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

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.

[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:timeframes and open source

[GreyWolf3000]

I have 3 words for you.

Duke. Nukem. Forever.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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!

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!