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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."
Okay, let me be sure I understand this - Miguel and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which is an open source implementation of .NET - which was developed to compete with Sun's Java - and Sun's throwing developers at this? No wonder why they are hurting so bad right now at Sun - wake up and smell the java Sun...
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
Also, doesn't anyone get the feeling here that Gnome is becoming less a desktop and more a political pawn every day?
They are not in ireland, all the Wipro hackers are in india. It is the Sun employed hackers that are in ireland.
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 wonder with all the talk of MONO and .NET being looked at as an option fro Gnome, how much of this is intended to keep Gnome going in the direction it is already.
.NET out of the equation.
Sun I am certain would HATE to see MONO/.NET implmented in ANY core Gnome technology.
This is good for Gnome, either way if its sincere, and the help is actually there, and not just in a press release. I still have to wonder how self serving it is to keep
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Does this mean we get another couple of years of Slashdot flamage? Suits me, I like a good flame war ;)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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?
wait for the flame wars about why its GNOME and not KDE, and vice versa... :P
Note: I work for Sun, but I don't speak for them in any way whatsoever.....
There was some discussion about this on the internal Linux mail alias, and IIRC, the consensus had something to do with C++ not being a "standardized" language.
Or something like that. I'm not a programmer, so I'm probably not using the correct terminology.
diffrent conspiracy theory?
Maybe they are doing it as a back door way to get some control over a new standard Microsoft is pushing.
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.
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.
I don't see why this is an enormous problem. If they're using Suns C++ compilers, they're already paying an arm and a leg as it is. I doubt SUn would have trouble negotiating a discount bundle-ware deal with Trolltech.
So, I think it is a C vs C++ thing. It's not just about what Sun know, I think the linkage issues with C++ are probably an issue (because you're stuck with whatever compiler was used to build the libraries).
BTW, a lot of the closed source apps developed on Solaris either have no GUI, are never released (in-house), or both.
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.
As touched on above, yes, Sun is very committed to the GNOME project. It will become a "supported" desktop mid this year. Later, it will become the preferred desktop for Solaris.
People are correct in pointing out that Sun has slipped on their deadline for integrating GNOME into a Solaris release.
I certainly see this is a win for Sun. I'm hoping that the GNOME people are seeing Sun's contributions as a win, too.
Me? I've used Ximian Red Carpet to install GNOME + goodies on my Solaris 7 box. My only unhappyness is that all my keys on the left hand side of the keyboard (copy, paste, raise to front, etc) aren't working. Some of that can be handled in the configuration, though.
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-
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Show me how you develop a KDE app without linking with Qt, please...
However, Qt is not only GLPed, but also available under the QPL and a commercial license - and it's not even that expensive to buy a commercial version (AFAIR ~2K$ per developer per platform) if you plan to develop proprietary apps. It's probably more about what Sun might think that those licensing issues might imply than what they really do.
(Please note that I do not want to bash KDE or Trolltech because of this. Even if it were a problem to develop proprietary apps for KDE (and the available apps e.g. from theKompany imply the opposite), I couldn't care less.)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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.
Superior component architecture? Superior to what? Definetly not superior to Bonobo.
So Sun is developing this version of one of the two major destop environments for Linux - the OS that it's busy badmouthing saying that it can't keep up with what they have? Sure, I get it - GNOME is a good desktop environment and is NOT the OS - but try telling that to Bob the Mid-Level Manager. And then you also end up losing recognition...
SIG: HUP
It's funny, we don't hear of *any* contributions from Sun to KDE. It's as if they are trying to create a divergence in the community.
The fact that KDE has been progressing leaps and bounds without Sun's help, is on schedule, and works *better* on Solaris than GNOME itself, must be a truly worrying prospect for Sun. Add in Mono, and they've got a problem.
However, despite being a KDE'r I wish the GNOMEs luck with their 50 Indian developers. It'd be instructive to see what they can do against the handful of volunteer KDE developers.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
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.)
> Is this why Bonobo is being replaced by .NET?
It is not.
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
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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.
What the hell does KDE have to do with CDE? What is "CDE icing" and why is it "too bad"? What does CDE's archecture have to do with blinding Sun? I use CDE every day, so please explain this to me...
How the hell did this post get modded up to Insightful? Is it time to differentiate Geek Karma from Polictical/Social Karma? The one group knows nothing about the other, and those that get a bunch of Karma by moderating Katz' insipid pieces jump into technology discussions with mod points burning a hole in their pockets. The result is embarassing, IMHO.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
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.
now even more developers will argue and fight on mailing lists instead of coding
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
After you finish Mono is the goal to make it a clone of
If technology is the purpose, whys compatibility so important????? Mono is sounding alot like Wine.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Leaves mailing lists of programmers arguing for days at a time. Thats why KDE is ahead of Gnome, Gnome programmers are too busy fighting why kde is coding
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
and then actually build some useful applications using it and we'll see ...
.NET we are waiting for ...). Java has had 5 years - where's the beef?
