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Sun Increases Commitment to GNOME

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-thats-a-lot-of-commitment dept.

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."

5 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Countering .NET? by JohnBE · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    e4 e5
  2. Wipro by AirLace · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  3. Uh oh, WIPRO. by mrsam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Paid hackers by elflord · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

  5. Desktop Sun by Snowfox · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.