HP Drops Gnome 2 Efforts

nauta writes "Now is official, HP will not make further investments in Gnome. They will stick with the old (and crappy) CDE. Here is the announcement This is the official statement if they are pressed for an explanation: 'The open source development of GNOME v2.0 was still on-going at the end of 2002, and did not stabilize in the timeframe that HP had earlier anticipated. This and other business and industry factors required us to re-assess our plans.'"

Comments

So?

[infernalC]

The inertia of GNOME and KDE will eventually cause commercial UNIX vendors to at lease include them.

It's not over until the fat lady sends a KILL signal.

Re:So?

[infernalC]

I meant 'least' no least. Perhaps a nice improvement to the submit form would be to place the "preview" submit element to the left of the "submit" submit element.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame the developers for your mistake. Typical immature OSS attitude there.

Re:So?

[stubear]

You should have checked your correction with preview too. I think you meant to say "I meant 'least' not lease". [Corrections are in bold]

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drupal/Kerneltrap.org reuires you preview your comment. I think adding that to slashdot would cut down on first posters.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too hurried to get first post, right?

timeframes and open source

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems to be a problem with other open source projects too (mozilla).

Is there a general trend in free software to move slower than business likes?

If HP would have forked the code, would they have been happier with the results, since they could proceed without community approval?

Re:timeframes and open source

[GreyWolf3000]

I have 3 words for you.

Duke. Nukem. Forever.

Re:timeframes and open source

[pmz]

Is there a general trend in free software to move slower than business likes?

Yes, and it is a good thing. Because Free software can evolve indpendently of corporate timetables, it will evolve at a much more natural pace. One thing Microsoft can do nothing about is the fact that Free software is always moving forward (on average, of course).

One day, there will be no desktop, browser, or word processor that companies like Microsoft can compete with, and this, too, is a good thing. These are types of software that are long overdue for the public domain. Proprietary document formats are dinosaurs of the early battles that led to Word's dominance. They simply need to go away once and for all.

The slow-ness of Free software is only a percieved disadvantage, because it tries our patience. It is unfortunate that Windows XP will remain the only choice for many people for several years to come. However, it is very important for us to understand that companies like Microsoft, who dominate on commoditity software only, will eventually become obselete. This is inevitable and not optional for them, IMO.

Re:timeframes and open source

[sydb]

Yes, it seems inevitable to me too. However, I am occasionally sobered by the thought that Marx said the same thing about the ascendency of the proletariat.

Re:timeframes and open source

[bofkentucky]

Straying OT but...

for Marxism to work, human nature (developed through [creation|evolution|your theory on the origin of man]) would have to be scrapped. Humans are not the most altruistic species on the planet, the natural drive to kill a bigger mastadon, have a bigger cave, and to spread your genetic info on to the next generation are in us from birth, until Marx or his intelectual decendants can move this feature out of humanity (socialism|communism) can not work.

Software development (and any other venture IMO) thrives on competition though, the drive to build a faster, less resource intensive, and more feature rich product is what drives the free software movement at its core. HP has decided to stay maintain a symbiotic relationship with the mastadon that is CDE, when Gnome (or some other product) finally trounces the old "top predator" in the niche, the symbiote has no other choice but to find another host (the victor) or die (like I wish HPaq would).

Re:timeframes and open source

[Tackhead]

> > Is there a general trend in free software to move slower than business likes?
>
> Yes, and it is a good thing. Because Free software can evolve indpendently of corporate timetables, it will evolve at a much more natural pace. One thing Microsoft can do nothing about is the fact that Free software is always moving forward (on average, of course).

As living proof of the superiority of Free software's "more natural pace" approach to software development, observe naturally-paced Netscape's total and absolutely dominant market share domination over the rush job that was Internet Explorer. The infidel dogs from Redmond continue to throw themselves suicidally into the flames gushing forth from the mighty lizard.

Re:timeframes and open source

[sydb]

Well, Mozilla and Netscape truly are better than IE, that's for certain!

The fact the world hasn't caught on to this is simply a glitch.

Re:timeframes and open source

[Anonymous Coward]

like I wish HPaq would

Why? what's wrong with them, compared to, say, Dell?

Re:timeframes and open source

[adri]

The one thing that really does define us as humans is our ability to train ourselves not to act on our instincts.

(Let the flood of counter-examples speweth forward.)

Re:timeframes and open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for the ignorance but what is this post talking about? I know that Duke Nukem is/was a game but that is about it. Is Duke Nukem Forever a Open Source version/fork of the game?

Re:timeframes and open source

[bofkentucky]

True, but that repression of the core drives may be flawed in some cases. Few would argue that basic laws we have against murder, robbery, and rape are bad outgrowths of man's ability to repress their natural urges, but the same framework that gives us those laws gave us prohibition, the DMCA and a Progressive Income Tax.

I think that business competition is good, if HP can make a faster, more stable, and more feature rich unix machine with CDE instead of Gnome, let them try it, but I do think that they are making the wrong choice here. Sun's approach of shipping CDE but funding the devel of gnome as a future replacement makes more sense to me, but I'm just a lowly sysadmin.

Re:timeframes and open source

[bofkentucky]

Nothing other than

• The shoddy HP Pavillion that was the family's first PC still makes me cringe.
• Telling the board to go screw itself IRT the Compaq merger
• HP-UX 10.20, the Unix I cut my teeth on, It is my least favorite commercial Unix that I have used

Re:timeframes and open source

[Tackhead]

> Well, Mozilla and Netscape truly are better than IE, that's for certain!
>
> The fact the world hasn't caught on to this is simply a glitch.

The problem is, both of those statements are akin to calling the Grand Canyon a "ditch" :)

Re:timeframes and open source

[Jonner]

There are no GNU/Linux infidels on the Desktop. Never! Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves! The Free Software zealots, they always depend on a method what I call ... stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies.

We love the Iraqi Information Minister

Re:timeframes and open source

[udippel]

This mother of all comments deserves more than the 1. Surely a moderator who is a strict believer of Donald R.

Re:timeframes and open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is better than 'Duke Nukem Forever'. Atleast, we know how to spell the darn thing.

woo hoo...

[charstar]

HP-UX on the desktop is just a dumb idea anyways.

Re:woo hoo...

[sydb]

X11 features network transparency; I can run CDE on my Windows desktop by using XFree86 under Cygwin, or some other Windows X server.

HP workstations used to be quite popular. PCs are too fast nowadays for non-PC hardware to be big on the desktop, but there are still many situations when it's nice to run the servers native GUI environment while you sit at your desk.

Re:woo hoo...

[__past__]

I can run CDE on my Windows desktop...

This may not be the best example to explain why network transparency in X11 is a good thing...

Re:woo hoo...

