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

Re:timeframes and open source

[GreyWolf3000]

I have 3 words for you.

Duke. Nukem. Forever.

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: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.