GNOME to have an effort to ship a "light" edition, all I can do is suggest its use. For things to actually happen, interested parties (like yourself) have to take an active role and push for this kind of things to move forward. And by pushing i mean, contributing, packaging, testing, integrating, coding, and everything related to this.

I think its a great idea, and we should have a light version, and a high-end version of GNOME.

If Rox and sawfish fit the bill for your low-end terminals, please go ahead and use those pieces. Your experience will be useful to other people trying to deploy Linux on similar scenarios to you (and there is a lot of impact outside the first world for this kind of setups).

Even if you go with Rox/Sawfish, if you need to run a GNOME app or a KDE app, you will still be able to, but you could manage some precious bandwidth in this particular scenario you describe by using a lighter product.

Miguel.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[squiggleslash]

Another way of looking at it is that the key existing developers want to take GNOME in a direction most of us, including Sun, are unhappy with.

There are two ways of dealing with it, reduce the number of key developers so that the only ones left are the Microsofties, or bring in your own developers into the project so you have more control of the direction its going to take.

Looking at GNOME and what it's doing, it's clear that they do not have a shortage of developers at the moment - they're developing a project which is getting increasingly more complex and "feature" ridden yet is generally following a time plan its supporters would agree with. Sun's decision to throw developers at the project suggests to me that they're as worried about Miguel's direction as the rest of us are.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's that rough anal sex from Microsoft I could do without.


Hear hear! I'm with you on that one brother! Not that there is anything wrong with rough anal sex mind you. Bill's is just a little too big and ugly for my ass and I don't pay for it. I'd rather get it free from Linux.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[King of the World]

Exactly. It's nothing to do with commercial or non-commercial software. Often free software has deadlines - and the developers are as pissed as anyone when if it slips (perhaps even moreso, what with the beerfest coming up).

All this shows is that some people consider their users' needs for a deadline. Big deal.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[fferreres]

Yes, Mono is great (no matter that RMS says) but it's also strange that Java maker Sun produces .NET clone from Open Source advocate Ximian...i mean, can't they do it on their own? I don't think we OWE an explanation, but the explanations given seem to naive/simplistic for me at least (The argument goes like: "Hey .NET is cool, SUN guys rock and this is all free")...

I'm a Ximian advocate but the .mono strategy seems like crucial for Ximian in ways i can't yet foresee (and that troubles me).

Anyway, thanks for all the cool stuff you've been doing (like starting gnome!)

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Z4rd0Z]

And with the change in the license, I doubt it will get much usage at all when it is anyway. I personally would rather the effort put into Java or something more open.

Do you mean the change to using the MIT license for the runtime libraries? The same basic license that is used by XFree86, Apache, and FreeBSD? Java is more open than this, how?

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tips and Tricks from Tante Hedwig:

[curb rough bedtime behavior]
Remind Microsoft that you are not a blowup toy
Demand Microsoft treat you like a lady
Acquire and fmailiarize yourself with the use of a cattleprod (a word to the wise suffices)or optionally, cayenne based Bear-Be-Gone spray

[adapt, and make the best of a bad situation]
Train with a zucchini -or something large and rigid from the gourd or tuber families
Try to interest Microsoft in some of your other fine qualities -not located on your dorsal side, and...
Delay penetration as long as possible with other diversions so Microsoft will want to get it over with as soon as possible

[if the steps above did not work, break up and kick Microsoft out of your bed]
All Microsoft's personal junk goes home with Microsoft today or out on the curb tomorrow
Stop swishing your tail as you amble past Microsoft at work
Decline tactfully when Microsoft offers to buy you a drink or take you out for drinks and disco
Stop stealing glances at Microsoft's crotch
Tell all your friends that it's over between you and Microsoft (peer pressure got you into this jam and peer pressure can get you out, too. Once you announce the breakup, one of your friends will surely make a beeline for Microsoft's pants. Don't tell them how abusive Microsoft is in bed )

[if all else fails -(Microsoft won't reform and won't leave you alone)]
Sometimes it's not diamonds but a Colt Diamondback .38 that is a girl's best friend

XoXoXo
Tante Hedwig

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is (Score:4, Insightful)? My God, who has so many mod points to waste??

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I'm on the KDE side


That's so nice. I'm glad to know that you like -favorite desktop here-. Your statement does justice to the thousands of people who contribute to free software.

BTW, my favorite color is red.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[tve]

So, if WinXP is 1) open source and 2) non-commercial, then no features/additions/etc. will ever be cut and therefore it will bloat forever until it explodes into one big, beautiful explosion of XP-ness. Reality actually starts to make sense now...

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Stallman, shouldn't that be GNOME/GNU/Linux?

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Karn]

This post is not much more a troll than some of the "Interesting" KDE zealot posts I see in GNOME threads like this.

I'm getting tired of the seeing useles zealot posts here (especially KDE zealot posts, since the asses won't even let GNOME supporters have a decent conversation.)

You don't see people who actually do the work coming in here, repetetively spouting what their favorite app is (perhaps because they have better things to do?)

I would like it very much if all the zealots here (KDE, GNOME, Whatever) would shut the hell up already.

Most of us don't care what YOU like. We will try different softwares as we come acress them, and we will use whatever we like for our own reasons. If someone asks what desktop you use, by all means answer them, but don't tell us every single post (unless you're a troll.)

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You have to understand that the different file managers that you see have different requirements and target audiences. For example, although most of us are running high-end computers these days that have enough CPU power to do all kinds of graphics intensive user interface improvements, and can handle all sorts of situations and combination, many users in the third world countries are stuck with very old machines."

"There is no reason why we should marginalize them as users. And I believe that both Rox and gmc fit that bill nicely."

I much prefer gmc over nautilus since gmc runs circles around nautilus. I don't have time for nautilus to draw its stuff.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[morbid]

Solaris comes with a GNOME CD in the media kit, and KDE is on the Freeware Companion CD.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[flacco]

> Tante Hedwig Would that be Hedwig of the Angry Inch?

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Miguel,

Just give up trying to explain. You've done so, nicely, 20 times, and some clods are just not going to get it. The "How can we make UNIX not suck" and "GNOME should be based on Mono" stuff should teach you that if you want it easy, you have to not make any waves. Of course, you'd be boring then...

Countering .NET?

[JohnBE]

Is this in any way related to Miguel De Icaza's .NET comments? It'd make sense for SUN's purposes. Does this mean that they'd push for heavy Java (J2SE) integration? If so, what JVM?

It's interesting that they are targetting the small Windows server with Cobalt, I think they'd need some kind of .NET competitor complete with J2SE integration.

Re:Countering .NET?

[qbalus]

I think you have a good point here. Gnome + Mono + Star Office + Java makes alot of sense for Sun.

Sun has been struggling with the desktop for many years:

- Sunview
- NeWs (network extensible window system, postscript)
- OpenLook
- CDE
- Now Gnome

This could be a winning ticket for them and the Open Source community

Re:Countering .NET?

[JohnBE]

Or the touch of death, depending on how pesimistic you are ;-). Crucially though I think this gives them a back door into the X86 architecture that they blew away when they ditched the new version of Solaris for X86 platforms.

Re:Countering .NET?

[bartok]

There's nothing to read between the lines here so why don't you stick to what's actually said in the anouncement?. To get a clue about what Miguel really meant with his .Net comments:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/200 2- February/msg00031.html

This anouncement has nothing to do with Mono or Java. It's all about finishing-up GNOME 2.0 so that Sun can make it the Default desktop on Solaris.

Re:Countering .NET?

[JohnBE]

I've read it, and the counter arguements, and the pooled quotes from Miguel, and I'd say he is pretty pro-.NET. What do you think Sun will make of that?

Do you beleive they are going to remain vendor neutral when it comes to the technology of the future versions of GNOME?

Re:Countering .NET?

[Korgan]

Or the touch of death, depending on how pesimistic you are ;-)
(The joke hasn't been missed, however....)

I don't think that in any way, either could lose from this partnership. Remember, Sun is helping build a platform that is very slick, very easy to use and is becoming a defacto standard for many other OS's as well. Having a common GUI across the various platforms can only be good, and the fact that its free is even better...

Crucially though I think this gives them a back door into the X86 architecture that they blew away when they ditched the new version of Solaris for X86 platforms.

I don't think they're going to bother with the X86 platform again. I think the closest they'll get is the Colbalt servers, but I don't ever expect to see an X86 version of Solaris (as a server or workstation) again. It is a pity, but X86 will never be a viable platform for anyone as long as M$ dominate the desktop and as long as Linux and the *bsd's remain free and open.

Re:Countering .NET?

[Korgan]

I've read it, and the counter arguements, and the pooled quotes from Miguel, and I'd say he is pretty pro-.NET. What do you think Sun will make of that?

Not a hell of a lot. Why should they care about what happens down the line in regards to Mono when they have a HUGE say in the development path (based on amount of code contributed and number of full time staff working on Gnome)? If the rest of the developers go crazy and do implement .net/Mono, Sun can just pull all its developers back and fork the existing code base. Not something they're going to want to do, but if they're pushed into a corner, they probably would. Given the amount of people opposed to .net, they'd probably get a huge chunk of the existing developers going with them if it ever came down to that.

Do you beleive they are going to remain vendor neutral when it comes to the technology of the future versions of GNOME?

Who? Sun? Are they vendor neutral? Ximian? Even though they're helping develop Gnome, even Ximian has a huge bias towards Linux based software. Mono is the child of Miguel, and he heads the team working on it. To my knowledge, he doesn't actually work much on Gnome at all lately because of his enjoyment and pleasure with .net/Mono.

Re:Countering .NET?

[JohnBE]

Fair enough, but I still think that Sun will have a far more drastic influence on the direction and underlying mechanics of Gnome depending of course on the level of funding and the number of Sun developers devoted to the tasks. Sun's weight compared to

When I say vendor neutral I mean that they evaluate code mediums on there relative merits as opposed to looking at a project (part-funded in any way) as a extension of their revenue stream. Which I beleive Sun already is. I beleive that this will effect the funding and affections of any GNOME involvement. I think I probably over emphasised Miguel De Icaza's MONO, interaction, looking back on that I think its probably quite irrelevant. But the question remains, how can a commercial organization become financially (or even idiosyncratically) involved with a non-for-profit organization and both sides remain spotless? It's easy to see how Ximian has influenced Gnome, what's a relative two ton gorilla like Sun going to do?

However, I guess we'll have to agree to differ.

Re:Countering .NET?

[NutscrapeSucks]

don't ever expect to see an X86 version of Solaris (as a server or workstation) again. It is a pity...

If Sun would have shown some interest in Solaris x86 a few years ago -- say focusing on driver support, adding Apache, Perl, and GNU tools, and adding a PPP dialer, I think they would have done quite well. Instead of all the Linux Hype we've seen, we would have had Solaris Hype.

Sun might have even stolen server market share from MS, instead of fighting a defensive battle - and still made lots of money on support and upsizing to Sparc hardware.

Of course now Linux is so established that the question always was "Why run Solaris x86 when you can run Linux?", but if Sun had played their cards right it easily could have been "Why run Linux when you can run Real UNIX?"

Re:Countering .NET?

[Bob Abooey]

The main problem with that is that Sun makes money by selling sparcstations. They are a hardware company who makes they revenue from servers and service contracts. If they promote an OS for X86 they are competing against their cash-cow. Especially with the powerful chips that Intel now puts out. Of course the thing they missed a couple of years ago was the fact that Linux on X86 would make a killer low end server and thus take away a big chunk of that market from them anyways.

I remember how Mr. McNealy was anti-Linux in a very pompous way just a few short years ago. It's that "you can't touch us" attitude that ends up killing companies in the end in the tech industry. Not that Sun is dead by a long shot, but they are facing some serious challenges from MS and Linux on low and mid range servers and they haven't exactly been doing much innovating in that area as of late.

Re:Countering .NET?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Sun have a competitive product included in Solaris?

Remember iPlanet, the company that is a partnership between Netscape and Sun. Well, they have a web and application server.

Apache is a competitive product.

By the way, depending on what type of service or package you get from Sun, you can get an all-in-one package that includes Solaris and the iPlantet web server/application server. They even have bundles with GNU tools as well. Have you actually gone to their web site and got one of their products?

Solaris for Intel worked on my machine. It's just as not fancy Linux. If anything, Sun needs to learn from Linux how to make a product more usable.

Re:Countering .NET?