Are there any real java applications out there? Unlike perl, Python, C, C++ etc java seems to have not a lot of really functional, fast widely used applications. Applix was a great office suite that (unlike Corel Wordperfect) really was ported to java and ran fast. It never got widely used and it's mostly dead now. Does Sun have any sample applications or any **proof** that java actually works?? (perl and Python we know work C#
Sorry but the beauty of ROX isn't just that it beats every other Filer hands-down in terms of speed. It's (a) its efficient use of screen-estate (which you can NEVER get enough of) and (b) the innovative use of the AppDir meaning all of an applications files are in one directory. No package management any more. Delete directory and delete entirety of application. Something a decade old for Acorn users but revolutionary in the Linux world.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The main problem with that is that Sun makes money by selling sparcstations. They are a hardware company who makes they revenue from servers and service contracts. If they promote an OS for X86 they are competing against their cash-cow. Especially with the powerful chips that Intel now puts out.
And yet I can't read a single article in the snazzy new apple section without some nimrod yelling about how good it would be for Apple to release OS X for Intel hardware.
Sigh.
This moment of bitterness brought to you by a Macintosh user.
--saint
As a company that doesn't know shit about UI, Sun beats them all. What else beside Gnome for Sun? CDE? Give me a break!
When I think that they had the opportunity to use OpenStep 7 years ago when they licensed it from NeXT. Idiots!
Oh, and the metal look is just a windows knock off. Better, if you want to have a good laugh, just read the "Designing UI for Java" by Sun Press. Hilarous!
If MS is a company that doesn't have taste (according to SJ), then Sun must be the company that has no taste at all.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
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The USD isn't particularily stable, not seen from here at least. In the last few years, it has fluctated between 5 DKK and 9 DKK, unlike the EUR, which is stable at 8 DKK. Of course, this is because the DKK is bound within a narrow margin to the EUR. My point is that stability depend on your point of view.
The workplace is obviously a better environment than any of the alternatives given to the people who work there, so a project like this can only improve the working conditions for Indian programmers. This, of course, should not be an excuse for first world consumers (in this case Sun) not to insist on some reasonable standard for the working conditions, but keep in mind that it a priori is an improvement.
The Gnome project should only accept quality code, this doesn't depend on whether the code is from Sun programmers in Ireland or outsources in India.
Their motivations should not matter, just the license and code quality. Any commitment to a postulated OSS ideal is beside the point. I'm sure Sun does this for purely selfish reasons.
It is true that once at the level of first world countries, cheap labour will be found elsewhere. Former third world countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan now has to rely on their skill and highly developed infrastructure to compete with other first world countries. As this continues, eventually, we may run out of third world countries to provide cheap labour. I consider this a feature, not a bug.
US is probably the nation in the world that is most self-reliant, so to say that it "depend on sub-serviant nations" is stretching it. While restricting free trade always has a cost, US could survive economic isolation better than anyone else, and certainly a lot better than the so-called "sub-serviant" nations. In the US, prices would rise, unemployment would rise (irionically, since the pro-isolation pinheads can't think beyond "they steal our jobs", to the many more jobs created by an improved economy), but the economy would survive on a lower level. In much of the rest of the world, the economies would collapse, as most other nations are much more dependend on trade than the US.
> Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances,
> not the solution for them.
Right. Ignore that just about anyone with any kind of economic background will disagree, they are probably brainwashed or belong to some interbational conspiracy. And also ignore that every country that have practiced economic isolationism (like Albania or North Korea) have ended up being by far the poorest countries in their region.
> Creating a wealthy elite in third world
> countries will just raise local prices even
> further out of the reach of the poor,
Right. Just ignore who *creates* the local goods, and sell them to the new middle class... or rather "wealthy elite" as you prefer to call these programmers who just a moment ago wos "poor oppressed sweatshop workers".
> adding to the problems caused by local goods
> being sold at global (i.e. western) prices.
Right. Of course, those who actually study global economics say the problem is the opposite, that the global prices are made artificially lower than the western prices, by trade protection and heavy subsidicing western farmers. Which, had it been true, would mean that third world farmers, who get no subsidicing, get paid a lot less than they would in a free market.
> Using cheap overseas labor will just exacerbate
> the problem by increasing ocrporate profits at
> home thereby increasing wealth here and leading
> to even higher global prices.
It all sound so logical when you explian it. Lower production costs lead to higher consumer prices. This gives me an idea: How about we doubled, nay, trippled all our salaries? In that case, profit would disappear or become negative, and consumer good would be free!
Ah, I like your sort of economy so much better than the conventionel sort.
> Also purely from a selfish POV, I don't want to
> see my salary capped because some shortsighted
> manager is trying to increase his bonus by
> reducing costs by exporting jobs overseas.
Right. We would not want any manager to increase his bonus by reducing costs. What's next? We have already established that reduced costs leads to higher prices. And what's next? Managers increasing their bonus by improving quality? We don't want that to happen, do we. In the end we might end up with increased prductivity, and if world history has taught us anything, it is that wealth is inversely propertional with productivity. Back when we were hunters and gathers, everyone had their personal jet and lives on private palaces on Fisher island (thus the name). Every time we have invented something to do our work easier, we have become materially poorer.
Plently of comparison. File manager or 3D renderer, the UIs of most all program should be the same speed. It doesn't take any longer to open a menu in 3D Studio than it does to open one in explorer. Besides, what's more complex? A file manager or a p2p filesharing program? If its the former, then you're suffering from featuritis.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...