[Arandir]

How about "I can run Framemaker on my FreeBSD box?" When you think about it, that's pretty damned cool.

I said this before...

[stubear]

...and I'll say it again. If OSS wants to play in the world of business they need to adopt some business attitudes and play by their rules. Deadlines and shipping dates reign supreme and the attitude of "it'll be done when it's done, no sooner" doesn't wash with the suits.

Re:I said this before...

[zmotula]

BSOD washes greatly with the suits. Conclusion?

Re:I said this before...

[The Bungi]

At least you can get stuff done between them.

And if you switch to Windows 2000, well, no more "BSODs".

Re:I said this before...

[zmotula]

Like... get a coffee?

Re:I said this before...

[The Bungi]

Sure. And even post FUD on Slashdot.

Re:I said this before...

[sporty]

One problem. A lot of OSS happens in spare time. I can't sleep, I write some code. Im too sleepy, i don't.

You can't deliver a product easily when your staff has erratic schedules. Moz and freebsd do well, probably, and I'm guessing, because they have a lot of people doing work in real life.

Re:I said this before...

[__past__]

But what if OSS doesn't want to play in that world, but rather to build stuff that works?

Re:I said this before...

[JJahn]

And when you aren't getting paid for developing, you probably won't give a fuck what the deadlines are.

Re:I said this before...

[theCoder]

And if you switch to Windows 2000, well, no more "BSODs".

So, is that because the default in Win2k is to just reboot instead of showing the blue screen? :)

Re:I said this before...

[Arandir]

So what about the paid GNOME developers at Redhat and Sun?

Re:I said this before...

[m1a1]

Deadlines and shipping dates reign supreme and the attitude of "it'll be done when it's done, no sooner" doesn't wash with the suits.

It "washes" fine with those interested in quality. Have a look at any Blizzard game, AMD's Hammer, and id's Doom III.

Sure, everyone wants things out the door fast, but those who pay attention to quality over rushing are rewarded not only with some nice $$$ but with consistent trust and respect from customers.

I drop $50 on a blizzard game without ever having played it before because I know they have standards of quality. For other games, I go to edonkey.

Re:I said this before...

[M.C. Hampster]

So, is that because the default in Win2k is to just reboot instead of showing the blue screen?

No, that's WinXP. Windows 2000 still bluescreens, but I've never seen it happen.

Re:I said this before...

[theCoder]

This is getting pretty stupid to argue over, but I'm pretty sure I did have to change that setting on my win2k computer (because dammit, if it bluescreens, I at least want to know about it!) Fortunately, I see very few bluescreens on that computer (it's uptime usually rivals my Linux boxes). I can't even remember the last time it happened (probably not since I had that bad memory).

Re:I said this before...

[chthon]

You have a point there (I'd mod you up if I could). Sun and HP compete in the same space there.

Re:I said this before...

[spokes]

You may have a point, in general, but as far as I know, GNOME 2.0/2.2 development has progressed even faster than GNOME itself anticipated. Did GNOME promise HP that 2.0 would be "stable" by the end of 2002? If not, then it's really not GNOME's fault, it's HP's.
[I haven't read the article.]

CDE bashing...getting old.

[pmz]

They will stick with the old (and crappy) CDE.

The redeeming qualities of CDE are exactly those that people criticize. It is a dry designed-by-committee desktop that is really good for day-to-day engineering and other technical work. It is simple, mature, stable, and predictable.

It is unfortunate that the mass market feels it necessary to have a one-size-fits-all Windows XP or GNOME eye-candy orgasm whose users somehow equate experiencing its visual greatness to getting work done.

With CDE, users don't have to deal with the volatility associated with the other mainstream desktops, becase CDE is an industry standard and has the inertia of some of the biggest corporate bureaucracies behind it.

I can understand why HP is questioning GNOME, even Sun's new GNOME 2.0 release has a long ways to go before it reaches the usability and stability of plain-ol' CDE.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[elmegil]

CDE may be simple to look at if you accept the defaults, but it is way more a PITA to configure than even Gnome, and Gnome is no picnic sometimes.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[pmz]

...it is way more a PITA to configure than even Gnome...

I disagree with this, because CDE's customization is performed primarily through the "Style Manager" and the "Create Action" tools. Actions can be dragged-n-dropped onto the workspace manager to customize the pull-up menus. Once these basics are covered, CDE is pretty trivial to keep up with.

Also, Sun's on-line CDE documentation is thorough and even covers the file formats stored in the user's .dt directory. This allows a sysadmin to create site-wide configurations relatively easily.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[elmegil]

How does one map Meta-F1/F2/F3/F4 to switch workspaces? Finding this in CDE took me ages to discover when CDE became the default (perhaps docs have improved by now); this was key to usability for me because I had relied on this function under olvwm. Finding the equivalent in Gnome took me a couple hours of research.

This is just one example where drag-n-drop doesn't do me one bit of good. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[4of12]

I remembered being offered the opportunity to run CDE on my early 1990's vintage RISC workstation.

I didn't consider drag n' drop advantage and integration (there weren't lots of "dt... " applications) worth the performance hit compared to running ctwm under X.

Maybe now, on current hardware, CDE performs tolerably.

It still seems to lack "pizzazz" compared to either Gnome or KDE. I think the OSS efforts tend to attract people who fervently believe they are working on the most important thing in the world.

If you choose to work on some project without being paid to do it, then you must feel motivated that you are doing something really worthwhile.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[Pierre]

I hear what you're saying but...

using CDE cuts my productivity. given the choice between a good HP workstation running CDE and a good PC running linux - i'll take the linux box for the UI alone.

weirdly - my kde3.1 setup looks so much like cde that's it confuses cde users... and the cde users look at my linux box as a toy.

i was thinking that this was why hp was ditching gnome. the established cde users see gnome as eye-candy from a toy os. nothing really to do with cde or gnome... more just momentum

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[tungsten alloy]

I think the OSS efforts tend to attract people who fervently believe they are working on the most important thing in the world.

That's a bit farfetched. My humble motivation for participating in OSS efforts is to learn stuff and build my resume. This chould enhance my ability to get employed and/or get customers for my own business. That others could benefit from my OSS efforts is not particularly relevant.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[pmz]

I hear what you're saying but...

using CDE cuts my productivity.

I'm not sure I understand how the desktop can cut productivity. I've experienced the same overall levels of productivity regardless of desktop: fvwm, olwm, CDE, GNOME, KDE, whatever.

IMO, the things that have first-order impact on productivity are shell scripts, sed, awk, perl, etc. rather than the look and feel of the desktop. All the desktops are approximately the same in the time it takes to do something, such as switch virtual desktops and launch an application.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[pmz]

I didn't consider drag n' drop advantage and integration (there weren't lots of "dt... " applications) worth the performance hit compared to running ctwm under X.

