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

Countering .NET?

[JohnBE]

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.

Re:Countering .NET?

[NutscrapeSucks]

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?"

Co-operation

[IamTheRealMike]

Really those hackers should be working on getting KDE and GNOME to work together better, more than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for competition, but that has to be balanced with co-operation to make Linux easier to use for everyone.

Also, doesn't anyone get the feeling here that Gnome is becoming less a desktop and more a political pawn every day?

Re:Co-operation

[Pentagram]

I despair on ever having a standard for keyboard shortcuts - the legacies are too long and people too used to them (I'd like C-s, to fit with emacs, but that's common for saving a file.)

However: shouldn't it be possible to have some sort of user-definable GUI-wide setting for each shortcut? Instead of adding C-s in the code of an app as a shortcut, bind the action to the standard "save-document" keystroke and have the app notified when it occurs. Allow the user to override the action for certain apps. It's surely not beyond the reach of human ingenuity.

Re:Co-operation

[Permission Denied]

Have you tried using Konqueror using a window manager other than kwin? Really, have you done this?

It does not work very well. First of all, QT has a bug where it expects to receive a certain X message before it accepts the input focus. Most window managers don't send this X message when the keyboard is grabbed, so QT apps won't take keyboard input. Try this: launch twm or an older version of WindowMaker, launch a QT application and try using Alt-Tab to cycle to the application (you'll need to configure twm to allow you to do this). It will no longer take keyboard input even though it is the focus window.

Try setting up Java to work with Konqueror in any window manager except kwin. You'll fail. That's because Konqueror's java support requires DCOP communication with the window manager. It could do the communication via X atoms (which means your favorite window manager such as WindowMaker could implement it), but it uses DCOP instead. Konqueror will never fully work on any window manager except the KDE window manager.

So what have KDE and GNOME standardized? They have a common way of creating application links on your desktop and they have the _NET_WM stuff. Theoretically, this would mean that you could use the KDE pager in any window manager that supports the EWMH (the _NET_WM hints). Try using kpager (the KDE pager) with fvwm+fvwm_ewmh module. It won't work very well. Kpager won't work very well at all unless it's engulfed in kicker (the KDE taskbar).

The GNOME-KDE cooperation is mostly useless at this point. It's even worse if you don't want to use KDE or GNOME but only want to use a KDE/GNOME application under a non-KDE-GNOME environment (like using Konqueror under WindowMaker or blackbox, etc.).

Re:Co-operation

[Dr. Sp0ng]

It does not work very well. First of all, QT has a bug where it expects to receive a certain X message before it accepts the input focus. Most window managers don't send this X message when the keyboard is grabbed, so QT apps won't take keyboard input. Try this: launch twm or an older version of WindowMaker, launch a QT application and try using Alt-Tab to cycle to the application (you'll need to configure twm to allow you to do this). It will no longer take keyboard input even though it is the focus window.

Yes it will. The problem is that the alt from the alt-tab causes the menu to get selected, and kwin works around this. Look up at your menu bar and you should see the first menu item selected. Tap alt again to unselect it, and it'll work fine.

they are not in ireland

[Ur@eus]

They are not in ireland, all the Wipro hackers are in india. It is the Sun employed hackers that are in ireland.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[miguel]

I do not think you have understood my position when it comes to Mono and GNOME yet. There is a detailed explanation about this here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002- February/msg00031.html

The short version of this is:

* I do not have any maintainership control over any piece of GNOME anymore.

* I like everyone else have an opinion on how GNOME would benefit the most.

* People will be free to use the tools the Mono project produces or not use them.

* Mono will integrate with GNOME right away, just like say, Java/GNOME is integrated with GNOME right away.

* So I believe that building apps with Mono will be a nice experience for people in the GNOME world.

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 ;-)

So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies. There are choices for everyone to pick from.

Miguel.

Wipro

[AirLace]

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?

