Slashdot Mirror
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."
Also, doesn't anyone get the feeling here that Gnome is becoming less a desktop and more a political pawn every day?
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
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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.
IAAL,BIANLY
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 ;-)
.NET Framework, get me my flamethrower!!...but wait, isn't that freedom of choice we are long for?
Oh I love Java platform a lot a lot more than
Hat off to Gnome dudes! Way to go man!
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.
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.
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.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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?
.NET-based GNOME, then I will be truly impressed.
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
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
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
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.
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?"
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Comment removed based on user account deletion