It's ironic that, now, CDE can be considered "fast". It's bascially the same scenario you describe but on 400MHz+ RISC workstations rather than 40MHz+ RISC workstations.

CDE runs well enought that it really isn't worthwhile to run twm or fvwm, unless you really want it. GNOME is noticibly less responsive than CDE, but it's still usable.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[Anonymous Coward]

Under "Desktop Applications" in the Application Manager there is a program called "Hotkey Editor". Want to guess what it does? It's been there since Solaris 8 (that's going on 3 years now).

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe now, on current hardware, CDE performs tolerably.

I use CDE because Gnome and KDE are intolerably slow. I also have never had stability problems with CDE, unlike my Gnome or KDE experience.

Re:CDE bashing...getting old.

[chthon]

It even lacks "pizzazz" compared to Window Maker (which builds OOTB on Solaris), and was slow in 2000, and is still slow in 2003.

haha

[Flamerule]

Quoth the marketer:

The open source development of GNOME v2.0 was still on-going at the end of 2002, and did not stabilize in the timeframe that HP had earlier anticipated.

Erm, so HP needed development on GNOME 2 to stop, by the end of 2002, so that they could use it? What the hell?

What does "stabilize" mean, anyway? Halting devel work on GNOME 2 because work on GNOME 3 has started?

Re:haha

[Tackhead]

> What does "stabilize" mean, anyway? Halting devel work on GNOME 2 because work on GNOME 3 has started?

Hint: If you're using an HP workstation, you're probably not using it to keep up with the state of the art in fancy desktops.

If my boss is paying me $100K per year to do CAD, and then he buys me a brand-new $20K CAD package that runs fine under CDE, and it just happens to work under GNOME (for about a week before another dependency makes it stop working again), guess what desktop I'm gonna be using?

Re:haha

[Arandir]

What does "stabilize" mean, anyway?

Well, since you're a GNOME user, I can understand why you don't understand the term, since it's so rare to see it. [ducks]

"Stable", among other things, means that the development APIs are not changing. It does NOT mean that development has stopped, only that they have finalized the interfaces, allowing other people to develop for it.

A stabilized GNOME 2 means that you don't have to rewrite your application next week when things change. Ideally, you shouldn't have to rewrite it when GNOME 3 comes out either. Consider the great unwashed evil that is KDE: the API is stable. It doesn't matter if you love or hate KDE, if you look at the project with an honest perspective, you have to agree that they have a relatively stable API. They may add new interfaces, but they keep their old ones as stable as possible. I ported several KDE 2 applications to KDE 3 for the FreeBSD ports collection. Average porting time was half an hour, including compilation and testing. And this was between MAJOR release versions!

An unstable API is a public announcement that the developers do not feel that the project is ready for public use, regardless of other statements to the contrary. GNOME is not alone in this regard, but that doesn't make the practice right.

Re:haha

[Anonymous Coward]

gtk 2.0 apps are compatible with gtk 2.2.. and will be compatiable when gtk 2.4 comes out.

the transition from gtk 1 to gtk 2 took a lot of years.

Re:haha

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since you're a GNOME user, I can understand why you don't understand the term, since it's so rare to see it. [ducks]

Well, since you're not a GNOME user, I can understand you don't know the APIs for Gnome2 are stable, although more functions are added, keeping the compatibility. [ducks]

Re:haha

[GauteL]

KDE 3.0 to 2.0 was not a big step and the main reason for it to go from 2.x to 3.x was the major change in Qt. KDE 1.x to 2.0 was however a huge step and changed things pretty dramatically. GNOME just went through the same step for GNOME 2.0 and the API is not expected to change much for quite some time. GNOME 2.0 came out last june. GNOME 2.2 came out 2.5 months ago, and GNOME 2.4 will be out in september, all with the same basic API.

GNOME is not even meant to change that much from 2.x to 3.x, so the API should now be reasonably stable for quite some time. It was perhaps not ready for HP in time, but it is there now.

Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[mhesseltine]

Ok, I don't get it. Gnome 2 is good enough for SUN Solaris, but not HP-UX? Which OS has a larger user base? (seriously, I don't know and a quick search turned up little) If SUN is willing to put it's faith into the Gnome developers and their own, why wouldn't HP just ride the coatails and get a good Gnome 2.0 for their OS as well?

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[pmz]

Gnome 2 is good enough for SUN Solaris, but not HP-UX?

GNOME 2 is not yet good enough for Sun. They have released it only in an unbundled package, and for good reason, too. There are still several severe usability issues, especially related to desktop customization. I would bet that after another year or so of refinement, it would finally be good enough to replace CDE as the default. Even then, it would be hard to beat the fact that CDE has been around for years, and GNOME 2 is just a toddler by comparison.

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[elmegil]

But Sun is pretty deeply committed to helping get it to work. Sun won't replace CDE as the default until its ready, but it seems ludicrous to say "well, they're not making our time to market goals, so we pull out completely." Sun at least sees that the future is not CDE.

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[pmz]

Sun at least sees that the future is not CDE.

More encouraging for me is that Sun hasn't caved into the buzz surrounding GNOME while still finding a way to embrace it. They are approaching it they way they should be: engineering before marketing. HP, as we all know, appears to have become a marketing-first company, which is unfortunate.

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[ianezz]

Ok, I don't get it.

Hint: I see OpenOffice for Solaris on Sparc, but I don't see OpenOffice for HP-UX on PA-RISC. Why?

I'd guess that (some) people at Sun believe that one day Solaris will make it to the non-techs desktops at large, while people at HPAQ basically don't.

In order to make it to the desktop, Sun needs (badly) something to replace the CDE, which is almost wasted disk space by today's standards (and IMHO also by yesterday's standards: NeXTStep provided a infinitely more useful desktop than CDE, and that was before the CDE was born in early '90).

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[larry bagina]

In order to make it to the desktop, Sun needs (badly) something to replace the CDE, which is almost wasted disk space by today's standards (and IMHO also by yesterday's standards: NeXTStep provided a infinitely more useful desktop than CDE, and that was before the CDE was born in early '90).

Interestingly enough, Sun (along with NeXT and HP, IIRC) did the OpenStep specification, which GNUstep and Cocoa are based on. There were beta OpenStep frameworks for Solaris and HP (as well as WindowsNT).

It never made it past beta, though -- Sun went with Java (which is strongly influenced by Objective C and the OpenStep Foudnation Kit). They had that Java-based browser for a while, so they may have been thinking that Java could provide the foundation or their next generation desktop. Of course, we know java and gui aren't as nice as they could have been.

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[Arandir]

HP wants to write commercial proprietary applications for GNOME. They cannot do that when the development has not stabilized. HP does not want to develop for and support a moving target, and their customers won't want to install a patch every week just because someone at GNOME changed the API. Geez, even Windows managed to keep a stable API through three different desktops, nine major release versions, and one complete decade!

