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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."
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?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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?
.NET competitor complete with J2SE integration.
It's interesting that they are targetting the small Windows server with Cobalt, I think they'd need some kind of
e4 e5
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.
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.
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?
[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.]
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
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
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.
put the what in the where?
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.
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.
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.