[slashdot_commentator]

You armchair CEO's are so feebleminded. Its pretty obvious that Sun would had to have sunk in a lot money to make Solaris a viable platform on Intel PCs, and that does not count the millions of dollars they would need to piss away to market Solaris for x86. Properly run (non-dotbomb) companies do not piss away their capital if they cannot reasonably expect a return on their investment.

Don't you know that Microsoft does not spend their money on implementing device drivers to their operating system? No, its hardware vendors that spend their money to make their hardware work on windoze! Picture the amount of money Sun would need to blow to either get some participation from vendors or the manhours to provide equivalent driver support that Microsoft gets for free. (Actually, the hardware vendors pay Microsoft for the privilege of incorporating their driver into the M$ OS.)

That's why Solaris for x86 was stillborn. Have you even tried installing Solaris on a PC??? Simply put, one piece of hardware outside of its miniscule sanctioned list, and you're screwed. The device may not work, and worse, sometimes the machine won't work either.

Sun Microsystems has the vision of a pre-surgical cataract patient, but this Dumbo (Solaris x86) was not going to fly. And yes, its too bad. What they should have done was tried to become a linux reseller like Red Hat. It would have solved some strategic niches which Solaris for x86 was planned for and it would have cost them the same amount of money. They probably would have crushed Red Hat in marketing and had a chance of snacking on Microsoft lunch. Oh well.

Re:Countering .NET?

[NutscrapeSucks]

I should have pointed out that my scenario never would have happened. While Linux was climbing on the radar, Sun was too busy selling high profit boxes to doomed dotcoms to pay attention to the greater market trend.

Now they are doomed themselves. Like every other stupid midrange company, they will cling to their high profit segments while their market contracts down to nearly nothing. My point is that the big high-profit box is always surrounded by smaller low-profit boxes, and that Sun could have had the whole deal instead of ghettoizing themselves as Oracle-only hardware.

As for your armchair CEO suggestion -- I did run Solaris x86 on a HCL PC, and it was far better than Linux (RedHat 5.0) at the time. I'm sure that Sun thought similarly -- why would they support a pile of crap like Linux when they have their own solid and expensive OS? Right now their Linux Strategy just reeks of the doomed plans of SGI.

Co-operation

[IamTheRealMike]

Really those hackers should be working on getting KDE and GNOME to work together better, more than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for competition, but that has to be balanced with co-operation to make Linux easier to use for everyone.

Also, doesn't anyone get the feeling here that Gnome is becoming less a desktop and more a political pawn every day?

Re:Co-operation

[JanneM]

Exactly what do you see as missing? We have a common window manager standard, we have a common standard for menus, with QT3 the clipboard should be interoperable, and there is quite a bit of talk about fixing some kind of standard for desktop themes - though that last one is difficult.

Is there anything else needed?

The projects will never settle on one toolkit, that's for certain; that cuts right to the heart of each projects goals and identity. They're unlikely to ever agree on a common component model either (although there's been attempts to bridge between them). None of that is really needed, however. If the applications can interoperate on the user-visible level, that really is the best of both worlds - the developers can choose whichever project they prefer to write the software in, and the users can run it fine either way.

/Janne

Re:Co-operation

[be-fan]

I want all apps to look the same and act the same, at least to the extent they do on windows (I'm not even asking for MacOS-like integration here!) The current situation in Linux is pitiful. Hell, even searching is not standardized. Galeon by default uses CTRL-F while gedit uses F6!

Re:Co-operation

[bartok]

Well since sun has no intention to include KDE on Solaris, I don't see why they'd pay for something they don't need. KDE and GNOME interoperability is only of interest in the Linux world.

Re:Co-operation

[Anonymous Coward]

And searching in Internet Explorer is ctrl+b, in MS Word it is ctrl+f, in filebrowsing(explorer) it is f3.And in notepad it is also f3 (but that is searching for tekst)

What is your point?

Well, actually gnome 2.0 have done a lot to improve usability in the widgets. And that is already a long step.
But even on windows aplications will never have the exact same behavoir. They should just try to learn from each other instead. There is no different on windows or linux in this matter.

Re:Co-operation

[Cheesy Fool]

I'm using KDE with Fluxbox and it works great.

Sawfish beats e16.

Re:Co-operation

[Pentagram]

I despair on ever having a standard for keyboard shortcuts - the legacies are too long and people too used to them (I'd like C-s, to fit with emacs, but that's common for saving a file.)

However: shouldn't it be possible to have some sort of user-definable GUI-wide setting for each shortcut? Instead of adding C-s in the code of an app as a shortcut, bind the action to the standard "save-document" keystroke and have the app notified when it occurs. Allow the user to override the action for certain apps. It's surely not beyond the reach of human ingenuity.

Re:Co-operation

[sultanoslack]

People, please, for the love of all things good, stop calling Solaris Linux (this is about the third time I've seen that on this topic). Solaris is not Linux! Solaris is not a variety of Linux. Solaris development is not Linux development. Making Solaris easier to use does not make Linux easier to use.

Am I being clear?

Note, I don't have a problem with Solaris or Linux, but they aren't the same operating system.

Re:Co-operation

[__past__]

KDE and GNOME interoperability is only of interest in the Linux world.

Uh, why? It might not be of interest to Sun[1], but both Gnome and KDE run on many more platforms than just Linux.

[1] And IMHO, it should be - there are some really nice KDE apps, why shouldn't Sun want their customers be able to use them without unnecessary quirks, once Gnome is the "official" Solaris desktop? Then again, /me is quite confident with the current state of interoperability.

Re:Co-operation

[Rob Kaper]

The current situation in Linux is pitiful. Hell, even searching is not standardized. Galeon by default uses CTRL-F while gedit uses F6!

That has little to do with GNOME/GTK inconsistancies, though. Probably one of these apps uses the GNOME key bindings and the other app uses is GTK only and had to come up with its own.

I see the same inconsistensies in Windows too, though. Most modern apps for both GNOME, GTK, KDE and Qt seem to integrate well, all using the same technologies mentioned in parent post.

Of course, there are areas which can be improved. Sign up for a GNOME or KDE usability test and let us developers know.

Re:Co-operation

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, KDE has always been able to work with other window managers. Since KDE 2, it has worked with the NETWM STANDARD window manager hint specification. it took the gnome folks until 1.4 to add that.

so you should be able to use KDE with any window manager you chose that supports NETWM, such as sawfish and blackbox.

Re:Co-operation

[damiam]

One of the nicest features of GTK is dynamic key bindings. Just hover your mouse over the Find menu item in gedit and press Control-F and the keybinding for Find will change to Control-F, just like Galeon. Or you could do the opposite thing in Galeon and the rest of your apps, to get searching standardized on F6.

Re:Co-operation

[Seli]

The thing you're describing almost sounds like what KDE does ...

Re:Co-operation

[Permission Denied]

Have you tried using Konqueror using a window manager other than kwin? Really, have you done this?

It does not work very well. First of all, QT has a bug where it expects to receive a certain X message before it accepts the input focus. Most window managers don't send this X message when the keyboard is grabbed, so QT apps won't take keyboard input. Try this: launch twm or an older version of WindowMaker, launch a QT application and try using Alt-Tab to cycle to the application (you'll need to configure twm to allow you to do this). It will no longer take keyboard input even though it is the focus window.

Try setting up Java to work with Konqueror in any window manager except kwin. You'll fail. That's because Konqueror's java support requires DCOP communication with the window manager. It could do the communication via X atoms (which means your favorite window manager such as WindowMaker could implement it), but it uses DCOP instead. Konqueror will never fully work on any window manager except the KDE window manager.

So what have KDE and GNOME standardized? They have a common way of creating application links on your desktop and they have the _NET_WM stuff. Theoretically, this would mean that you could use the KDE pager in any window manager that supports the EWMH (the _NET_WM hints). Try using kpager (the KDE pager) with fvwm+fvwm_ewmh module. It won't work very well. Kpager won't work very well at all unless it's engulfed in kicker (the KDE taskbar).

The GNOME-KDE cooperation is mostly useless at this point. It's even worse if you don't want to use KDE or GNOME but only want to use a KDE/GNOME application under a non-KDE-GNOME environment (like using Konqueror under WindowMaker or blackbox, etc.).

Re:Co-operation

[Anonymous Coward]

The same thing works in KDE.

Re:Co-operation

[Dr. Sp0ng]

It does not work very well. First of all, QT has a bug where it expects to receive a certain X message before it accepts the input focus. Most window managers don't send this X message when the keyboard is grabbed, so QT apps won't take keyboard input. Try this: launch twm or an older version of WindowMaker, launch a QT application and try using Alt-Tab to cycle to the application (you'll need to configure twm to allow you to do this). It will no longer take keyboard input even though it is the focus window.

Yes it will. The problem is that the alt from the alt-tab causes the menu to get selected, and kwin works around this. Look up at your menu bar and you should see the first menu item selected. Tap alt again to unselect it, and it'll work fine.

Re:Co-operation

[damiam]

Ummmmm... no.

Many KDE apps (Konqueror, Koffice, etc) have a settings dialog to configure keybindings. But it's not built into QT and it doesn't automatically work in every app, like it is with GTK. And it's not as convenient.

Admittedly, in GTK, an author has to write code to save the keybindings between sessions. But that's trivial, and almost everyone does it.

Re:Co-operation

[reynaert]

You can (re)define keyboard shortcuts for any menu item in any GTK application. Just select (don't click) the menu item, and press the shortcut you'd like.

I don't think you can set system-wide defaults for an option, though.

Re:Co-operation

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use konqueror and java with blackbox just fine? I dumped konqueror when mozilla 0.9.4 came out, and have been using moz ever since. But Konqueror DOES work with other window managers (at least it did until kde 2.2.0 came out, when I used it last).

Re:Co-operation

[m_ilya]

Have you tried using Konqueror using a window manager other than kwin? Really, have you done this?

For very long time I was using Konqueror from KDE 2.0 with blackbox. I've not seen any problems related to interaction of window manager and konqueror.

Re:Co-operation

[Permission Denied]

Perhaps I'm the only one who has seen this problem. When I was using konqueror with ctwm and an older version of windowmaker, the java applet would pop up OK (it would, of course, be a separate top-level window as with other window managers), but the input focus would jump eratically between the java applet and the konqueror window. I was unable to type into either the applet or the konqueror window. I tried this with all the window managers I could get my hands on, and kwin was the only one that didn't make the focus jump around.

I just tried it now with a newer version of konqueror (and the same versions of the window managers) and it seems to work OK.

Still, it would be nice if Konqueror didn't use DCOP to tell kwin to reparent the window to konqueror. It could just use an X atom which is the name of the window to be reparented, and this would allow java applets to run as a part of the web page (rather than as a separate top-level window) under all window managers, not only those who would rely on DCOP.

Re:Co-operation

[Anonymous Coward]

From my conversations with Sun people, they do now offer, and plan to continue offering, KDE on their add-on CDs. As it stands, a lot of their users - and developers - prefer KDE. Ideally, they would give their users a real choice of something as basic as the desktop at install time.

But complaining about other platforms limiting choice, and actually providing choice on your own platform, appear to be two different things, at least when it comes to Sun.

Re:Co-operation

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with what you are saying.

Have in the control-panel a place to se3 these standard key shortcuts as a global x-application default. Store the user preferences using GConf or xml. Hey, use XML as a way to bridge this gap between GNOME, KDE, etc... Have each applcation and session override these global default standard key shortcuts.

This could go beyond shortcuts, we could do other settings as well, such as, cut/copy/paste/delete clipboard functionality.

- DanM

Re:Co-operation

[jo42]

Oh forkin' great, another feature for the average user to figure out why the fork something stopped working they way it used it. Forkin' programmers should take some UI classes to stop this sort of feature shite.

*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable...*

[Anonymous Coward]

wait for the flame wars about why its GNOME and not KDE, and vice versa... :P

oh what fun...

but still... its good to see that a corporation such as Sun are putting time and effort into Open Source projects... If only more companies would help to provide the capital to help many other great projects. Granted, Sun has a vested interest in wanting to use GNOME... But its still good to see...

*news flash* Microsoft to fund WINE... i can see it now.... and look... those pigs are flying...

Finally Some Indian Action

[xzap]

This is great
Finally a big Indian Company is doing some big Linux Work.
The bad part is they are doing it in Ireland
Wonder Why

Re:Finally Some Indian Action

[sultanoslack]

Ok, am I the first person who read this and though "big endian"? Funny, ha, ha. Ok, so Sun is contracting a big Indian company to make sure that Gnome performs better on thier big endian hardware.