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[KeyserDK]

gnome/gtk libs has been ABI/APIstable since 2.0. It seems they are pretty comitted to do just what you want.

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[Anonymous Coward]

mod this up plz.. you'd think from the parent post that with every minor gtk release, you have to recompile your apps!

Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX

[leandrod]

> good enough for SUN Solaris, but not HP-UX? Which OS has a larger user base?

Sun Solaris. Sun only does Solaris (mostly), while HP does several OS's.

Was this a good marketing move for HP?

[Futurepower(R)]

HP should have thought more clearly about this. What is the cost to HP of Timothy of Slashdot calling HP software "crappy"? It is difficult to imagine that it is less than the cost of continuing development.

Re:Was this a good marketing move for HP?

[Jarth]

You probably hit the spot on this one, once the adrenaline get's going these guys brake for no one. Within their right. It is only after years of sitting by i became to understand the importance of shutting up in the right places. The person(s) involved should find some other outlet, maybe a closed developpers forum. Just think about this. Posting a website on slashdot is enough to launch an unintentional DDOS to the website concerned. To the PR people such a remark must at least feel like a slap in the face. Given this is the kind of 'world' they are frequenting and inhabiting. Although critique has the right time and the right place, having to learn when to shut up is the downside of flirting with commerce. (Remember Iraq, Q8 . . . ?)

Re:Was this a good marketing move for HP?

[Anonymous Coward]

people give a flying fuck what timothy thinks?

timmeh!!!!#%#% :\

Bill Won -- Deal with it

[fm6]

It's tempting to blame the usual politics and infighting and general flakiness for Gnome's "instability". But if Gnome were at all important to HP (or to Sun, or to the other corporate backers of the Gnome Foundation), they'd pony up the money or the programmer expertise needed to stabilize it.

Or just accepted its current level of stability. I'm no expert, and I'm not even a Gnome fan, but the Gnome appears to me to be at least as stable as CDE!

You have to look at the reasons so many people jumped on the Gnome or KDE bandwagon starting around 1999. They'd been fighting with Microsoft for access to the desktop for a long time. They saw the sudden emergence of open source desktops as one last chance to offer a serious competitor to Windows.

Which it wasn't. Microsoft won the desktop wars a long time ago. There will always be people struggling to offer alternatives to the Microsoft monopoly. (At least I hope there will.) But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.

And even if it were possible, there's no longer any point. The traditional "personal" computer market is saturated. It won't see any more drastic expansions until the next Big Idea (a solution to the last mile problem? cheap mobile computing? if I knew I'd be off building it) makes its splash.

Re:Bill Won -- Deal with it

[Christ-on-a-bike]

Gnome and KDE, like Linux and free software generally, are international projects, funded and written by many different organisations with different needs and resources. (The German government, RedHat, Sun...)

And even if it were possible, there's no longer any point. The traditional "personal" computer market is saturated.

Been to China recently? How about India?

And even if the market for desktop PCs was 'saturated', there would still be a market for operating systems!

Re:Bill Won -- Deal with it

[fm6]

Been to China [com.com] recently? How about India [rediff.com]?

Ouch. Good point. We in the west, particularly the U.S., tend to think the technological world begins and ends with us. Whereas China or India each outnumber us 5 to 1. And both countries have their share of techies. Still...

I used to be part of the team that created Kylix. Now, you can use Kylix for many kinds of development, but where it really shines is developing GUI applications. So I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that Borland created Kylix mainly to tap into the impending boom in Linux desktop apps.

Except that the boom never happened. There was a reasonable demand for Linux software in a lot of places, including South and East Asia (with their 2 billion potential users). But nothing like a boom.

Probably the day will come when there are more computer users in the East than in the West. But it's not going to be for a few years yet. And when that day comes, I suspect the systems will be much better suited for conditions in that part of the world than anything we're using now.

Besides, suppose there was a sudden surge in demand for computers from the East. Hundreds of thousand of desktop systems at once. Where would they buy them? Not from HP or Sun. They'd buy x86 boxes, made in white box factories. Probably Asian factories.

Re:Bill Won -- Deal with it

[Arandir]

Gnome appears to me to be at least as stable as CDE!

Stable does not merely mean that the software doesn't crash much. It also means that the software has a consistant and reliable API.

Not only do you want your desktop not to crash, you also want the software you write for it today to be valid tomorrow.

Re:Bill Won -- Deal with it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's tempting to blame the usual politics and infighting and general flakiness for Gnome's "instability". But if Gnome were at all important to HP (or to Sun, or to the other corporate backers of the Gnome Foundation), they'd pony up the money or the programmer expertise needed to stabilize it.

From what I gather, Sun has "ponied up the money" and a lot of engineering time and experience to work on GNOME. When it's ready, it'll be the new, official desktop of Solaris. CDE will still be there for standards compliance.

Re:Bill Won -- Deal with it

[GauteL]

I don't think you should put SUN in here with HP. SUN is still commited to GNOME, and have released official GNOME 2 packages for Solaris already. It is still slated for inclusion in the next version of Solaris.

SUN also have put quite a lot of money where their mouth is, and have contributed extensively to documentation and accessibility for the GNOME-platform.

Apparently, you got lucky

[leonbrooks]

While W2k is an improvement over NT in terms of reliability, it still bluescreens occasionally. I note that the oldest IIS webserver finally managed to rack up 2 years, just in time for Slammer - but that every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that. And XP is a reliability unimprovement. And Foghorn Leghorn - er, I mean, Longhorn, or BlackComb, or whatever it's called today is gonna be all shiny new and with a fabulous and innovative range of unforeseen bugs too.

Meantime, I get plenty done and there are no Windows machines in the house at all to "do stuff" with. I may not have the latest frilly border on my documents, and each screen I face may have more than three things to click on, but my documents and programs do come out hot and on time.

If you ever come to visit Western Australia, call ahead. I can show you a bunch of kids doing video editing on their Linux boxes and a highly productive office kitted out with nothing but Linux. No Windows, no bluescreens, yes productivity.

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[The Bungi]

Ah, one of those urban legends post trying to prove than [Linux|BSD|OSX] is better than Windows.

While W2k is an improvement over NT in terms of reliability, it still bluescreens occasionally

So does my Debian box running Gnome, and so does every other OS ("blue screen" being whatever passes for that elsewhere). The assertion that operating system X fails more than operating system Y is about as valid as other apples-to-oranges comparisons because I'm sure as heck not doing the same things with my Windows boxes as you are with Linux.

finally managed to rack up 2 years

Server uptime is a nice statistic that is irrelevant for people who buy computers to play games or send email to grandma. Windows 2000 has absolutely fantastic uptime compared to NT4, and yet that's irrelevant as well even in the server space. What matters is service availability. I really don't find it amazing that a box can serve static HTML for six years in a row without crapping out. In the real world, I don't care if the box never dies, it's being rebooted at 4:00 AM on a Sunday. Why? Because. It doesn't matter which OS it happens to be running. And since you can cluster Windows boxes very easily, you have 100% service availability. Period.

