Slashdot Mirror
Sun Announces Linux Deal With Chinese Government
Infonaut writes "Scott McNealy announced today at Comdex that Sun Microsystems has made a deal with China for a million desktop Linux deployments under the new $50/seat licensing plan for Sun's desktop software, which includes its Star Office 7.0 productivity program. Whether this will translate into renewed profits for Sun remains to be seen, but according to McNealy, it represents 'the No. 1 Linux desktop play on the planet'."
It's refreshing to see a government be "open minded", if that term can be applied to an organization. China seems to have its act together on so many issues that Europe and the US struggle with. China's embracing of open source is just one example, and now their partnership with Sun strengthens that commitment. I hope Europe and the US will open the minds and their eyes and start to take a good hard look at their economic, social, and government models. They have a lot to learn from China.
Are you braindamaged? Seriously, you definitely seem that way, you spin every little bread crumb against KDE and even make up lies.
"It should be no surprise to anyone who keeps tabs on Sun's desktop Linux activities that they focus heavily on GNOME, along with practically every other corporate desktop Linux supporter. There's Red Hat, Ximian, Sun, and the recently acquired SuSE, which will have Ximian handle its desktop development, according to Novell.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this is that KDE has lost its main commercial support."
yeah, that's true, but KDE is used on over 50% of the Linux desktops. Furthermore, every distribution except redhat's and Sun's sues KDE as default or does not have a default (Gentoo).
"GNOME has always been the commerical desktop of choice. It has long been focussed on getting the basics right and building from there... as opposed to the KDE Project, which is entirely aimed at pleasing the slashdot peanut gallery with pointless eye-candy. KDE features are thrown into the mix with little or no regard for usability, or even good taste. The end result is disasterous, as can be seen by anyone unforunate enough to be forced into using it."
Now her eyou are speaking right out of your misinformed ass.
SUSE has clearly said it will continue to strongly support KDE, which comes as no suprise since the whole comapny is focused on KDE, all their tools were Qt based, they hired a few KDE developers, and even wrote books on Qt.
Here is a simple letter by SUSE's CEO, Richard: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=106855804 831790&w=2
KDE is far more advanced architecturally, as it is the only truely componetized desktop and it is a pleasure to develop for, in a large part thanks to the Qt Development Toolkit. Please do checkout some of KDE's excellent technology such as Kparts, Kconfig XT, Kommander, and KJSEmbed to name just a few.
KDE is also a much more powerful desktop and in the past months the KDE team has worked hard to improve its usability by cleaning up toolbars, simplyfying context menus, improving tooltips and organizing options better. KDE has had an interface guideline years before SUN even started writting one for GNOME. These guidelines are generally followed and often some automation processes ar eused to ensure compliance.
Unlike GNOME KDE is both usable and useful.
"KDE is extremely expensive to develop for, unless you intend to produce GPL software. TrollTech, the owners of KDE and Qt, license the X11 version of their Qt toolkit under the GPL. This forces anyone wanting to develop software built on top of it (including KDE), to be (L)GPL licensed -- or pay TrollTech $3000 for every developer you have working on the application to purchase a commercial license."
This may be your opinion, but you have to remember that Qt is a lot mroe than just a toolkit, it is a complete se tof tools for GUI development. It's cost is competitive for the features it provices, its cross platform nature and its time (aka money) saving ease of use.
It only seems fair that if you are going to use the tools Trolltech has constantly improved for years and you are going to use those to make a profit Trolltech should make some money too. if you are going to make something free, than sure the tools will be free for you too. The price of a Qt license is just about 2 weeks of a programmer's salary.
"TrollTech is also vulnerable to takeover by companies hostile to Free software and good corporate lawyers who can blow holes in the laughable FreeQt agreements."
Trolltech is a private company, they have complete control and can't be taken over in a hostile way. Furthermore, I don't see anything laughable about the FreeQt Foundation, it seems like a very strong legal document.
" Qt's/KDE lack of accessiblity. Accessiblity is vital feature for a modern desktop. A desktop cannot be sold to the U.S. government unless it supports the features necessar