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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.'"
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?
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?
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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.
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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
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.
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