BTW, Slammer is not an IIS worm.

is gonna be all shiny new and with a fabulous and innovative range of unforeseen bugs too

So is the next version of Oracle. So your point is?

I may not have the latest frilly border on my documents

Good for you. I use Windows to write code, mostly and play games. In three years I've had exactly two blue screens, both caused by crappy Creative drivers. At work my workstation has had exactly zero blue screens in two years. These are boxes that get turned off about once a week.

No Windows, no bluescreens, yes productivity.

More power to you.

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[ralphclark]

So does my Debian box running Gnome, and so does every other OS ("blue screen" being whatever passes for that elsewhere)

Hmm. I've been running a Linux network comprising a variety of hardware since Slackware 2.0 (about 1993 I think) and the only setup that ever forced me to reboot was Red Hat 5.0 (a famous turkey if ever there was one - around the end of 1998?). I replaced it with the then-current version of SuSE (5.4 or something) a few weeks later and that was the end of that. No system lockups or crashes in the past five years. Remember this is several machines too (three or four) so my data set is almost big enough to be a statistical sample :o)

If you really are getting crashes or lockups on Linux therefore it's most likely you have hardware problems, e.g. you're running your systems too hot, or you're using cheap RAM, or you have a motherboard with an early revision (i.e. buggy) chipset.

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[The Bungi]

If you really are getting crashes or lockups on Linux therefore it's most likely you have hardware problems

I have an older (~3 year) box, a Gateway with some mods. I boot to both Debian and RedHat 7.x (or maybe it's 6.x, it's the "Valhalla" build) on it.

RH works fine. Debian crashes once in a while, especially when using Mozilla and/or xmms. Sometimes the OS as a whole will begin to get unresponsive to the point I have to reboot. All is well for a few hours after that.

I don't consider myself a Linux expert since I've only been using it for about two years, but I can't find anything that would point to the reason for this.

I'm probably at fault, but that doesn't mean that a) Linux sucks; or b) Windows r00lz. It just means that sometimes you can screw it up just as happily with the "superior" OS.

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[ralphclark]

Kernels shouldn't crash due to software errors. At all.

Conventional wisdom says that the acid test is kernel compiles (this is because it works the machine harder than just about anything else). If you have a working kernel .config that in a repeated test sometimes completes compilation and sometimes doesn't, this is usually caused by segment violations due to memory errors. This can be caused either by poor quality DRAM, or a BIOS config or jumper configuration running the DRAM outside its rated spec, or by timing errors on the memory bus which is down to the chipset.

You could try putting memtest on a floppy and running a comprehensive memory check for 24 hours. If there is a problem with the DRAM or with bus timings it *might* show up there.

Take a look at your motherboard - does it have "Rev: 1.0" stencilled on it anywhere? Actually some motherboards didn't get stable until revision 1.4 or 1.5...this is most likely if the board was one of the first to implement a new chipset.

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[cerberusss]

No Windows, no bluescreens, yes productivity.

No windows == No MS Office.
If you have no MS Office, where's that productivity you're talking about? You're not gonna tell me about how the Wordfilters in Open/StarOffice work just fine, are you?

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[leonbrooks]

You're not gonna tell me about how the Wordfilters in Open/StarOffice work just fine, are you?

As well as one MS-Word version to another, yes, and sometimes better.

And OOo does a lot of things well that MS-Word can't do, or does very badly.

PS, Office runs fine on Mac OS X, so its absence on Linux is a political decision (porting would be a doddle). Expect that decision to be reversed before Linux officially hits 10% of the desktop market share.

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[cerberusss]

As well as one MS-Word version to another, yes, and sometimes better.

Well, my experience with the Word filters in OOo 1.0.2 is that there was always one or another bug harassing me, to the point that I didn't dare to edit/start a document in a project on my work.
Funny enough people seem to be a lot more forgiving when it's (a version of) Word's fault rather than OOo's fault. Lots of snide remarks from customers and colleagues like "Gee man, stop wasting time. Just run Windows and Word blahblahblah"

It's true that the latest OOo, 1.1beta, is looking pretty good. Yesterday I've been looking at it, opening some documents on projects I've worked on. Lots of bugs have been solved.

(...) Expect that decision to be reversed

It's interesting to talk about how the future might look like, but when I'm working, I only care about what's working right now. OOo still has to prove itself. Flawless word im/export is what I need.

(Note that other people might need other features, I'm not saying that my feature-needs are the only needs.)

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[SecretAsianMan]

leonbrooks (8043) wrote:

up 2 years ... every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that

Only if their sysadmins are complete idiots. The truth is that exploits happen. Kernel updates happen. Recompiles happen. Reboots happen.

If not that, then intrusions happen. Get the point?

Re:Apparently, you got lucky

[SecretAsianMan]

The Bungi wrote:

uptime is a nice statistic that is irrelevant for people who buy computers to play games

I have to disagree. Having BSODs thrice a day back in my EverQuest-playing days was certainly not fun, and I'm definitely not the only one to echo that sentiment. One must admit that the game publisher's crappy code bears much of the responsibility, but I still fault the platform for making it possible in the first place for the game to go BSOD.

So while gamers may not care between 2-year uptime and 2-week uptime, give them 2-hour uptime and someone's getting yanked into the street and shot.

The the risk of starting a flamewar...

[leonbrooks]

This here KDE 3.1 desktop seems mighty stable, and it's easy to configure, too. You can have an "eye-candy orgasm" (excellent buzzphrase!) and still keep your I-am-an-accountant-I-am-so-boring-people-forget-to -breathe-in-my-presence shirt on.

I've not had any noticeable issues with GNOME recently, either, and I can't see that there's enough of an issue for Hewlett-Pacquard to throw a hissy fit over it, especially given that most of the desktops hp ships are laden with oops-another-special-case Windows.

Re:The the risk of starting a flamewar...

[elmegil]

KDE unfortunately relies on Qt, which, if you want to resell or redistribute in the normal ways starts becoming expensive to distribute as a corporate entity. Personally I prefer KDE, but I understand why Sun and HP don't adopt it.

Re:The the risk of starting a flamewar...

[Arandir]

starts becoming expensive to distribute as a corporate entity

Huh? It's free to distribute! Even the proprietary version!

But it's not free to develop for. You need a per-developer license to create non-free software with Qt. But once you've done that, you can distribute the finished product any way you want, including in ways in which you don't have to pay any with no royalties for anyone. You can even distribute the Qt runtimes royalty free!

