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

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!

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: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