Re:Wipro

[Ami Ganguli]

Does the GNOME community really want to be associated with this kind of establishment?

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.

Re:*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable..

[bigdogs]

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.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Wdomburg]

>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?

A few things:

The only developer who has said they are interested in making Gnome "based on" Mono is Miguel. Your inclusing of "and his gnomies" seems to imply that this is a widespread intention; it is not.

The term "based on" is misleading. As Miguel himself said:

Rewriting GNOME in C# with the CLR would be a
very bad idea, if not the worst possible idea
ever.

And furthermore Mono is being based on Gnome technologies, not the other way around:

Libart will be used to implement the
Drawing.2D API; Gtk+ and the GNOME libraries
will be used to implement the WinForms API and
of course Glib and libxml will be used in
various places

If anything, it would be more accurate to say that Mono is being offered as an alternate API for accessing the Gnome libraries, and that Miguel has belief that this API offers signifigant enough advantages that future code may be based on Mono, or embed the Mono runtime.

The next thing is that this has nothing to do with Gnome 2.0, which is the project that they will be working on. Miguel stated he would like to see Gnome 3.0 have Mono ties, but he has also stated that his guess is that Gnome 4.0 would be when developers start seeing the benefits of it.

And of course, the more important point - Miguel does not have maintainer control over ANY package in Gnome. He has long since given maintainership on every project he worked on to someone else.

What this means is that the only thing that will move Gnome to dependency on Mono is if it is reached as a consensus among the Gnome developers.

Matt

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[flacco]

So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies.

It's that rough anal sex from Microsoft I could do without.

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.

Uh oh, WIPRO.

[mrsam]

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.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[luge]

A number of Wipro patches have already been rejected and sent back for reworking. Ximian and Sun can not and will not force maintainers to accept patches from them. Of course, Sun may apply those patches to their own builds of GNOME, but they could do that no matter what. It's important to remember that using GNOME doesn't make sense for Sun if they destroy the community in the process.

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

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:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Ewan]

Interestingly, while Sun are funding a lot of Gnome development, IBM have already shipped AIX5L with both Gnome and KDE available alongside CDE as the desktop.

I would hope so

[Per Abrahamsen]

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.

Re:I would hope so

[SpinyNorman]

I disagee.

Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, not the solution for them. Creating a wealthy elite in third world countries will just raise local prices even further out of the reach of the poor, adding to the problems caused by local goods being sold at global (i.e. western) prices. 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.

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. American companies sure seemed to be patriotic when it was an issue of "buy american", but apparently it's a different story when it comes to "support american workers".

A start to a real solution at eliminating global wealth disparities would be for us to start importing grain and to encourage cooperatives in third world countries which would help the little people sell into the global market. Instead we currently prefer to subsidize domestic production thus keeping prices artificially high.

Re:I would hope so

[luge]

The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies?
Speaking personally, not for Ximian: this question assumes that GNOME is in some way 'American'. That's... fairly wrong. Ximian has employees all over the place; GNOME definitely has contributors on every continent, except maybe Africa, and Sun's GNOME effort has always been based in Ireland. And of course the project was started by our favorite Mexican. So... I don't know. The answer to your question might be interesting or relevant if GNOME were an American project. But it isn't, so the question is at best misleading and at worst just dumb.

Re:y gnome not kde

[__past__]

Suns argument is mostly that they know C better than C++ - but I doubt that this is that relevant for a company like sun.

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.

Re:Paid hackers

[elflord]

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.

Sun and GNOME

[AtariDatacenter]

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.

Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choices

[aminorex]

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.

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Re:y gnome not kde

[__past__]

uh, kdelibs is also LGPL. Qt is GPL.

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.)

Re:y gnome not kde

[SpinyNorman]

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.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[miguel]

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.

Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic

[Karma Sucks]

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?

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 .NET-based GNOME, then I will be truly impressed.

Desktop Sun

[Snowfox]

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.

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