Enough of that.

Re:Finally Some Indian Action

[easter1916]

Read the article. And why do you have a problem with some of the GNOME work being done in Ireland? Perhaps if your own English reading comprehension was higher you'd get more work in India.

they are not in ireland

[Ur@eus]

They are not in ireland, all the Wipro hackers are in india. It is the Sun employed hackers that are in ireland.

You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop

[PRR]

You would think that Sun, of all folks, would do a separate desktop based around Swing to showcase their Java technologies just as Trolltech contributes to KDE to showcase their Qt.

Re:You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop

[October_30th]

Jesus Christ! Are you serious?

Even small applications with Swing GUI crawl on a 1+ GHz computer. I am afraid to even think about how slow a Swing desktop would be.

Re:You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop

[be-fan]

Actually, Limewire (java) runs faster than Nautilus (ansi-C) on my P2-300. Retarded? Quite.

Re:You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

it'd probably be faster than bloated gnome shit like galeon and nautilus.

Re:You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop

[konmaskisin]

Umm except that java and swing are way too slow to use for anything except .... umm well they're just too slow.

Thats Nice Maybe I'll get a Job Now ;)

[xzap]

Refer Subject :P

Trying to keep MONO out ???

[CDWert]

I wonder with all the talk of MONO and .NET being looked at as an option fro Gnome, how much of this is intended to keep Gnome going in the direction it is already.

Sun I am certain would HATE to see MONO/.NET implmented in ANY core Gnome technology.

This is good for Gnome, either way if its sincere, and the help is actually there, and not just in a press release. I still have to wonder how self serving it is to keep .NET out of the equation.

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[luge]

[Ximian hat on] This contract doesn't affect our work with Mono in any way, nor does it affect the interaction between GNOME and Mono (none of which would be happening for years anyway.)
[Ximian+Sun hat off] How does it benefit Sun to keep Mono off their platform? Either .Net takes off, in which case Sun needs Mono to remain competitive, or .Net fails, in which case it still doesn't hurt to have Mono around just in case. Mono is not going to decide whether or not .Net succeeds- it'll stand or fall on MS's own skill in promoting it and FUDing Java.

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[JanneM]

And also, the ideas behind .Net and Mono (as opposed to that passport #

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[JanneM]

As I was saying before getting cut off:

Mono is based on some pretty good ideas whether associated with .Net or not, and Linux really has more to gain from being able to write _really_ portable code (that's runnable on any architecture Linux supports) in any language (whether installed on the target machine or not). You could see a situation where .Net whithers, but Mono thrives.

/Janne

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[luge]

Definitely. So when are you going to come hang out in #bugs, Janne? :)

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[JanneM]

When I can figure out how to install the GNOME2 beta and not lose the use of my desktop... :)

/Janne

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun I am certain would HATE to see MONO/.NET implmented in ANY core Gnome technology.

What for?? I think it would be to Sun's advantage... Now Microsoft's .net apps will run on Solaris. And productivity apps have always been a sore spot on the Unix desktop. Mono fixes that problem in one shot.

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[alext]

Ah, the famous Mono non sequitur, wondered where it had been hiding today...

Linux needs something like Dotnet ("to be able to write really portable code")
therefore
we must clone Dotnet.

I like my mom's apple pie and piano playing, so I will have her cloned.

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[yomegaman]

It's probably not a simple matter to design a portable, secure, language-independent runtime environment. Since Microsoft has already done all of that work, why not just use it?

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[Anonymous Coward]

>It's probably not a simple matter to design a portable, secure,
>language-independent runtime environment. Since Microsoft has already
>done all of that work, why not just use it?
>
>
>
Because what Microsoft came up with is a virus-spreading pile of crap?

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun knows these facts:

• KDE is hurting
• Linux is on the rise
• GNOME is now the standard OSS desktop
• BSD is dying
• .NET is trying to kill the rest.

Individually any one of these facts is signifies little, but in toto ...

Sun knows it needs OSS if it is going to compete with Microsoft. It can't afford any more boners.

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[Anonymous Coward]

If Sun thinks KDE is hurting, why are they throwing second-rate developers at GNOME? I guess the GNOME community is faltering.

Re:Trying to keep MONO out ???

[alext]

Not trivial, perhaps, but certainly not unique to Microsoft. How many JVMs are there out there? And still people are working on their own VMs for Perl, Python, TCL, Scheme etc.

'Using it' in some form is probably sensible, but it doesn't follow that in order to benefit from it we have to reproduce every feature - creative synthesis and modification should be allowed to best meet open source requirements.

Let's be clear what Miguel is proposing here: he's not just modelling Mono on Dotnet, in the manner of modelling C# on Java, he's cloning it, and so tying Linux development in every aspect to Windows development. Nobody has asked for this, and it isn't healthy.

Sun vs. Slashdot

[Cally]

So the consensus on Slashdot and LinuxToday, to me at least, seemed pretty comprehensively to have ticked box marked "Miguel is smart but misguided, .NET is evil and you must never trust Microsoft." And there were many comments along the lines of "Sun will now have nothing to do with GNOME cos they will never have anything to do with .NET." Well I reckon Sun do better due diligence on such things than the average /. gasbag (like me =) so, whatever they think of .NET, they're not worrying about it affecting Gnome for at least the next couple of years.

Does this mean we get another couple of years of Slashdot flamage? Suits me, I like a good flame war ;)

Re:Sun vs. Slashdot

[dybvandal]

I think the thing they are trying to do here is getting themselves even further into GNOME to be able to control it better, since then you are the ones providing a considerable number of developers ...

Wipro

[AirLace]

I've had some experience with Wipro in the past. It's a software sweatshop based in India. I guess that's how Sun can affort to devote 50 whole programmers to GNOME. Does the GNOME community really want to be associated with this kind of establishment?

Re:Wipro

[Ami Ganguli]

Does the GNOME community really want to be associated with this kind of establishment?

Definately. At worst, pumping some money into India will do nothing to help India's poor. At best, growth in the Indian economy will help everybody at least a little (even if it's just through an increased tax base).

I fail to see how this can be considered a bad thing.

Re:Wipro

[qweqwe]

Just because a company is based in a poor country like India, doesn't mean that it's a sweatshop. Wipro programmers are not that much cheaper than, say, Canadian programmers. Times have changed. As companies in non-western countries start to gain reputation and skills, they become more popular, and thus can afford to demand more. That raises their standard of living and the standard of living of people in their country.

Personally, I think it's great if people can find work they like in their own country. Why should you have to move to some place like North America or Europe or some parts of east asia to get a decent job?

Re:Wipro

[NDPTAL85]

Did you *HAVE* to bring your personal politics into this issue?

Re:Wipro

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, while I don't like GNOME much, I'd have to ask why Wipro is considered a sweatshop? Just because they don't get paid comparable to 1st world countries doesn't mean anything. Most Indians (like myself), consider it a good thing(tm) because these people get paid more than 75% of the Indian populace. Yes, these guys are upper middle class in India and you dare call them sweatshops.

Fuck you, you rich, arrogant, pompous bastard.

Re:Wipro

[Anonymous Coward]

I see. So you don't think that programmers should be able to work in India ? I suppose you'd rather they all come to the US on H1Bs instead ? Or are you just advocating that Indian people all work in the textiles industry ?

Re:Wipro

[Thurn und Taxis]

You're right, this problem is rampant in the open-source community. Why, I've heard rumors that some of the people who write code for Linux don't even get paid for it!

Re:Wipro

[Shelled]

Maybe I missed something in the quick scan, but neither article seemed to have a single reference to sweatshops. One instead explicitly states that Wipro, having raised wages substantially over the past five years, is now facing serious competition. The company is outsourcing programming from China to remain competitive. The other focuses partly on concern over India's digital divide between those working in the software field and the average population. Both imply that IT workers are very well off in their country. What sweatshops?

It's my opinion that non-Western countries, where the cost of MS licensing is prohibitive, are linux's greatest hope for mass acceptance. An army of potential users in the world's second largest country helps more than just Gnome.

Re:Wipro

[Anonymous Coward]

ever seen the Wipro campus before opening your big mouth Mr. Smart Ass (you're a hate filled Paki i bet!)????? I've worked there and also worked in US... here's a description of the Wipro campus:

Wipro has ten development centers, spanning 450,000 sq. ft., in prime locations in Bangalore working on some of the best international projects.

Some of the finest minds in the industry work in these development centers on a broad spectrum of new technology areas such as telecom, datacom, e-commerce, mobile commerce, e-infrastructure services, wireless/optical network, VoIP, VLSI, and network management just to name a few.

Recreational facilities include tennis, basketball, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, etc. and are available to all employees

If this is a SweatShop I'd gladly work in one all my wife :)

Re:Wipro

[rnash]

Does the GNOME community really want to be associated with this kind of establishment?

Hey, those people are adults, they're not the little chinese children that sew the Nike shoes : The page you cite (sweatshop [isanet.org] ) says :

The services of India's highly-skilled, English-speaking software professionals are sought after by major global corporations, and many have become founders or managers of IT companies in the United States. On the other side of the digital divide are the 45 percent of the population who cannot read or write (57 percent of the female population), the 44 percent who survive on less than $1 per day, and those who live in the 370,000 villages that do not have telephone connections. [2]

I really don't think the first category (the highly skilled one) is made of little geeks which are not even 15 years old.

Re:Wipro

[kanad]

I have worked in Wipro earlier , and while I wouldn't call it a sweatshop , it isn't the best place to work either (even in India). The biggest problem there I felt was incompetent project management and their recruitment policy. Once a picker of top Indian students only they shifted to take all and sundry from little known colleges as s/w engineers and not training them properly. The result is coders who has a very narrow vision and limited knowledge.

I am sure there are exceptions but thats what I felt.

Re:*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable..

[bigdogs]

wait for the flame wars about why its GNOME and not KDE, and vice versa... :P

Note: I work for Sun, but I don't speak for them in any way whatsoever.....
There was some discussion about this on the internal Linux mail alias, and IIRC, the consensus had something to do with C++ not being a "standardized" language.

Or something like that. I'm not a programmer, so I'm probably not using the correct terminology.

If your going to guess...

[BadlandZ]

If your going to guess that about the Sun+Gnome+MONO/.NET connection, why would you guess that they are doing it to keep it out?

diffrent conspiracy theory?
Maybe they are doing it as a back door way to get some control over a new standard Microsoft is pushing.

Uh oh, WIPRO.

[mrsam]

At my day job (a huge corporate behemoth), they decided to use WIPRO to build a business-critical application. Well, they've been regretting this decision for two years now.

Everyone had dollar signs in their eyes at first: using cheap overseas labor, how much money they'll save, yadda yadda yadda...

Well, the PHBs discovered that if they wanted cheap overseas labor, that's exactly what they got with WIPRO: cheap, shoddy labor. Spaghetti, unmaintainable code all around.

I really hope that WIPRO's "contributions" to the GNOME project would undergo the same scrutiny and vetting as anyone else's submitted patches and contributed code.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[luge]

A number of Wipro patches have already been rejected and sent back for reworking. Ximian and Sun can not and will not force maintainers to accept patches from them. Of course, Sun may apply those patches to their own builds of GNOME, but they could do that no matter what. It's important to remember that using GNOME doesn't make sense for Sun if they destroy the community in the process.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[3seas]

And the great thing about open source is?

Nobody can stop improvements..... But getting things layed out, even if wrong.....

It's easier to improve then to originate.

:)

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Luis, you've got your work cut out for you. I've seen the effect of outsourcing development and even just maintence work to third world countries. Typically the programmers jump in and start producing patches way before they have enough domain experience to know WTF they are doing. I've seen companies blindly trust the 3rd world developers to do things right and let them check into the tree themselves. Worst mistake those companies have ever made, at least one company spent 3 months just trying to recover from it.

You guys are going to have to be exceptionally vigilant in dealing with the output from wipro's people. I expect that for the first year or so, while they are getting up to speed, their contribution will be net negative because of all the work everyone else has to do make sure they don't F it up.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[JanneM]

But this is not really too different from the normal open-source process. People just starting out is going to write poor code, reinvent the wheel and seeing their patches being rejected quite a lot. As their domain experience grows, so does their skill.

the difference here is of course that Sun has a stick and a carrot available by virtue of paying them, and are being able to determine what they will work on, and can demand a higher level of professionalism.

/Janne

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[Utopia]

This is lesson to every organization which out sources software development. Do not outsource without a effective in house code review/quality assurance process in place.