No, it's not free-beer, not even for billion dollar companies like Sun and HP that might have twenty or so people actually developing with Qt. But you don't have to pay to distribute your Qt software.

Re:The the risk of starting a flamewar...

[elmegil]

Given how many developers use Solaris, and some apparent confusion over who pays (the developer? Or the distributor?), you don't see that as expensive to distribute? It's an entangling license that incurs costs and liabilities easier done without by using Gnome. I didn't say that it wasn't Qt's right to license it however they want, btw, just don't be surprised when people don't adopt it.

Re:The the risk of starting a flamewar...

[Arandir]

If you check, you'll find that Qt based Kylix (as well as other commercial Qt based libs and tools) doesn't require developers to pay Trolltech. Ever wonder why? Because Borland, which is significantly smaller than Sun, negotiated a simple deal with Trolltech. I don't know what the details are, but I suspect it's a small percentage of each Kylix purchase. Sun could easily do the same thing with the same triple licensing that Trolltech uses, so that non-commercial development on Solaris would be free.

GNOME is dying!

[Anonymous Coward]

HP confirms it: GNOME is dying. You don't need to be Miguel de Icaza to know GNOME's future direction. GNOME has no future because GNOME is dead, and most of its developers have left to write VB.Net code or work on KDE.

Bill cheated - deal with that

[leonbrooks]

But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.

Don't look now, but they're doing it already.

Bill's desktop may be pretty, and officially possessed of useability, but if that were what really counted then Apple would long ago have won the desktop wars, wouldn't they?

A lot of things go into making a desktop corporately acceptable, and many businesses are waking up to the fact that if they run Windows, Microsoft to some extent runs their business - and Microsoft is working very hard to drive their claws deeper into every business they can reach. Anyone who thinks that's a safe move from the individual business's perspective is invited to continue headbutting the walls of their cell.

Meanwhile, businesses are also discovering that if they want their desktops to be within cooee of stable, they have to spend time and/or effort locking them down. Locking down KDE or GNOME (or for that matter Ice, FluxBox etc) is relatively trivial, especially en masse, and can be done without the one-idle-change-in-Tahoe-wrecks-systems-in-Boston- and-Vancouver risks of Active Directory.

What's your point?

[fm6]

That Microsoft shouldn't have won the desktop wars? You think only people with superior products ever get to dominate the marketplace? Get real!

So sad to see HP go

[SewersOfRivendell]

He did such a great job on fontconfig and metacity. Maybe he'll bring those innovations to CDE, if he doesn't decide to work on improving xfontsel and twm instead. Good luck, Havoc!

Moving targets

[stefanlasiewski]

What does "stabilize" mean, anyway?

Are you kidding? That has to be one of the top complaints regarding alot of OSS development, including Gnome.

I do alot of testing and bug stomping for some Gnome packages, and I've frequently heard Gnome developers describe many Gnome and Linux libraries such as GTK as "moving targets". By the time you finish developing for version a.b.c, version a.e.f was released, and it breaks compatability with version a.b.c.

As a Gnome user, I've tried to compile everything from Source on a number of occasions. The dependancies drive me up the wall.

I use prepackaged products such as Gargnome, but it only solves some of the dependancy hell. If I want that new version of software X, I need to go and find and compile the newest version of several other packages.

Re:Moving targets

[JJahn]

I've compiled gnome from source before. Here's what I did:

emerge gnome

I really love Gentoo's portage, in fact I wish every distro including something like it or Debian's apt (another great package system).

Re:Moving targets

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a shit what you did? What does what you said have to do with what the parent that you are responding to said?

NOTHING.

It's almost as if all you gentoo zealots are monitoring every messageboard just in case you get an opportunity to mention how incredibly elite you are.

Re:Moving targets

[stefanlasiewski]

Anyone else getting sick of these "My Gentoo is so superior to your distro" responses?

You know, I'm sure gentoo is a good distro, I like the idea of a ports-based system, and maybe I'll try it in the future; but what do you Gentoo folks expect me to do? Rip up and replace my entire system?

I actually need my computer for work. My work on Gnome doesn't require a whole new paradigm... Gentoo does.

Re:Moving targets

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the one that complained about having to find and recompile program X to work with library version Y. The other was offering a solution. If you want another solution: Drop Linux and go with FreeBSD and use the ports system.

Re:Moving targets

[Arandir]

Ooh ooh! Elitist alert! He thinks his system is better than mine.

Bollocks! All I need to do to get a complete GNOME installation under FreeBSD is:

make install

p.s. Yeah, I omitted the cvsup step, but you omitted your rsync step as well.

p.p.s. I can also install prebuilt binary packages so I can use GNOME now, and save the compile for a 2am cron job.

Re:Moving targets

[stefanlasiewski]

In otherwords, throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:Moving targets

[JJahn]

No I DON'T expect you to rip up your system. I'm sorry you must have misread...because I didn't say that. I think the major distros should trash the shitty RPM standard and move to something like Debian, FreeBSD, and Gentoo have already done.

For the record though I'm not a Gentoo "zealot"...my router runs FreeBSD, which also has a great system (although I don't get to install many packages on a router)

Re:Moving targets

[murrayc]

GTK+ is not a moving target. It's had API stability for a long long time.

Re:Moving targets

[Anonymous Coward]

Er... look at http://gtk.org/ . That's 2 releases in less then 3 months.

3 Feb 2003
Version 2.2.1 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated librares (GLib, Pango) is now available. This is a bug-fix release.

GTK+ 2.2.1 release announcement
Glib 2.2.1 release announcement
Pango 1.2.1 release announcement

22 Dec 2002
The GTK+ team is proud to announce the release of version 2.2 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, and ATK). The 2.2 release adds significant new functionality while maintaining source and binary compatibility with GTK+-2.0.

General release announcement
GTK+ 2.2.0 release announcement
Glib 2.2.0 release announcement

Re:Moving targets

[Darren Winsper]

But they're source and binary compatible...

What does this mean for Ximian?

[stefanlasiewski]

According to HP, Ximian GNOME for HP-UX was developed under a partnership with Ximian Inc.

I'm pretty sure that Ximian doesn't make alot of money by selling Ximian Desktop to end users (I bought it, but most people don't buy, they download for free). Many of Ximian's recent headlines talk about their deals with large companies like HP and Sun. Now that HP is dropping out, will Ximian lose some of the planned contracts?

I hope not. Ximian are some of the best contributors to the Gnome project.

Translation

[mmcshane]

We couldn't get all these Open Source developers do do everything we wanted for free so we're going to take our ball and go home and play Techmo Bowl.

haha, nice try

[Anonymous Coward]

HP was never crucial to the gnome plan, nice, but not essential. anyone who actually uses gnome instead just hanging out masturbating while trolling slashdot knows.

