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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."
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
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
.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 ;-)
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
So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies. There are choices for everyone to pick from.
Miguel.
>Okay, let me be sure I understand this - Miguel .NET - which
>and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which \
>is an open source implementation of
>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
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.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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.
IAAL,BIANLY
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 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 ;-)
.NET Framework, get me my flamethrower!!...but wait, isn't that freedom of choice we are long for?
Oh I love Java platform a lot a lot more than
Hat off to Gnome dudes! Way to go man!
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.
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.
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.
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-
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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
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