I am pretty sure GNOME project has matured enough and every contributed code will go under a magnifying glass

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[haggar]

Couldn'tagree more: our experience with Wipro has been the same, and their code is the laughing stock of R&D.

We went the Wipro way about 3 years ago, some of their consultants are still working for us, but it has been acknowledged that their services are to be avoided.

Strangely enough, the bad quality of their work is not the reason why their stock went into the shitter recently.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[easter1916]

I formerly worked in Paris for a subsidiary of a medium US corp., and head office in Lisle had Wipro rewrite a general ledger application. The result was a buggy pile of spaghetti code that never worked at even an acceptable level and was nigh-impossible to maintain.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The other difference is that you've got a whole mass of them coming in all at once and who have a history of management (wipro not necessarily sun) of pushing for "results" to early in the process. I don't know if wipro is SEI certified, but even that can't help if you've got management that doesn't understand the limitations of the people they are managing and therefore fail to plan appropriately.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[steve_l]

wipro claim to have a high SEI certification. I've worked with them and think their PMs have a high PHB certification, not so sure about the technical skills of the staff. They seem smart, but the one I worked was honest about hisjava inexperience, and I caught him exaggerating his C# skills (I guess saying 'I know c#' is impressive to say and hard to catch people on right now -he was unlucky)

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[Thing 1]

People just starting out is going to write poor

You said it!

code

oh, that too. ;-)

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[rmathew]

Being from Bangalore, India, I can now visualise how the full benefits of bottom-up SEI CMM Level 5 and Six Sigma would be brought to GNOME (http://www.wipro.com/aboutus/whatapart.htm).

For the humour challenged, that was SARCASM.

Seriously though, my sympathies are with GNOME - and my desktop with KDE.

Misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you people get these perceptions? Sweatshop???? I have worked with Wipro myself. Why do you persist in comparing pay rates with your US based $$$ rates? Don't you realize that India is a much cheaper place? Everything is cheaper.... a $$$ goes much longer than it does in the US. A person making the equivalent of $200 a month in India can live more luxuriously than someone making $3,000 in the US. I know because I have been in both of the above situations.

Wipro is a fine organization and it is CMM level 5. Its work culture is great and it pays its employees very very well. So stop bashing something when you dont have the full information; with just a couple of biased articles as your news source.

Re:Misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for addressing these misconceptions. By some standards, U.S. 24/7 work week life might be considered inhumane. If a big house in San Jose with 2 trucks in the garage a $500,000 2 br home, 1.5 hour commute and 2.3 children is the gold standard, then by all means move to San Jose. If you're looking for something else, shop around. South Korea, Eastern Europe, Finland, Singapore, Ireland, Russia, Mexico and yes, India have some examples of what can happen if you educate your population and give them freedom.

When employees can shop worldwide for employers just as companies shop worldwide for cheap labor, we will have a much more efficient global economy.

In the meantime, I applaud Sun, Ximian, Wipro and other companies for whatever they can do towards the common goal of making a computer that is easy enough for my grandmother to use.

Competition bad for open source

[Sir Homer]

Competition doesn't help at all with open source. Open source is somewhat a communist ideal (which don't get me wrong, not EVERYTHING communist is bad), while competition is a capitalist ideal. Perferably I would like to see one very good desktop enviroment, then two so-so desktop enviroment.

Re:*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, you mean suns C++ compiler doesn't implement the C++ language and STL properly..

Too many cooks...

[Psiren]

This just makes me wonder if the number of people working on Gnome has increased too much. There's been plenty of examples of throwing developers at a project to speed up development, only for it to have the opposite effect. It takes time for new developers to learn the innards of a project. I can only see this making things worse.

I gave up on coding for Gnome about 6 months ago because I got fed up chasing my tail with new and incompatabile libararies popping up every five minutes. It seems to me that this occurred because of a lack of communciation between all the developers. How adding a whole bunch more of them to the mix will help this is beyond me.

Having said all that, I hope it does work. Too much effort has gone into Gnome for it not to succeed. And I see KDE vs Gnome as a good thing. I think it keeps everyone on their toes.

Re:Too many cooks...

[egghat]

Despite the announcement, that says it will help Gnome 2.0, it will help Gnome 2.x and much more Gnome 3.0. In the long run, this move will Gnome much more than in the short run.

Re:Too many cooks...

[bogie]

KDE v Gnome was a good thing years ago. But now it is largely a duplication of efforts. Granted its pie in the sky, but imagine how far along the linux desktop would be if all those developers coded for one and not two projects. The bazaar model is not always the best. The problem is how do you tell someone who codes for free what they should work on? And even though I don't like KDE v Gnome I'm certainly not going to tell someone what they should code.

Re:Too many cooks...

[martijn-s]

Thinking up new stuff is really fun, and probably the main cause of all those libraries popping up. Hobbyists will do this fun stuff all the time, but these people are paid do to an entirely different job.

Don't forget they've been assigned mostly clean-up, ready for commercial rollout jobs. They are not designing completely new libraries (except for maybe that accessability thing).

Re:Too many cooks...

[Alomex]

. Granted its pie in the sky, but imagine how far along the linux desktop would be if all those developers coded for one and not two projects.

Ii don't agree. Competition keeps people moving. Linux didn't patch the kernel until the major branches became a threat.

Now, if only we could junk X windows and replace it with display postscript and other MacOS X goodies...

Re:Too many cooks...

[bogie]

"Ii don't agree. Competition keeps people moving. Linux didn't patch the kernel until the major branches became a threat"

Yes but there is a major difference between the threat of a major branch forming, and the current situation where two major "branches" exist and continue to draw resources for years. Having whomever keep their own kernel branch does not really affect that many people or coders when compared to KDE v Gnome.

With KDE and Gnome we have hundreds or maybe even thousands of people working against each other to create the same thing. Which is by any measurement a waste of resources. Trust me this Gnome v KDE impass is unique in its scope and size, and goes way beyond any of the old which shell or editor to use arguments. In this case the competition argument is not working in a positive manner.

Re:Too many cooks...

[Alpha600]

so what you're thinking? how many cooks needs a normal MS meal with windows, office et cetera to get it as worse as it is - not meant to be funny ...

Re:Too many cooks...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an implicit assumption in your argument, bogie, that there are only enough developers in the world to build one solution to "compete" with Microsoft, et. al. Why not consider KDE and GNOME two seperate products much like Windows and MacOS are different products? Or GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are seperate products?

Additionally, who's to say that people who respectively work on GNOME and/or KDE would be coding at all if their favorite platform didn't exist? Who's to say that the "pool" is negatively drained?

Re:Too many cooks...

[Arandir]

I love the duplication of effort. Don't ever stop it. Why? Simple. Because the desktop I want to use might not be the system you want to use. I'm serious. We just might disagree on whether the enforced and mandatory destkop should be Gnome or KDE.

Re:Too many cooks...

[crsm]

I gave up on coding for Gnome about 6 months ago because I got fed up chasing my tail with new and incompatabile libararies popping up every five minutes.

Thats my experience too. Overall KDE seems to be much better managed than Gnome - or one could say: Gnome is much worse managed than the most of the other open source projects.

Re:Too many cooks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Having multiple toolkits and desktops is really just Situation Normal in the Unix world, and both Gnome and KDE are robust enought that they could stand on their own.

Where the duplicate effort comes into play is when each project has to develop it's own Word-clone, Excel-clone, PowerPoint-clone, Visio-clone, and Outlook-clone. The end result is double the half-done buggy Microsoft clone products, none of which interoperate properly with each other, and all of which sit wanting developers. It's just embarassing.

Re:Too many cooks...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Here here! And the enviornment I use for numerical analysis isn't the one I use for browsing the web. (Its not even the one I used *last week*, just for the stimulation of making the change.) Diversity is a good thing, and remap the keys if need be. Without both VI and Emacs, we'd never have Viper!

Re:Too many cooks...

[Cyno]

And that says nothing of enlightenment, 0.17.0 looks intriguing, or windowmaker/afterstep/etc. The linux desktop has always had MANY choices, not just 1 or 2. You can boot all of them from gdm, kdm, xdm, dtlogin or the login manager of your choice. And someday soon you might be able to run them on directFB or other alternatives to X. Linux/UNIX is all about keeping everything modular, and I bet if all this effort behind gnome drives its developement to producing a finished product soon we'll be finding a lot more linux/solaris boxen around the office in the following months.

Re:Too many cooks...

[Raphael]

But now it is largely a duplication of efforts. Granted its pie in the sky, but imagine how far along the linux desktop would be if all those developers coded for one and not two projects.

You are assuming that all developers who work separately on GNOME and KDE could have moved to a single project and made the resulting destkop better and faster. This is probably not true.

It is likely that some developers who are working on GNOME or KDE now would not be working on any desktop project if the only choice had been the other destkop environment. There are some significant technical and conceptual differences between both projects and some programmers are much more likely to contribute to a project that fits the way they think. The first difference is in the programming languages: although both projects use object-oriented concepts, the GNOME libraries are written in C (which makes it easier to add bindings for other languages such as Perl or Python) and the KDE libraries are written in C++ (which makes the development faster if you stick to C++). This is just an example; there are many other differences in the architecture of both systems.

The problem is how do you tell someone who codes for free what they should work on?

Nobody should tell them. They should work on whatever they feel comfortable with. Some developers will prefer GNOME because they prefer the way the GNOME libraries are designed. Some of them will prefer KDE because they prefer the way the KDE libraries are designed. There are not so many experienced programmers who would feel equally at home in both environments. So let them choose whatever they want and work on what they like best. There is not much duplication of effort anyway.

Re:Too many cooks...

[Anonymous Coward]

It should bepointed out that KDE 3 has bindings for.... C... as well as most other languages. And they're basically autogenerated.

I would hope so

[Per Abrahamsen]

More high tech job in the third world is good for everyone. It will help establish an educated middle class which will bring local stability and wealth, and ultimately be a market for first world companies, increasing prosperity here as well.

I'd really hope a community build around a project started by a Mexican will appreciate that.

Re:I would hope so

[SpinyNorman]

I disagee.

Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, not the solution for them. Creating a wealthy elite in third world countries will just raise local prices even further out of the reach of the poor, adding to the problems caused by local goods being sold at global (i.e. western) prices. Using cheap overseas labor will just exacerbate the problem by increasing ocrporate profits at home thereby increasing wealth here and leading to even higher global prices.

Also purely from a selfish POV, I don't want to see my salary capped because some shortsighted manager is trying to increase his bonus by reducing costs by exporting jobs overseas. American companies sure seemed to be patriotic when it was an issue of "buy american", but apparently it's a different story when it comes to "support american workers".

A start to a real solution at eliminating global wealth disparities would be for us to start importing grain and to encourage cooperatives in third world countries which would help the little people sell into the global market. Instead we currently prefer to subsidize domestic production thus keeping prices artificially high.

Re:I would hope so

[luge]

The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies?
Speaking personally, not for Ximian: this question assumes that GNOME is in some way 'American'. That's... fairly wrong. Ximian has employees all over the place; GNOME definitely has contributors on every continent, except maybe Africa, and Sun's GNOME effort has always been based in Ireland. And of course the project was started by our favorite Mexican. So... I don't know. The answer to your question might be interesting or relevant if GNOME were an American project. But it isn't, so the question is at best misleading and at worst just dumb.

Re:I would hope so

[momo-chan]

Ahh, but in a hundred years, commercial coding as we know it today will be akin to producing low-cost goods, and the domestic, educated elite will have moved on to something more productive (and lucrative). Now, is that what we really want?

Re:I would hope so

[tats]

interesting to see this attempt at being arm chair economist marked "interesting".

i hope everyone reads Luis' post above this one.

Re:I would hope so

[the Atomic Rabbit]

GNOME definitely has contributors on every continent, except maybe Africa

GNOME has contributors from Antarctica? Cooooool.

Re:I would hope so

[Anonymous Coward]

If I live in Texas should I rather trade with Mexico or New York. Mexico is closer so where do I draw the line? How well will a poor company do in the "information age" developing their own CPUs since they are made in 1st world economies? What would they buy them with since we would refuse to import from them? No sir, tariffs just make everyone poorer which is a little more equal that is true.

Reach for another beer Mr arm chair economist. I just hope you live near a good brewery. Oh and never watch a movie again, support local actors! etc.

Re:I would hope so

[1010011010]

Boy are you confused. On the one hand, you say:

Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, not the solution for them

And on the other...

