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Are You A Friend of Gnome?
From the donation page: "Love GNOME? Want to give back to the community of mostly volunteer developers who have worked so hard to make GNOME
the powerful, flexible, friendly, fun desktop that it is?" There are a number of contribution levels a person can join at, so if you love Gnome, consider helping the foundation out.
Too bad GNOME isn't written in C++. I guess from a coding standpoint, that's why I prefer KDE. GTK just feels like so much effort was put into things that C++ gives you for free.
Yes, I like gnome a lot. I might even donate money, but the problem with this link is they they don't offer any specific details about what happens with this money? Does it go to administration? How so? To major coders? which? Who qualifies? Bandwidth? Why does the Gnome Foundation do that requires our financial support?
To make matters worse, contributions seem to be handled via Ximian. I have no problem with Ximian forming as a company, or their desire to make money. Still, I'm not entirely confortable with a donation to a company. So, is Ximian providing accounting/banking services here, or are they going to directly benefit from this contribution?
I'm sure there are good answers to all of these questions, but they're not present on the donation page, and they should be.
..tell ya what I WOULD do and I bet thousands of other people would do. If any of the major distros-or a brand new one-would voluntarily set aside a certain percentage of the proceeds from their CD releases to give to those developers who's apps are in the release-I would purchase the full install CD's from them. If it's redhat or mandrake or whomever-so be it. I like the idea of "free", but am not so cheap or naieve to think it really is. As a non coder all I can do is bug reports and cash. As a user I just honestly don't see me sending a thousand or several hundred small donations-just the dang postage would be a bear. I'm relatively po, ie, "real low end of the economic food chain", but I can pop another ten bucks for a cd set if the coders who's work went into the whole package got their share. Make it so it starts at ten, and then you can voluntarily give more, with all the extra going to the coders.
Well, good idea or what?- a co-op linux distro that actually supports all the coders with some beer and rent money, not just the release company for the packaged distro.
I hardly see the parent as being flamebait. The guy/gal prefers KDE over Gnome. As a matter of fact, I prefer KDE also, though damn KPackage crashes EVERY time in KDE 3. But seriously, BadmanX is stating he prefers KDE, thinks Gnome won't ever catch up. I think that's a pretty fair comment for a discussion about Gnome.
"Bold as Love"
Have you used NT4 on a P90? (Recall that the minimum requirements are under a 20 MHz CPU.) It's quite snappy compared to xfree86 on a 233.
And besides which, X is slower on the same hardware than Windows is. (Not to diss X, because I use it on a daily basis; I'm using it right now.) But, that's a fact of life. Gnome runs on a 1.0 GHz about as fast as Windows 98 runs on a 300 MHz. Hardware shouldn't have to come along; Gnome should (attempt to) keep pace with Windows on the same hardware.
Why advertisements to gnome donations but not KDE, not Enlightenment, no, no posts on that?
Why support Gnome? Gnome has enough support from Sun and IBM, support KDE, they dont have big companies helping them out like Ximian, IBM, Sun etc.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Mozilla has its own UI libraries, so I don't see how it could, as you suggest, bring down KDE. Plus, you find Mozilla to be more stable under GNOME?
I can only think of one way for both of your observations to be true:
It sounds like it is KDE that is crashing, and bringing down Mozilla (the sub-task).
Once again... like a vast majority of the IT industry, you fail to realize that the definition of "free" does not start and stop at the exchange of currency.
This is one of the dangers with Open Source accepting the "freeware" label. I've seen the term used more and more within the industry when referring to Open Source. And its the same problem that's faced Open Source software for years - price isn't everything.
Sure - "free beer" is nice. We all like freebies - assuming they don't blow up in our face. I've been involved in projects where the low price has been a major help. But I have also worked on projects where there are ample funds for any needed technology... and Open Source software STILL held value.
It is all the other aspects of "free software" where the real value comes in to play.
I think someone does need to learn to read more carefully, and it's not me.
I wrote that contributions seem to be handled via Ximian. From the page:
GNOME Foundation
c/o Ximian
401 Park Drive, 3rd West
Boston, MA 02215
And, yes, someone can figure out who the Gnome Foundation is, which tells them absolutely nothing about how they plan to use this money.
Linus never asked us to pony up a little spare change for the kernel? Looks like he is doing pretty good for himself....
If I learned one thing from my dad growing up it was when you start looking to make money from your hobbies then it's to much like your real job -- and maybe time to find a new hobby. Among his many hobby cycles, he restored old saddles and other antiques -- he would spend hundreds of hours on a project for little more than the money for materials and the gleam in his eyes when he finished a project -- when I told he he was crazy to not try to make money doing it -- he said something like "They pay me from 7 AM - 5 PM everyday to do something that has never been fun -- and if I ever have to take money from this it will mean that it has stopped being fun..." When he got burned out he would pick a new hobby.
It never hurt to get a day job. That way you can make money to afford to spend the evenings and weekends doing things you enjoy.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Presumably the Gnome Foundation isn't a business but a non-profit. Most non-profits exist on either membership fees, volunteer labor, grants, or donations. The real question isn't whether the model works, it is whether there is any significant interest in philanthropy among open source advocates.
Personally I'll probably be donating at about the same level I donate to KQED. Less than I give to the EFF or the ACLU, but more than I give to the Sierra Club or my mayor's reelection campaign.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
This whole .NET stuff and GNOME just has to stop. It is just FUD.
.NET, but the development platform would still have plenty of value as a very nice (kind of) language independent development platform for UNIX, and GNOME. KDE could create bindings for mono as well.
Ximian is backing Mono which if successful will become a nice OPEN SOURCE development platform for UNIX (and GNOME).
The worst thing that could happen would be that Mono would not be able to run application made for
You don't have to use Mono at all for GNOME-development. It's just a (nice) alternative if you like a clean unified oo-API and would rather not deal with memory management.
Mono also has nothing to do with the core of GNOME, apart that there are some GNOME-hackers working on Mono. Mono is not part of GNOME.
Personally I like Java, and would like to see better Java-integration in GNOME, but mono looks pretty nice (and close to a Java-api for GNOME) as well.