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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
Duke. Nukem. Forever.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
What does "stabilize" mean, anyway? Halting devel work on GNOME 2 because work on GNOME 3 has started?
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?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
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
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.
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.
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.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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
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
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!
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.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
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.
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!
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.