A start to a real solution at eliminating global wealth disparities would be for us to start importing grain and to encourage cooperatives in third world countries which would help the little people sell into the global market.

Trade is not the solution! Trade is the solution! Make up your mind.

The rest of your argument is specious. Trade does help other countries's citizens, as well as our own. This has been established for centuries, if not millenia.

Other countries have internal problems, such as a lack of property law and (therefore) huge underground economies. We can't fix that directly. But if we trade with the citizens of those countries, the underground economies composed of regular citizens will one day become the above-ground economies. It happened in the U.S. It happened in Western Europe. It can happen other places. Read The Mystery of Capital by Hernando deSoto, a Peruvian economist.

Re:I would hope so

[Captn Pepe]

Yeah, but there are larger reprecussions.
...
Keeping these people in country is a good thing for other reasons - it will bring money into the country (and from a stable currency, like the US dollar). A programmer making $40k US who lives in New Delhi is a major earner by foreign standards. In a sense its Trickle-Down economics.
...
The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies?

This statement misses an important fact (that you even mentioned earlier in your post) -- making software, even is a "sweatshop" environment -- is fundamentally different from making shoes. You can't write software unless you're educated, and if you're paid too little it's relatively easy to migrate somewhere else because the demand for programmers is high. Thus, as you say, this practice will only increase the size and power of the educated middle-class, which every economist in the world has acknowledged is one of the most best economic stabilizers you can get.

The wonderful thing about a large educated middle-class is that it tends to be self-supporting, economically speaking, as its presence tends to drive both the production and consumption of goods and services. (Say what you will about consumerism ... I think Americans take it waaaaay too far, but a little bit is really necessary to keep everyone employed.) So once these programmers standard of living rises enough to price themselves out of the cheap-overseas-labor market, they'll probably have jobs waiting for them in the local market. Meanwhile, some other location gets to reap the benefits of this process.

So, by all means support the use of overseas programmer farms (and international knowledge workers in general), even if like me you don't buy shoes from Nike.

Re:I would hope so

[Anonymous Coward]

> > GNOME definitely has contributors on every
> > continent, except maybe Africa
> GNOME has contributors from Antarctica? Cooooool.

Yep. Tux himself chips in every now and again.

Re:I would hope so

[Shelled]

You're suggesting that importing software development at the expense of our programmers is bad, but importing grain at the expense of our farmers is good. You weren't kidding when you said "Also purely from a selfish POV...."

Re:I would hope so

[elflord]

Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, not the solution for them.

Nope. A lack of global trade is an obstruction to social mobility. It results in an aristocracy of citizenship. There are obviously people with a vested interest in creating and maintaining such a thing (namely, lower/middle class citizens of wealthy countries). But a lack of global trade is certainly not good for curing wealth imbalances.

Creating a wealthy elite in third world countries will just raise local prices even further out of the reach of the poor, adding to the problems caused by local goods being sold at global (i.e. western) prices.

This goes against all existing experience. A country can use taxes and social problems to redress social inequalities. Currency increase is rarely bad for the economy. Countries with strong currencies have high standards of living, countries with weak currencies have low standards of living.

Also purely from a selfish POV, I don't want to see my salary capped because some shortsighted manager is trying to increase his bonus by reducing costs by exporting jobs overseas.

Right on! You are one of the people with a vested interest in maintain an aristocracy of citizenship, and you aren't really that interested in fairness. In fact, fairness probably isn't in the interests of most people in western countries

American companies ...

American companies have their own interests too. They are neither moral or imoral. They are indifferent to morality.

A start to a real solution at eliminating global wealth disparities would be for us to start importing grain

Question 21: Based on the above, the authors goal is:

• To put American farmers out of business
• To prevent third-world countries from developing brain economies
• To create a dependency on other countries for essential food resources

Instead we currently prefer to subsidize domestic production thus keeping prices artificially high.

Now I'm confused. Is protectionism good or bad ? First you were saying it's good, and we need more of it, and now you're attacking it.

Re:I would hope so

[Thing 1]

We're venturing slightly off-topic here, but I'd like to add to what you're saying.

I think as time goes on, more and more of our industries will move part or all of their operations off-shore. And I think there is one simple reason, in two words: Minimum Wage.

Why? Well, if the work a person can do is worth $2/hour to the company employing that person, then in the US, that person will be unemployed and collecting welfare (minimum wage being over $5/hour today).

However, the company still needs that work to be done. So they will do one of two things: move the work off-shore, where they can pay a reasonable price for that specific work; or automate the job so that machines can do it.[1]

It would be interesting to see if someone has done a history of the increase in the minimum wage versus the types of industries moving off-shore.

[1] - To bring this back on-topic, witness the tools available to us to solve programming problems that used to require a human. Debuggers, profilers, lint-type tools, etc. We even have some automatic code generators, like Visual Basic and Delphi, although they don't write the entire program (yet!). My prediction is that one day, not too far into the future, computers will be able to write their own software. "Genetic Algorithms" already produce vehicles and bridges that we never thought of, but which are well-adapted to their task. Once we have hardware and software that approaches the power of the human brain, it will then design a faster version of itself, ad nauseum, until we're eliminated to form a superhighway. DNA, 42, RIP.

Re:I would hope so

[sql*kitten]

The problem is that many of these students simply take their knowledge (often paid for by The State) and move to the US, Canada, Europe, etc. It can literally kill a country when you have 95% of your educated people trying to emmigrate to the US.

That's the problem, see. You can't have a well-rounded, liberal education and still want to live in a religious oligarchy like Pakistan. If they really do want an education, prosperous middle class, the first thing to do is to establish a secular democracy. Unfortunately, the instant you do that, the oligarchy will get voted back in by the huge swathes of the population who don't want a Western-style education, and bitterly resent anyone who does.

Ultimately, the West benefits from both the export of highly educated technical professionals and the export of mass-produced consumer commodities. Remember that cheap labor isn't exploitation, it's arbitrage, and the alternative is no real money going into their economies at all. So we take in the educated ones, let them steep in our culture for a while, and maybe someday they'll go back and make their homelands more like ours. And if they don't, well, it's not the Western way to coerce individuals if it can be avoided.

Re:I would hope so

[Anonymous Coward]

You say:

> Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, not the solution for them

And then you say:

> A start to a real solution at eliminating global wealth disparities would be for us to start
> importing grain

What is that supposed to be, proof by contradiction?

If I understand you correctly

[Latent Heat]

GNOME will always be GNOME, and while you are creating a CLR/Mono binding to it, and if CLR/Mono runs contrary to a person's aesthetic sensibilities, they can still program GNOME in good old ANSI C, now and in the forseeable future.

By the way, I have looked at the Mono web site, and as a Windows developer, I am not quite sure what I have to download in what order to get the Mono C# and class libraries going, but I will keep checking the site as things develop.

its completely logical

[skymester]

Why should SUN move out of GNOME, because it is in danger to be infestet with .NET? Its only logical that they move more into GNOME to have a good position in the project.

Paid hackers

[Anonymous Coward]

One has got to wonder if mandating programmers is the correct way to spur the development of a publicly developed UI. When Corel tried to do that with KDE, they ended up being pushed out simply because they could not contribute code at the level and skill of the rest of the KDE hackers. I'm wondering if in three months, all of Sun's extra programming people will not just be pushed back to the outside. These companies should learn that you cannot dump money into open source and make it a good product, a better idea would be to sponsor existing dedicated hackers such that they may work on the interface full time. Just my two cents. troy(at)kde.org

Re:Paid hackers

[elflord]

One has got to wonder if mandating programmers is the correct way to spur the development of a publicly developed UI. When Corel tried to do that with KDE, they ended up being pushed out simply because they could not contribute code at the level and skill of the rest of the KDE hackers.

I think putting QA people on the job is a very good move. If they focus on bugfixes, running backtraces and fixing core dumps, and that sort of thing, it's probably a lot easier for them to contribute than if they try adding substantial new features. The problem with Corel is that they wanted to substantially extend existing code, with their "innvative file manager" (yes, they really called it that) and other things.

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Bugfixing GNOME modules to meet Sun's quality standards.

Man, let me catch my breath - I can't stop laughing. I guess I've dealt with too many Sun C++ compiler bugs and Java bugs over they years, so I'm a bit skeptical.

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree imo sun should stay the fuck out of gnome. they act as NAZIS right now as the DECLARED OWNER of GNOME you should read some of the GNOME mailinglists. i think it is time for me to switch to a less annoying desktop. KDE is the way for me and my future. GNOME is too much under control of SUN now.

Re:Funny

[nr]

Holy fuck! Moving right into the corporate stranglehood TrollTech has over KDE. KDE is controlled by the greedy company TrollTech who uses it to milk money out of developers of commercial applications who is forced into use QT to develop applications for KDE.

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

get a clue hannes.

i am talking about all the companies that put shit within GNOME and influence the WAY gnome has to go. sun say 'gnome goes there and pay their programmers to do so' KDE are the legitimate owners of the QT sourcebranch and no other copany spit into their shit.

Re:y gnome not kde

[__past__]

Suns argument is mostly that they know C better than C++ - but I doubt that this is that relevant for a company like sun.

Another explanation is that it's easier to develop proprietary software for Gnome: GTK and most Gnome-Libs are LGPL, while, if you would use KDE, you would either have to purchase a commercial license for Qt, or to use the GPL version (and, hence, make your own app Free). Sun probably isn't comfortable telling their customers either to stop producing closed-source apps for Solaris, or to pay money to some other company.

Re:y gnome not kde

[kurt555gs]

makes a lot of sense

y pay trolltech for a QT license even if KDE is an order of magnitude better

Does WIPRO have GNOME CVS write permission?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or are they normal contributors?

C++ vs C decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more to the point - g++ and Sun's C++ do not have binary compatability linkage. gcc and Sun's cc are compatible, however. Sad, but true. Often it is easier to go with the lowest common denominator - C, instead of the more advanced language, C++.

Re:*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable..

[sultanoslack]

Note: I work for Sun, but I don't speak for them in any way whatsoever.....
There was some discussion about this on the internal Linux mail alias, and IIRC, the consensus had something to do with C++ not being a "standardized" language.

Hmm. I haven't used Solaris in a while, but as I recall, they don't distribute gcc/g++, but instead use an in house compiler. Most KDE development seems to revolve around GCC 2.95 (g++) right now, so it may be a problem that Sun's compiler won't compile KDE whereas it will compile Gnome. (Mostly a random guess.) Of course you can use both KDE and gcc on Solaris, but they don't come with it.

Limeware not a desktop, but a Gnutella client

[Anonymous Coward]

No comparison.

Re:Limeware not a desktop, but a Gnutella client

[Anonymous Coward]

well, I think Nautilus is probably the worst engineered software ever. whoever wrote it needs to take classes in software optimization.

ROX-filer is MUCH MUCH better. ok, it doesn't have all the features that Nautilus does.. If you want a better comparison, compare Nautilus to Windows Explorer. Microsoft can even write better software than the Nautilus folks can :/

Re:Limeware not a desktop, but a Gnutella client

[be-fan]

Plently of comparison. File manager or 3D renderer, the UIs of most all program should be the same speed. It doesn't take any longer to open a menu in 3D Studio than it does to open one in explorer. Besides, what's more complex? A file manager or a p2p filesharing program? If its the former, then you're suffering from featuritis.

Sun's AWT to be rewritten in GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just a matter of time - bury that slow and buggy Motif once and for all.

Re:Sun's AWT to be rewritten in GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

get a clue what you are talking. didn't motif serve you fine for the past decade ? if it's that heavily supported as QT or GTK+ is nowadays then it would still be the leading widgetset temporarely it is less bloatened than GTK+ not to mention the 10 widgets that got implemented into motif 2.2

you are like a parrot you repeat the fucking shit that others spit out of their mouths. i programmed motif for many years and it is not that bad at all. at least it is 20000 better documented than gtk+

Re:y gnome not kde

[elflord]

Another explanation is that it's easier to develop proprietary software for Gnome: GTK and most Gnome-Libs are LGPL, while, if you would use KDE, you would either have to purchase a commercial license for Qt, or to use the GPL version

I don't see why this is an enormous problem. If they're using Suns C++ compilers, they're already paying an arm and a leg as it is. I doubt SUn would have trouble negotiating a discount bundle-ware deal with Trolltech.

So, I think it is a C vs C++ thing. It's not just about what Sun know, I think the linkage issues with C++ are probably an issue (because you're stuck with whatever compiler was used to build the libraries).

BTW, a lot of the closed source apps developed on Solaris either have no GUI, are never released (in-house), or both.

