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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."
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
.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 ;-)
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
So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies. There are choices for everyone to pick from.
Miguel.
>Okay, let me be sure I understand this - Miguel .NET - which
>and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which \
>is an open source implementation of
>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
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.
IAAL,BIANLY