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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.'"
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.
...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.
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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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).
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).
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
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.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I don't know much about CDE but isn't it's development more stagnant then "stable"? Or does "stagant==stable"?
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.
free dom(inion) - free energy - free your mind - whee!