Re:y gnome not kde

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, kdelibs is also LGPL. Qt is GPL.

Re: OT on C++

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's true that some of the extra stuff certain groups have added to C++ make it not work everywhere, C++ is an ANSI standard. If you only use a subset of C++ (think Objective-C style) then it will work everywhere.

I've been programming in C for 15 years and C++ for 8 years. I like the purity of C, but it is extremely ugly when trying to do good modular design. Even somewhat "pure" functional languages like Erlang have a module system. C has nothing. It's not that it's impossible to do things in C, it's just hard to manage compared to something like C++. If you only added something as simple as namespaces to C, that would be an tremendous help, but that isn't standard C. (I know, namespaces is not the best example because of how non-standard they are, I'm just trying to make a point about modular design)

My problem is that I really want to use C, but it has no modular functionality. My solution is to use C++ in an Objective-C manner. At least that's the best I've come up with, if someone knows a better way let me know.

Sun backs Gnome, but makes StarOffice payware agai

[egghat]

Strange.

Hopefully they are not going to make Gnome payware, except under Solaris ;-)

Holy shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, the already slow and bloated GNOME running on the already slow Slowaris. Sounds fun.

I'll keep my blackbox+OpenBSD+gtk-only+occaisonal KDE app, thank you very much.

Re:Holy shit

[nr]

Solaris slow? what have you been smoking? Solaris can scale to 106 processors in SMP while OpenBSD only can do 1.

Re:Holy shit

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenBSD supports the RMLI project, and is capable of scaling to 72 processors right now. Where did you hear Solaris scaling to 106 processors? I'd be suprised if it could.

Solaris is.. however, slow. Hence, slowaris.

Re:Holy shit

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a SunFire 15K, a Real Computer (tm).

Re:Holy shit

[Anonymous Coward]

slowaris? on the low end hardware i.e. winblows replacements. that run maybe at most 2 cpus... solaris blows..........

Re:Holy shit

[jo42]

And linux can barely do two.

Re:y gnome not kde

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome doesn't suck.....

Did you ever look at Gnome/GTK applications?

Do you honestly can say that,
Galeon sucks?
Evolution sucks?
Gnumeric sucks
Pan sucks?
etc.

I use gnome as desktop on a daily bases, I use GTK+ as widget-set for the apps I get payed for to develop, Glade, Gvd, Glimmer work good and stable

The only time gnome (sometimes) crash on me is when I'm use gnomemeeting, a bleeding edge application in its infancy or when I switch on GLText in xscreensaver.....

I can trace back my crashes in Gnome and can avoid them, I had lesser luck with KDE......

Sun and GNOME

[AtariDatacenter]

As touched on above, yes, Sun is very committed to the GNOME project. It will become a "supported" desktop mid this year. Later, it will become the preferred desktop for Solaris.

People are correct in pointing out that Sun has slipped on their deadline for integrating GNOME into a Solaris release.

I certainly see this is a win for Sun. I'm hoping that the GNOME people are seeing Sun's contributions as a win, too.

Me? I've used Ximian Red Carpet to install GNOME + goodies on my Solaris 7 box. My only unhappyness is that all my keys on the left hand side of the keyboard (copy, paste, raise to front, etc) aren't working. Some of that can be handled in the configuration, though.

Re:Sun and GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

"People are correct in pointing out that Sun has slipped on their deadline for integrating GNOME into a Solaris release."

I think it is GNOME that has slipped. Sun said they would integrate GNOME 2.0, and not GNOME 1.X. Since GNOME 2.0 is not ready yet, it is not in Solaris. GNOME 2.0 has gone from being "included in a future update of Solaris 8" to "included with the initial release of Solaris 9" to "included in a later update to Solaris 9".

It looks like Sun is trying to speed the development of a stable Solaris implementation of GNOME 2.0. They probably should have made this concerted effort a year ago.

Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choices

[aminorex]

NeWS, Motif, CDE, now Gnome. I think the CDE
experience blinded Sun to the KDE advantage,
because KDE incorporates too much CDE icing.
It's really too bad, because KDE provides a
superior component architecture, and it much
more advanced in it's functional development
than is Gnome.

Re:y gnome not kde

[Anonymous Coward]

Many GNOME apps are great. I loove Gnumeric and Evolution and use them daily. I think Gnucash is probably the most underrated GNOME app today. Galeon is also cool, but I find myself using the updated Mozilla more (hey, it takes the same amount of ram, and has tabbed browsing).

But.. I'd have to say as a DESKTOP, Gnome falls behind serious to KDE. It starts at the small nuiances (no launch feedback, no taskbar grouping), to large architectural things (the CRAPPY gtk file dialog, no netdownloading of file opens, and the general lack of integration between apps).

I look forward to both GNOME 2 and KDE 3. I think they will start to have parity in the desktop like GNOME 1.2 and KDE 1.1.2 once did.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:y gnome not kde

[__past__]

uh, kdelibs is also LGPL. Qt is GPL.

Show me how you develop a KDE app without linking with Qt, please...

However, Qt is not only GLPed, but also available under the QPL and a commercial license - and it's not even that expensive to buy a commercial version (AFAIR ~2K$ per developer per platform) if you plan to develop proprietary apps. It's probably more about what Sun might think that those licensing issues might imply than what they really do.

(Please note that I do not want to bash KDE or Trolltech because of this. Even if it were a problem to develop proprietary apps for KDE (and the available apps e.g. from theKompany imply the opposite), I couldn't care less.)

Re:*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable..

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use KDE with Sun's compiler fine.. the problem is that when people compile free software projects, they use gcc and then distribute it. with C, you can distribute the resulting binary to anyone (there is a defined standard). however, with c++, you cannot unless they have the compiler runtime that you used.

on platforms that C++ is prevalent (uhm, all major consumer platforms, like Windows and MacOS), this is avoided by the fact that there are either good installers (MacOS, Windows). or the fact that there are only one or two compilers (VisualC++, Borland C++ on Windows), and CodeWarrior and MPW on MacOS.

This is why C++ hasn't taken over C on UNIXes yet. On all other platforms, it has, except for niche programming (RE: programming of drivers, and operating systems).

Re:y gnome not kde

[SpinyNorman]

Am i the only one wondering y sun isnt using KDE to replace cde?

There's two obvious reasons:

- They don't want to pay royalties to Trolltech for Qt (commercial use)

- They don't want a C++ only GUI toolkit (yeah I know there's PyQt, but there's no CQt that I'm aware of)

Too bad, since KDE/Qt is much nicer to develop for.

Re:y gnome not kde

[Anonymous Coward]

There are ruby bindings and also you could use java (koala) to develop kde apps!

gnome and .Net

[gh0ul]

Down with the .Net

Re:gnome and .Net

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed!

Re:gnome and .Net

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. Howabout 'down with clueless assholes like gh0ul'?

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Ur@eus]

Superior component architecture? Superior to what? Definetly not superior to Bonobo.

Globalization = Good!

[NDPTAL85]

Well we can't import grain. That would destroy the domestic market for grain and well, the US being able to feed itself is a strategic advantage, not a financial one. Thats why we subsidize our own farmers.

Aside from that, I disagree with your disagreement. :) Global trade DOES help reduce income disparities and imbalances, but only when the target nations have the proper social and legal infrastructures ready to benefit from such trade. Financial infrastructure is necessary as well.

The US didn't get from agrarian to information based industries overnight. It took over 200 years. I don't see why its gonna be any less amount of time for other 3rd world countries. That does not mean global trade is bad because it doesn't cure and fix problems overnight. Its simply a good first step.

Re:Thumbs up!

[Anonymous Coward]

you are dumb. sorry to say but don't belive that sun works for FREE on a project like gnome.

Re:Sun backs Gnome, but makes StarOffice payware a

[Anonymous Coward]

so you belive that SUN does this all for free ?

all those poor suckers working for free on a project like gnome. for nothing more than an apple and sun is making the big cash.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think then that Sun's choice of Gnome had anything to do with it using C and KDE using C++?

World Domination : kgc - KDE and Gnome Collaboration

Sun's not Indian

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever gave you the idea Sun was Native
Americans?

can't hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

an extra 30+ programers for gnome can't hurt it.

X Windows, Swing, KDE, GNOME Similarities Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming in Swing and X Windows, I see a lot
of similarity in design between them. Graphics
device contexts, basic menu design. It's
tangential to be sure but there is something
there. Now, how similar are GNOME and KDE to
these two? Could Sun be throwing programmers
and money to start *merging* designs? Could
experience with the first two designs give them
leverage in merging KDE & GNOME with Java API's?
Is that an alterior reason for this?

Wipro. What a Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

A former employer (Nortel for anyone who cares) hired them based on internal pressure from a certain Indian VP. (The smell of kickbacks accompanied that of curry. :)

Results: Almost total disaster. Throwing any number of Indian code monkeys at a problem doesn't imply any solution.

Wait a 1/3 of a minute...

[autocracy]

So Sun is developing this version of one of the two major destop environments for Linux - the OS that it's busy badmouthing saying that it can't keep up with what they have? Sure, I get it - GNOME is a good desktop environment and is NOT the OS - but try telling that to Bob the Mid-Level Manager. And then you also end up losing recognition...

Re:Wait a 1/3 of a minute...

[Z4rd0Z]

What about the fact that Sun now uses CDE, the same environment used on other commercial Unices? If anything, this will make them stand apart. Plus, although Gnome development started out Linux-centric, it really isn't a desktop environment for Linux, it's a desktop environment for Unix, and Sun's effort strengthens that position.

Re:Wait a 1/3 of a minute...

[autocracy]

Rephrase: one of the two major destops environments commonly found in Linux distributions. I just think that Sun needs to be careful to not blur Solaris and Linux (yeah, I'll never be unable to tell those two apart. But it's Bob the mid-level manager that you don't want to confuse. He still holds the cash).

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[georgeb]

Good one, troll...

Let me tell you which one is superior, of kde and gnome. They BOTH are! Initially I was just as unhappy with gnome as with kde (that was a couple of years ago), and now I can see both projects grew and both are successful.

BTW, obviously you're not an active memeber of either community.

georgeb

Sun is throwing its weight against KDE

[Karma Sucks]

It's funny, we don't hear of *any* contributions from Sun to KDE. It's as if they are trying to create a divergence in the community.

The fact that KDE has been progressing leaps and bounds without Sun's help, is on schedule, and works *better* on Solaris than GNOME itself, must be a truly worrying prospect for Sun. Add in Mono, and they've got a problem.

However, despite being a KDE'r I wish the GNOMEs luck with their 50 Indian developers. It'd be instructive to see what they can do against the handful of volunteer KDE developers.

Re:Sun is throwing its weight against KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't trust into SUN anymore. they practically don't exist for me anymore.

Re:Sun is throwing its weight against KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

that GOOD statment is. you wholefully smart for me theseadays.

I'm dissappointed

[-ryan]

I'm dissappointed to see that Acentury1 didn't get the contract.

-ryan

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Karma Sucks]

Is this why Bonobo is being replaced by .NET? Step back and look at Bonobo again. Where is it now? Who is using it? Who *likes* it besides the GNOME promotion department? Where is it going?

It should tell you something that to launch Evolution you have to run at least 5 other processes! This is a horrible idea with horrible consequences. Not only is it stupid on a local machine, but it doesn't even *work* on a distributed network. So what's the point?

Most GNOME elements can't even talk to each other on the desktop. In KDE, *all* of them can. That's DCOP. In KDE, component embedding is a *piece of cake*. Can't say that for Bonobo.

Bonobo is the whole reason people are looking elsewhere to improve the GNOME development platform. I'm sorry, but the Network Object Model of GNOME never was. Come back when you have .NET-based GNOME, then I will be truly impressed.

Re:y gnome not kde

[NonSequor]

I hate to tell you, but in English "y" is not a word.

Sun and Linux

[shaji]

Didn't Sun announce that OpenOffice will be ported to GNOME?
Didn't Sun plan to use GNOME as default desktop of Solaris 9?

Sun, Please walk the talk and talk the walk

Re:Gnome still sucks though!

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont get why this is modded down but i share what this person say. kde is more advanced.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Ur@eus]

> Is this why Bonobo is being replaced by .NET?
It is not.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Alex]

Actually I'm pretty sure it'll be something to do with the fact that Sun don't want to have to tell people like Veritas, Oracle and other ISV's, "Errrrm, sorry guys you're going to have to pay arbitrary fees to TrollTech, cos we've decided to go with a desktop toolkit that doesn't belong to us".