Trading one historicism for another

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but your one line explanation of human nature and how it drives history is certainly no more convincing that the extensive historical analysis of _Capital_.

Not that I believe the latter, by the way, but it deserves a bit more trenchant critique than the ol' mastadon and cave.

Re:Trading one historicism for another

[bofkentucky]

Yeah, I was at ork and really didn't have time for a masters thesis on civilization tempering the drives of mankind, a quick anecdote was sufficent to state my position on the situation though.

the real reason?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this has anything to do with them having fired Bruce Perens... he was their biggest (and only?) open source advocate. I don't want to bring up rumours an innuendo, but my cousin is a manager at HP, and he said Bruce's departure was a mess...

Face an urban reality

[leonbrooks]

In brief (busy, busy, too much Linux work to do)...

I have a Linux user with a workstation uptime in excess of two years.

Slammer may not be an IIS worm (but it's one of the few that aren't... sorry, couldn't resist :-) but it did kill that IIS server by raping MS SQL Server on the same machine,

Betcha Longhorn has more bugs than your front lawn when it comes out, and Oracle has maybe a few hundred.

I use Linux to write code and play games, too. What a coincidence! (-:

I also use it to write articles, do graphics work (crappy craphics work, I'm no artist), fix broken Word documents, build (and sometimes show) presentations, remote administer a few score servers around town when they need it (rare), and only ever have problems with dodgy hardware. The only things standing between it and infinite uptime are that I power it down to plug people's hard disks into it from time to time, and every month or two I lug it off to a bandwidth party. Oh, and I just blessed it and my wife's machine with a kernel update (actually, total upgrade from Mandrake 9.0 to 9.1), killing about 3.5 months of uptime on hers (last power failure). My wife's machine and the gateway in the shed (Debian 3.0) stop only for power failures. No exceptional hardware, no special care. My LAN-attached neighbour (community networking at its best) kills his shiny new XP machine about once a day.

Oh, and the ext3fs journalling actually works. I routinely pull the plug on working machines to add hardware or move them, and haven't had a blip yet. My experience with NT and 2000 has been... less sanguine.

More power to anyone who uses it. (-: That's the whole point :-)

That nasty marketplace

[fm6]

Yes, and it is a good thing. Because Free software can evolve indpendently of corporate timetables, it will evolve at a much more natural pace. One thing Microsoft can do nothing about is the fact that Free software is always moving forward (on average, of course).

That picture is much too black and white. Yes, corporations often impose silly deadlines on their development teams. But if the only alternative is the "we'll release it when we're finished" attitude, the Corporate Timetables are actually a good thing.

There's more to a successful product than quality engineering. Every product has a finite window of opportunity. If you miss that window, all your potential users have gone on without you, using some other product to satisfy their needs.

Look at Mozilla. That project has been wandering in the wilderness since 1998. If they had produced a useful, stable product back in 1999, when Internet Explorer still only had half the market, people might have resisted the pressure to switch.

In 2003, IE has ninety-six percent of the market. That's a huge mass of people who have every motivation not to switch back. So what if Mozilla is now technically superior? There are a zillion web apps that are designed around IE's quirks and "innovations". Users of these apps will never switch back -- and Mister Bill gets to dictate how web browsers "should" work. Depresssing thought.

Re:That nasty marketplace

[pmz]

Every product has a finite window of opportunity.

This is too black and white, also. Free software could be described as working best for software that has no finite window of opportunity. For example, word processors were relevant twenty years ago, are relevant today, and will be relevant twenty years from now. All that matters is that the Free software projects keep marching on forward to create the word processor that finally can displace the proprietary ones.

The windows of opportunity exist more for either low-end fashionable software or high-end niche software. For example, high-end CAD vendors are always leap-frogging each other in one way or another to stay competitive. They have to to survive. Additionally, I don't see any Free software project that could take on the unforgiving complexity of CAD/CAM.

If they had produced a useful, stable product back in 1999, when Internet Explorer still only had half the market, people might have resisted the pressure to switch.

IE's dominance is temporary, because the WWW, by its nature, requires non-proprietary commodity software to succeed in the long-term. If Microsoft can continue to dominate perpetually, then that will be the once-and-for-all failure of our free society, because everyone will have given up and settled into the comfortable Windoze ooze, sucking their thumbs, and smiling at their corporate overlord.

Projects like Mozilla are steadily, but slowly, gaining acceptance. It really is just a matter of time before IE has to "play along".

Perhaps you missed it? Bill cheated.

[leonbrooks]

The wars were not "won" as such.

Also worth noting that the "war" is not over, but that Microsoft's contributions to it may well be over with shocking suddenness.

Slashdotted??

[jn42]

Following the posted 'announcement' link:
"The connection was refused when attempting to contact h21007.www2.hp.com"
So much for HP servers...

j

This hurts HP way more than GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

HP sells a really grotty OS. HP-UX gets awards for being one of the worst UNIX environments available. Lousy compiler. It's losing market share to Linux.

GNOME's popularity has steadily been waxing. UNIX folks are familiar with it.

s/stable/stagnant

[kinema]

I don't know much about CDE but isn't it's development more stagnant then "stable"? Or does "stagant==stable"?

No wonder

[avdi]

I want to like GNOME2. But after years of development, it's still unbelievably slow, feature-free, buggy, and crash-prone on my Debian system. I've never seen Nautilus stay up and running without crashing for more than a few minutes. Whatever development methodology went into the GNOME rewrite, it clearly didn't work out; and I don't blame HP for cutting their losses and staying with something that's at least stable, if butt-ugly.

Re:No wonder

[turgid]

The whole point about vendors supplying CDE with their UNIX is that CDE is an official standard, another check box, which many companies insist on. There is nothing stopping you installing another desktop or window manager on your machine. Maybe HP will ship KDE or XFce as well? There would be nothing stopping them. It certainly hasn't stopped Sun.

HP is being level headed in ditching....

[cuteface]

GNOME which unfortunately had been known (correct me as this is what i have read and witness when the programs i tried to compile with different versions of glibc breaks) to yank the API rug from beneath application developers.

Compared to Sun, i always have the impression that HP is willing to work with Microsoft, IBM, Linux, Sun or anyone as long as the business gets done. Some may see this as not being principled while some may see this as being profit minded. Say what you want, but you have to admit they DO have a point there and HP is currently stronger in market fundamentals than its major competitors.

Re:HP is being level headed in ditching....

[Nodatadj]

The GNOME API remainded backwards compatible (IE, no functions taken away, only functions added) throughout the 1.x series.

The transition to 2.x allowed the API to change, meaning that applications that were written to 1.x APIs would not always compile with 2.x libraries. This is common, and KDE and QT do it as well. The 1.x and the 2.x libraries are parallel installable, so that you can have both installed on your system.