Just think of the stranglehold that'd give TrollTech over Sun and any software vendors that deploy on Solaris, can you imagine Microsoft giving another company control of the windows desktop toolkit?

Before you reply back with "they can afford it" or any other such arguments, I'm sure Sun's view was that despite KDE's advantages, it'd be easier to take gnome and bring it up to KDE's level, than hand over control of their desktop to a 3rd party.

Alex

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Christian Schaller! bonobo.. dude you know it and i know it a lot of gnome developers till avoid bonoboizing their programs.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

i share this statement. i am developing some applications under gnome with some other people and we still avoid using bonobo because it is horrible. we hope to keep bonobo out of our product as long as even possible. we also have plans to port our product to the KDE desktop because of better API.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah right but KDE is more enchanced. :-)

Ireland Desktop unit...

[Anonymous Coward]

They suck. This is the same group that fsck'd the drag and drop API in java, which did not work for three years and two major JDK releases.

I would not cheer at hearing those Irish drunks are hacking gnome.

Re:Ireland Desktop unit...

[easter1916]

Hello, little racist.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, i disagree partially here. now what does SUN own ? nothing ? they don't own GNOME (yet) but probably soon maybe in some years after they change the whole code who knows ? but something i can say TODAY is that SUN owns the ROADMAP of GNOME already and they OWN a couple of developers so practically they own GNOME. they already act like fucking nazis on the gnome mailinglist. if i read the list i often need to puke 'our quality check' 'how about this and that' 'usability here and there' i mean who owns gnome ? isn't it a project for everyone ? a truly free project that everyone can contribute on ? nope ROADMAP is clear already no other volunteers allowed. now 50 people should mess in the code too. this takes us FREE contributors somehow the RIGHTS to contribute to the code. we have no way to fork the code or contribute to it (yes with some stupid patches) but no REAL contributing. sorry to say but gnome bites into shit now it is going nowhere.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[georgeb]

yeah right but KDE is more enchanced. :-)

Each of the two projects has its unique qualities and advantages over the other. But there has been a tremendous exchange of ideas and concepts between the two projects that has benefitted both of them. This is one of the side effects of OpenSource competition; as opposed to commercial competition, which promotes individual activity.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[ink]

What the hell does KDE have to do with CDE? What is "CDE icing" and why is it "too bad"? What does CDE's archecture have to do with blinding Sun? I use CDE every day, so please explain this to me...

How the hell did this post get modded up to Insightful? Is it time to differentiate Geek Karma from Polictical/Social Karma? The one group knows nothing about the other, and those that get a bunch of Karma by moderating Katz' insipid pieces jump into technology discussions with mod points burning a hole in their pockets. The result is embarassing, IMHO.

Mono is NOT a implementation of MS.net !

[Anonymous Coward]

It is an implementation of the CLR and the CoreClass API whatever they say or MS let addict hopes.

This make a huge difference ;-)

This is the differences between potential applications portability and real portability.

This means that if you develop an application under WinXX using the .net tools such applications will NEVER run on mone, unless you use ONLY the restricted functionality limited by the CoreClass API!

What it also mean is that you are not sure that a mono application will run on MS .net (Win32) !

.net will never compete with Java portability just because MS has not interrest in : ever wonder why they would kill the juicy source that WinXX is ?!? (I do not only reffer to license but also to the huge royalties they get from trainings and books thru MSDN and affiliated websites !)

.net as a portable platform is just a vaporware !
But .net as a complete change for MS legacy user and a "cultural revolution" : that's reality !

Anyway the Sun's commitment to Gnome is a good thing :o)

Re:I DO IT WRONG!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

OFLROLFROLFOLFROLFOFLFROL

Desktop Sun

[Snowfox]

I'm curious; please believe that this isn't a troll: Does GNOME on Sun really matter?

Where are Suns being used as something other than a server? Are there business sectors where Sun workstations are common?

I thought SGI pretty much owned the UNIX workstation market.

Re:Desktop Sun

[ogren]

Snowfox asks: I'm curious; please believe that this isn't a troll: Does GNOME on Sun really matter?

Where are Suns being used as something other than a server? Are there business sectors where Sun workstations are common?

I thought SGI pretty much owned the UNIX workstation market.

Nope. Sun has 76% marketshare for the RISC workstation market. SGI does well in the graphics workstation market, but Sun has the technical workstation space.

Yahoo article on workstation marketshare

Re:Desktop Sun

[rnash]

Where are Suns being used as something other than a server? Are there business sectors where Sun workstations are common?

I work (or more exactly am being rent by) for a company working in the private mobile radio area (selling to corporations or public safety).

And there I see 200 people develloping on Sun workstations and behind them lie Sun servers. They've been using them with Rational Clearcase (plus debugging tools) for years before Clearcase became fully functional on Linux (seems like only RedHat is officialy supported by Rational, full power since R4.1).

Re:Desktop Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

The importance isn't necessarily in the existing Sun workstations, but in the kind of muscle and big name backing that Sun can provide.

Re:Desktop Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda. Remember the whole "thin client" hoopla some time ago? We have been doing something similar since 1993. We have a big sun in the middle of the building running everything (oracle, e-mail, apps, print server, backups, samba, etc., etc.). The users get a linux box that is nothing more than an X terminal. All of the apps are running on the sun. If we upgrade something, we do it in one place. Nothing is held locally on the desktops. So yeah, we use the sun as both a server and desktop box. I'm told we're not alone either.

Re:Desktop Sun

[randombit]

Where are Suns being used as something other than a server? Are there business sectors where Sun workstations are common?

They're all over my university. There are still a few SGIs left, but everywhere you look there are Ultra5s (not to mention SS5-SS20s). After all, if you're going to have a support contract with Sun for your server, you might as well deal with them for workstations, too (that is the logic around here, according to the head CS department sysadmin, anyway).

And thank god. I fscking hate CDE.

Re:Desktop Sun

[Gerdts]

Sun workstations are very common as desktops for a wide variety of engineering disciplines. Other platforms have made some inroads into this market but the success stories are limited.

NT has made some progress, but the ports of the applications tend to be second-rate ports of the UNIX version. For example, in the late 90's some electrical engineering apps that were ported to Windows required an X server to be run on Windows. At one biomedical engineering firm that I interviewed at, the engineers tried to use NT, but found that it crashed too frequently during multi-day simulations. There are exceptions to this. Autocad used to run best on UNIX. Since the Pentium came out, Autocad shifted to being a Windows-only app.

Until the last year or so the front-ends of commercial engineering apps on Linux were all but unheard of. Some articles that pop up from time to time in EE Times suggest that vendors are starting to take the Linux desktop seriously. Certainly the motion picture industry has taken this route as of late.

Ximian's packaging of GNOME for Linux and Solaris makes it possible for me to deploy Linux and Sun desktops side by side with a bare minimum of duplicate training. I can't wait to deploy Solaris 9 so that I can stop answering olwm questions.

Re:Desktop Sun

[sql*kitten]

I thought SGI pretty much owned the UNIX workstation market.

SGI sell into a niche, which they own, and that's graphics, whether for entertainment or scientific visualization (they're big in pharma, for example). Sun dominate finance and engineering (CAD, FEA and so forth). Plus Sun are popular with embedded developers (firmware for laser printers, for example) which is a huge market.

The only times I've seen HP workstations is where they were being used specifically to develop software for HP servers.

Bye Bye Open Windows

[hfk]

As a side note, Open Windows will not be included with Solaris 9. Remember all those pop-ups in Solaris's Open Windows warning of it's impending abandonment? They meant it.

Sun history of mistakes with Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is regretting buying Cobalt for $2B.
Sun is going to regret getting into the Linux
business. Solaris is 10 times better than
what Linux wants to be, but isn't.

Swing desktop or Mozilla desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have forgotten another Sun's "nephew" - Mozilla (former Netscape).
Studiing with GNOME design Sun has at least two choices of techs to promote: SWING and Mozilla (actually XPTk). The speed is not a problem:

1. GNOME is not THAT fast to compare with. GTK is the other story.

1. Something should begin using upcoming super-fast CPU anyway. New PCs are already way TOO much speedy than required. No need to mention it may give a new green light for SPARC desktops.

1. SWING in 1.4 is already not THAT bad. And new area of applying XPTk may help to optimize its performance.

I like the disability bit

[marcovje]

because
- It is work which is too often forgotten.
- In which Microsoft has been(not Windows apps in general, but Microsofts own apps) is quite thorough.
- Windows own GUI systems are very navigable and intuitive using keys, contrary to many X systems.

Re: OT on C++

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, there is ansi c++ and iso c++, but nobody has made a completely standards-compliant c++ compiler yet (hint..hint.. Sun and Microsoft). gcc 2.9x was horrible in this department, although 3.0 is much better.

also, c++ linking is not standardized, while c linking is. this is mostly due to the complexities of writing a c++ linker and compiler (much, much harder than C).

but c++ is a great language, and I personally use it in all application development.

SUN starts to suck!

[Anonymous Coward]

SUN = SUN
GNO = GNOME DEVELOPER/COMMUNITY

SUN: "no we don't want to overtake gnome we want to help"
GNO: "juchu thank you yipieeee"
SUN: "hey let's put 50 more people on working on gnome 2, we have a nice day so we do it"
GNO: "juchu we get our gnome 2 fixed faster"
SUN: "aehm.. nice icons but may you change em to more intuitive ones ?"
GNO: "sure"
SUN: "nice where we are at it whats about the quality and stability can we do something to improve it ?"
GNO: "sure we work on it"
SUN: "well our customers (psst don't tell the GNO people we gonna cash our customers) want a intuitive desktop"
GNO: "sure you get it"
SUN: "here some cash now show your thanks"
GNO: "wow cool they gave us 100$ usd"
SUN: "(dump fools, we could even pay you 1000$ because we do 10 times that money"
GNO: "wow sun are our friends, they support us and gives us cash"
SUN: "let's concentrate on gnome again, what was that stuff about .NET (secretly put out another 500$)"
GNO: ".NET ? we never heard about it"
SUN: "nice now that we cleared up some facts"
SUN: "let us add even more developers lets say 100 in the future we use GPL and rewrite a couple of gnome code"
GNO: "hey that sounds cool"

2 years later

SUN: "hahaha we fooled these poor suckers"
SUN: "oki thanks for beeing such shitheads and work for free, we now made enough cash"
SUN: "besides we rewrote so many code that we call our GPL'ed code our own"
SUN: "well shit on this FREEWORLD crap, are you guys so stupid or is it real life ?"
SUN: "lets tweak the licenses, now that we own a lot of the codebase"
SUN: "we made things so complicated that no one can even FORK gnome anymore"
GNO: "hey cool they slapped us, really sun touched us"
SUN: "haha these suckers still don't get it"

what i want to point out is sooner or later SUN owns gnome, they already command around like beeing the OWNER of gnome.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[crsm]

Actually I'm pretty sure it'll be something to do with the fact that Sun don't want to have to tell people like Veritas, Oracle and other ISV's, "Errrrm, sorry guys you're going to have to pay arbitrary fees to TrollTech, cos we've decided to go with a desktop toolkit that doesn't belong to us".

Yeah. And its not only Sun that reason this way. Everyone with just some remote recollection of a mortgage bill or even kids to feed thinks the same. In fact its the entire problem of the Gnome/KDE split. Now if just someone with a large pile of cash could bye-out TrollTech...

But its probably too late now since Sun et.al seems to be committing themselves wholeheartedly to Gnome.

This will slow development down

[HanzoSan]

now even more developers will argue and fight on mailing lists instead of coding

Ok Miguel, a question

[HanzoSan]

After you finish Mono is the goal to make it a clone of .Net, or make something better.
If technology is the purpose, whys compatibility so important????? Mono is sounding alot like Wine.

Having alot of developers who wont get along

[HanzoSan]

Leaves mailing lists of programmers arguing for days at a time. Thats why KDE is ahead of Gnome, Gnome programmers are too busy fighting why kde is coding

Re:Having alot of developers who wont get along

[Karn]

Out of curiosity, why do you read theads on GNOME when you obviously do not like it? Do us a favor: go to the KDE Beta threads, and talk trash, and tell everyone what your favorite Desktop is.

Wake up and open source the java

[konmaskisin]

and then actually build some useful applications using it and we'll see ...