The GNOME development platform is now backwards compatibable in the 2.x series and will remain so until 3.x

At least, this is how I think it works.

Ehr

[Jarth]

This post says Gnome 1.4 is still available and will continue to be so ... GNOME 2.0 is not YET available. Personally i wasn't under the impression gnome 2.0 has THAT many plusses over any other desktop such as KDE, thank the Gnome developpers HP didn't revert. Maybe GNOME2.5 might win their hearts if it's a worthy and COMPLETE environment.

Re:Ehr

[GauteL]

"Personally i wasn't under the impression gnome 2.0 has THAT many plusses over any other desktop such as KDE"

You are probably talking about CDE and not KDE. Afaik KDE has never been part of any plans of HP. My guess is that HP is in no hurry to make this change, since they do not live on fancy interfaces and flashy visual effects on the desktop.

Bullshit.

[jotaeleemeese]

What saved humans from extension were our social traits.

The young taking care of the elderly, the orphans being cared for by the rest of the community, the clan's men hunting for days the protein (in the form of any animal you care to mention) to be shared with the rest of the clan.

And then sedentary towns, cities, countries.

Drop the tired Thatcherism. Society does exist and has provided many evolutionary advantages to have a healthy balance between reasonably selfisheness and cooperation.

Re:Bullshit.

[bofkentucky]

Elderly was 25 for the Cro-Magnon, these people could still hunt and bear young. Man only formed clans to secure larger prey (Mastadon) there is no advantadge for man to hunt rabbits or goats in packs.

What stinking UI?

[Zapdos]

Most of HP servers that are sold, will never need one. So why invest in a new one?

Hi, no

[Niscenus]

Ok, you, me and Bob all know GNOME's development rate (like much of FreeSoftware) tends to prevent much of it from becoming stable before it starts to become out of date for the latest and greatest software development.

In a way, that is what HP is referring to, but not in the direction you're going. HP's attempts to work within and without the community resulted in a split of direction. Work within the community resulted in more and more new work that needed to be done for work from without of the community. Basically, HP wanted to backport the progress more functionally, but was surprised to find GNOME developing much faster than they could clean-up, backport and re-test the work.

You see, HP didn't want a specific GNOME 2.n'.n; they wanted a GNOME 2.x functional system, as in, not any particular GNOME2, but a compatible GNOME2-based system.

With GNOME 2.0, plus corrective backwork for GNOME 1.4, plus forward work in GNOME 2.2, plus functional mapping of GNOME 3(ish) (really, "ish"), HP got over-loaded, burnt out and generally disgusted. It was like Linus trying to manage over 4 dozen patches a day--it just stopped being a functional model at some point.

Maybe HP needed a buffer; maybe they needed to focus on one direction; maybe they needed something completely different. Whatever they needed, they don't seem interested in looking into it any further.

Well, just my thoughts; maybe someone should ask BP if he has any insider information?

Re:Hi, no

[Arandir]

You basically said what I was saying, in a slightly different way. The Gnome API is not stabilized, and commercial developers want stable APIs.

No I didn't

[Niscenus]

It's not about whether this crashes or whatever. The point was that they were trying to combine too many of the developing efforts, while content to stabilize the work as they went.

It wasn't just that there was a risk of some strange error if something wasn't done right. It wasn't just that development is occuring on multiple levels. It wasn't just trying to combine various areas to create a solid GNOME. ** It was doing all of these at once. There version of GNOME 2 was very stable by all appearances.

Explain that to VP whose previous experience was hardware deployment.

missing the point

[bartok]

Yuo're missing the point. GNOME on HP-UX is not targetted at the desktop segment of the market. HP-UX and the platform(s) it runs on is used for either very specialized worstation applications or server stuff. HP will continue to ship it's OS with a deskyop interface for their costumers. It'll just be CDE insead of GNOME.

FreeBSD driver support?

[yerricde]

Drop Linux and go with FreeBSD and use the ports system.

Does FreeBSD support all the video cards, all the sound cards, and all the network cards (including winmodems whose manufacturer provides only a binary Linux kernel module) that Linux supports?

If I have to buy new hardware to switch to BSD, it'll probably be one of these.

Operating system piracy in China and India

[yerricde]

Been to China recently? How about India? ... there would still be a market for operating systems!

Not if infringing copies of Microsoft operating systems outnumber genuine copies by an order of magnitude in China and India.

Flash! -and- Prepare for disappointment

[leonbrooks]

It's true that the latest OOo, 1.1beta, is looking pretty good.

And getting better faster than MS-Office (which seems to have pretty much peaked, time for a new round of Microsoft's "stone soup" game). Speaking of whizbang features, OOo's export-to-Flash is pretty slick.

Flawless word im/export is what I need.

You're pretty much going to lose that with Blackdown versions of MSO anyway.

Re:Flash! -and- Prepare for disappointment

[cerberusss]

Flawless word im/export is what I need.

You're pretty much going to lose that with Blackdown versions of MSO anyway.

I'm assuming here that Blackdown is some codename for Office 11? Well, I've seen some word2000 bugs in the im/export of word97 docs, but still I'd rather put my bets on MS Office its own import than OOo's.

And it's probably gonna take a while before it's flawless, since some problems (like table cells spread over more than one page) are only scheduled for the next major version, 2.0. And MS is not helping either.

Idiot sysadmins

[leonbrooks]

up 2 years [...] every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that

Only if their sysadmins are complete idiots. The truth is that exploits happen. Kernel updates happen. Recompiles happen. Reboots happen.

If not that, then intrusions happen. Get the point?

Well... no. At least, I understand what you're saying, but it's wrong.

Go back and count the number of Linux kernel security issues over the last 5 years. Now divide by ten because your original kernel featured OpenWall so 90% of the vulnerabilities weren't exploitable anyway. The end result, for Linux (a rapidly-developing, large-ish and immature Unix - now consider OpenBSD) is far less than one potentially useable kernel exploit in five years. Now consider additional elementary precautions against exploitation, such as readonly and nosuid/nodev partitions, chroot'ing and chattr+i'ing everything in sight (very effective on nosuid loopbacks) (and then hiding chattr), and your need to reboot drops even further. If you can be bothered running your services in UML, you can put those few security patches through the stripped-down UML kernel(s) - which may not even have a chattr call - and never need touch your "real" one. And so on.

In short, power and hardware failures are much more common than software failures. Unlike Windows.

Not helping

[leonbrooks]

And MS is not helping either.

Hands up all those who were deeply shocked by this news.

Too early or too late

[Per Abrahamsen]

Software projects tend to be released too early (before they are ready) or too late (later than initially expected).

It has nothing to do with whether the software is free or not, expect perhaps a preference of some free software managers towards "too late" over "too early".

I suspect this is because programming is still a creative craft, which makes it harder to predict.