Are there any real java applications out there? Unlike perl, Python, C, C++ etc java seems to have not a lot of really functional, fast widely used applications. Applix was a great office suite that (unlike Corel Wordperfect) really was ported to java and ran fast. It never got widely used and it's mostly dead now. Does Sun have any sample applications or any **proof** that java actually works?? (perl and Python we know work C# .NET we are waiting for ...). Java has had 5 years - where's the beef?

ROX for 3rd World Countries?

[horza]

Sorry but the beauty of ROX isn't just that it beats every other Filer hands-down in terms of speed. It's (a) its efficient use of screen-estate (which you can NEVER get enough of) and (b) the innovative use of the AppDir meaning all of an applications files are in one directory. No package management any more. Delete directory and delete entirety of application. Something a decade old for Acorn users but revolutionary in the Linux world.

Phillip.

Re:ROX for 3rd World Countries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but the beauty of ROX isn't just that it beats every other Filer hands-down in terms of speed.

Yet another "I know everything, you know nothing" post from yet another prick with the only "correct" opintion. Fuck you.

Re:ROX for 3rd World Countries?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried it. ROX isn't bad, but neither is it that great, IMHO.

When I came to Linux from the MacOS, I was quite taken with mouse-based file management. It took a while to get used to bash, but I managed. At the time, all the file managers (RH 5.2) really sucked. I tried mc, a couple of amiga file manager clones...didn't like 'em.

gmc has always been sorta flaky and not very flexible. I've never tried Nautilus -- I have a PII/266.

ROX is good from a performance point of view. I like the MIME-based system. However, doing some operations involves going an extra level in a hierarchical menu, like deleting a file. It'd be nice if it supported defining additional actions -- for example, edit and delete a file, a la Explorer's file assocation actions.

ROX *is* quite lightweight and screen space efficient, though. I now find it slower than bash for almost everything, but for GUI file manager affecionados, rox is a good choice.

How will this affect price for Ximian Desktop Pro?

[Anonymous Coward]

What will the new pricing for Star Office 6.0 mean for Ximian Desktop Professional Edition? At $49.95 USD (Its current price) we have been seriously considering adopting this as the standard 'Corporate desktop' in the company I work for. Ideally we would even be able to provide a CD with the same software and environment for those who would want to and need to work from home (licensing permitting). If the effect of a commercially priced Star Office 6.0 takes the cost up substantially then it may not be as easy to convince our bean counters who will just tell us to continue with Microsoft products. We would like to switch to a non-Microsoft desktop and presenting a substantially lower cost as well as good 'compatability' will work to an advantage. With a higher cost the PHB will find it easier to maintain the status quo. (Not to mention more potential lost productivity to bad Microsoft product and the various viruses, worms, and trojans... :(

Sponsoring Hackers

[Anonymous Coward]

Will gnome-hacker from India submit code
soon? Now maybe Wipro and Sun opens the wallet
and sends him to GUADEC.

Re: Miguel the troll? - WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, seriously this is not a troll but mod me down if you wish, you'll be spending karma on an AC :)

I am starting to question the technical qualifications of one Miguel De Icaza.

I've been a fan a Miguel's for some time up until recently.
I met with some of his buddies about two years ago at an IBM conference and they kept raving about the guy. Being a young hispanic guy myself I thought it was pretty cool what he's been doing and I couldn't help but let my opinions be swayed by his rhetoric.

But just a couple of months ago he posted this comment about C# vs. Java.
Granted, this was in the middle of another flamefest started by slashdot for more traffic. And the guy has a right to his opinion just like everyone else. However, when someone is in the position where people seem so mindlessly listen to his preaching, he should at least do his homework.
From his post :

C# is actually a very good object oriented language. There is a complete type unification in C#. In C# structures and basic data types (like int, char, double) can be treated as objects with no hacks attached (I am not familiar with the Java hacks, but those who know claim that Java has some kind of difference between int and integer, or something like that).

Anyone who knows anything about Java or object-oriented programming for that matter, knows the difference between a primative data type "int" and a class "Integer".

I'm not saying Java is "better" than C# or vice versa, but I do know enough about both to not get so giddie about C# like its the best thing since sliced bread.

Having a C# compilier for Linux is cool no doubt. Another one of many tools for my OS. And I really hope that Miguel's playing with fire doesn't get him burned. If the dude gets over on M$ and screws them over with Mono then cool every /.'er will call him a hero again. But right now Miguel is looking more and more like a troll every day.

Offtopic analogy.

[saintlupus]

The main problem with that is that Sun makes money by selling sparcstations. They are a hardware company who makes they revenue from servers and service contracts. If they promote an OS for X86 they are competing against their cash-cow. Especially with the powerful chips that Intel now puts out.

And yet I can't read a single article in the snazzy new apple section without some nimrod yelling about how good it would be for Apple to release OS X for Intel hardware.

Sigh.

This moment of bitterness brought to you by a Macintosh user.

--saint

What else really?

[pinkpineapple]

As a company that doesn't know shit about UI, Sun beats them all. What else beside Gnome for Sun? CDE? Give me a break!

When I think that they had the opportunity to use OpenStep 7 years ago when they licensed it from NeXT. Idiots!

Oh, and the metal look is just a windows knock off. Better, if you want to have a good laugh, just read the "Designing UI for Java" by Sun Press. Hilarous!

If MS is a company that doesn't have taste (according to SJ), then Sun must be the company that has no taste at all.

PPA, the girl next door.

Re:What else really?

[steve_l]

Hey, CDE wasnt just Sun's fault. Sun NeWS used to be slick even if it crawled on 68010 sunos4 boxes with 8MB ram. Too bad they dont stick the src up on an ftp server; bet it'd fly now. Bring back oddly shaped windows!

(course, java swing on NeWS would still crawl)

Just hacks? Not developers or engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me , but why are hacks writing software?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[civilizedINTENSITY]

One of the "horrible consequences" of the "horrible idea" is stability. Putting the components in their own processes means a component's death isn't going to kill the app.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

> One of the "horrible consequences" of the "horrible idea" is
> stability. Putting the components in their own processes means a
> component's death isn't going to kill the app.

That's assuming that the "app" can properly deal with the components' death. A mighty dangerous assumption - if you've ever actually tried to *write* an application that deals with all the potential exceptions you will realize that there is a wide gulf separating theory and reality, and it runs under the name pragmatism. Look it up. The KDE developers did, and found KParts.

A few random comments.

[Per Abrahamsen]

The USD isn't particularily stable, not seen from here at least. In the last few years, it has fluctated between 5 DKK and 9 DKK, unlike the EUR, which is stable at 8 DKK. Of course, this is because the DKK is bound within a narrow margin to the EUR. My point is that stability depend on your point of view.

The workplace is obviously a better environment than any of the alternatives given to the people who work there, so a project like this can only improve the working conditions for Indian programmers. This, of course, should not be an excuse for first world consumers (in this case Sun) not to insist on some reasonable standard for the working conditions, but keep in mind that it a priori is an improvement.

The Gnome project should only accept quality code, this doesn't depend on whether the code is from Sun programmers in Ireland or outsources in India.

Their motivations should not matter, just the license and code quality. Any commitment to a postulated OSS ideal is beside the point. I'm sure Sun does this for purely selfish reasons.

It is true that once at the level of first world countries, cheap labour will be found elsewhere. Former third world countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan now has to rely on their skill and highly developed infrastructure to compete with other first world countries. As this continues, eventually, we may run out of third world countries to provide cheap labour. I consider this a feature, not a bug.

US is probably the nation in the world that is most self-reliant, so to say that it "depend on sub-serviant nations" is stretching it. While restricting free trade always has a cost, US could survive economic isolation better than anyone else, and certainly a lot better than the so-called "sub-serviant" nations. In the US, prices would rise, unemployment would rise (irionically, since the pro-isolation pinheads can't think beyond "they steal our jobs", to the many more jobs created by an improved economy), but the economy would survive on a lower level. In much of the rest of the world, the economies would collapse, as most other nations are much more dependend on trade than the US.

Of course, you are right.

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances,
> not the solution for them.

Right. Ignore that just about anyone with any kind of economic background will disagree, they are probably brainwashed or belong to some interbational conspiracy. And also ignore that every country that have practiced economic isolationism (like Albania or North Korea) have ended up being by far the poorest countries in their region.

> Creating a wealthy elite in third world
> countries will just raise local prices even
> further out of the reach of the poor,

Right. Just ignore who *creates* the local goods, and sell them to the new middle class... or rather "wealthy elite" as you prefer to call these programmers who just a moment ago wos "poor oppressed sweatshop workers".

> adding to the problems caused by local goods
> being sold at global (i.e. western) prices.

Right. Of course, those who actually study global economics say the problem is the opposite, that the global prices are made artificially lower than the western prices, by trade protection and heavy subsidicing western farmers. Which, had it been true, would mean that third world farmers, who get no subsidicing, get paid a lot less than they would in a free market.

> Using cheap overseas labor will just exacerbate
> the problem by increasing ocrporate profits at
> home thereby increasing wealth here and leading
> to even higher global prices.

It all sound so logical when you explian it. Lower production costs lead to higher consumer prices. This gives me an idea: How about we doubled, nay, trippled all our salaries? In that case, profit would disappear or become negative, and consumer good would be free!

Ah, I like your sort of economy so much better than the conventionel sort.

> Also purely from a selfish POV, I don't want to
> see my salary capped because some shortsighted
> manager is trying to increase his bonus by
> reducing costs by exporting jobs overseas.

Right. We would not want any manager to increase his bonus by reducing costs. What's next? We have already established that reduced costs leads to higher prices. And what's next? Managers increasing their bonus by improving quality? We don't want that to happen, do we. In the end we might end up with increased prductivity, and if world history has taught us anything, it is that wealth is inversely propertional with productivity. Back when we were hunters and gathers, everyone had their personal jet and lives on private palaces on Fisher island (thus the name). Every time we have invented something to do our work easier, we have become materially poorer.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

Your making too big of a deal about sun's choice, from what i read it pretty much boiled down to gnome being written in C. the desktop team at sun wanted the libraries in C not C++ so they choose gnome.

Re:y gnome not kde

[Anonymous Coward]

> They don't want to pay royalties to Trolltech for Qt (commercial use)

Since Qt is GPL for Unix, and KDE is Free Software, they don't have to pay any fee to TrollTech. You pay to Trolltech only for closed source programs, and it is a fee per developer, which is affordable for Sun.

> They don't want a C++ only GUI toolkit (yeah I know there's PyQt, but there's no CQt that I'm aware of)
There are C bindings, Java bindings and Objective C bindings for Qt and KDE.

Check developer.kde.org

I have to agree...

[Vintermann]

That Sun may not be really good at designing interfaces... I've tried to use Forte (which is Sun, innit?) and it's horrible.
But then again, I think you can trust those 50 sweatshop indians to use their time on coding...

And also: accessibility... Oh, that is just the buzzword of our time. Ok, so I can do everything with voice commands, what's the use of that when the interface doesn't let me do what I want in the first place?
I'm still struggling to get my linux box up (because of an ISDN card that's causing trouble).
Gnome, in addition to having a accessibility project, has a usabillity project which is far more important for everyday users. At least they are asking the right questions.

Surely an Irish Gnome . . .

[MightyMicro]

. . .is a leprechaun.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but KDE has terrible support for other languages except c++.

C++ is pure evil.

I'm glad java and C# came along. What the hell was Stroustrup thinking? I rather program in plain C before messing with that C++ crap.

Have you taken a look at the applications in GNOME vs KDE. Much better applications - Gnumeric, AbiWord... Shoot even OpenOffice is part of Gnome Office now. What can you say about KDE.

You are full of it.

[Xiphoid Process]

1) Bonobo is not replacing Mono, they will be integrated together.

http://go-mono.org/faq.html#basics

"Question 20: Will Mono include compatibility with Bonobo components? What is the relationship between Mono and Bonobo?

Yes, we will provide a set of classes for implementing and using Bonobo components from within Mono. Mono should allow you to write Bonobo components more easily, just like .NET on Windows allows you to export .NET components to COM."

2) Who is using it outside gnome? How about OpenOffice? :

http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/bonobo/

3) If you think the number of processess spawned (remember threads are processes in linux) is a good measure of the quality of a program, you are increadably ignorant.

Re:Sun backs Gnome, but makes StarOffice payware a

[pwlees]

openoffice remains free.

in my experience many companies don't like to get "free" software, since they

1. don't understand how to value/account for it
2. and/or
3. want to know the developer is going to be around in a few years when they need a refresh

hopefully you'll find that sun is responding to these two, rather than some evil plot.