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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'."
According to InternetNews.com (http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article.php /3110131)
it's going to be Java based...
"Sun said the China Standard Software Co(CSSC) will use Sun's Java Desktop System as the foundation for standard desktop development and deployment in the People's Republic of China".
Where does Linux fit into that? (Not being a smart-ass, just genuinely curious).
I am a leaf on the wind
Sun says Linux isn't the future, yet they have no qualm of selling a million of them to China :)
Microsoft is pricing itself right out of the developing world. Newsflash: 90% of the world can't afford to fork over $500 for office.
That sound you hear is bricks hitting the ground in Redmond.
From the article:
100% of 1.3 BILLION PEOPLE. That's some hella marketshare right there. Ballmer must be scratching his big hairless monkey-head.
...that narrow-minded politicians or lobbyists don't use a large deployment in a communist country as propaganda against open source.
Of course, taking a cue from the '50s (and from Dr. Strangelove):
"Mr. President! We cannot allow an open-source gap!"
With apologies to Stanley Kubrick...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Does anyone know what packaging system they use? RPM, dpkg, or their own system?
This sale represents about 2% of their quarterly earnings. But the current estimates are that their earnings are gonna be down 7% this quarter. So I doubt it does much for renewed profits.
The China Standard Software Co., a consortium of government-funded companies, selected Sun as its preferred technology partner to deploy Linux-based desktops. The deal is part of China's deliberate policy to diversify away from Microsoft.
Hopefully there's more to it than just diversification. Don't get me wrong, heterogeneous computing is a wonderful thing, but I'd also hate to see governments, corporations, or anyone else making decisions based on computing philosophy instead of technical need and justification. (Some might argue that the first is the second, of course.)
The article doesn't mention other reasons why the Chinese government felt Linux was ready to deploy Linux on desktops, why the available software such as StarOffice was adequate, or why Sun was chosen as the "preferred technology partner." I'm very interested to know exactly what it is about the overall computing infrastructure of the Chinese government that made it choose all of the above. What technical differences exist between their situation and, say, that of the U.S.?
The coolest voice ever.
so they switched from their American Windows based overlords to the new American Java based overlords. good move
did you forget to take your meds?
1. Make one million Linux desktops with a secret backdoor.
2. Have US military pay you for software to invade backdoor.
3. Have China secretly pay you to patch the backdoor.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Uh, I'll install copies of Mandrake for 'em for $25 a seat. I will...really.
their research. If they did, I don't think they would be buying something from such a hypocritical company. We'll sell you Linux, but we don't think you should be buying it. That mentallity all in itself spells uncertianty for continued support. IBM who vowed to support Linux 100%(See here) seems like a better company to go through, though I think they are already helping the Chinese government with Linux. That's the last I heard anyway.
The deal is for one license. McNealy was initially puzzled at how a single license could possibly be enough for the Chinese population, but when your stock is trading at $3/share, $50 is $50.
In the meantime, the quiet hum of CD duplicators echoes across the middle kingdom...
China has pledged to deploy 200 million copies of open standards-based desktop software.
You must mean BeOS?
Pretty Pictures!
At Sun's site
u nf lash.20031117.3.html
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-11/s
The article says "Java Desktop" and "interoperable with Linux, Solaris, and Windows".
So, whoa -- China is going ALL-JAVA ?
Seriously... I think it's good news for Sun, hopefully instead of spending millions chasing MS in court, they could put that money into R&D and kick some ass/arse/arslet/culo ..
MoFscker
I hope to see something of this scale happen in the United States, though I think it's more likely for a small cash-strapped state or major metro to adopt Linux state/city-wide than more well-heeled communities.
Though I am happy to see Gnome getting this much deserved recognition, your article is way over the top and deserves to be modded into oblivion.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Mandrake is quasi-commerical and they've always favoured KDE over GNOME as well.
" 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."
I have no idea where you came up with this. There is no pointless eye-candy, and I don't have any of it enabled if it does in fact exist...and I find KDE to be extremely functional in all respects. GNOME on the other hand never seems to work for me, and as far as usability goes, whey the hell do they have that second menubar on the top of the screen and another on the bottom? Getting GNOME set up the way one would like out of the box is a nightmare.
I guess Sun is taking their definition of innovation beyond the realms of technology. This is a good thing, certainly for Sun. I believe the focus is strongly shifting towards the markets in India and China with their increasing buying powers. The outsourced jobs, after all are creating business opportunities in those areas. Might be too early to call it good a move, but a little pointer to that. Here is another article with comments from Australia's Reserve Bank Governor on the Indian and Chinese economies
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Eah? How is BeOS dieing? It is dead, no longer support at all.
OpenBeOS however is alive and kicking, not yet walking, but kicking.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I can see it now...:
Pssst, hey, you wanna buy a cracked version of Linux for only $2.88
A good start.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
He'll be dead in a minute...
This is huge huge news, a million new Linux users on the Desktop? This is a huge move and if things keep up at this pace its the end for Microsoft. RIP Microsoft.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Sun's logo has much better Feng Shui than the Microsoft one!
-psy
I just knew that some idiot would start trolling about KDE vs Gnome.
The reason Gnome has commercial support is purely and simply due to there being a company producing a commercial version of Gnome back when Sun and HP etc were looking at Linux Desktops.
Yada Yada Trolltech, QPL/GPL, C++, yada yada.
Don't worry about what anyone says. The reason Gnome was chosen was because of Helixcode, pure and simple. Sun and the rest are businesses and as we all ought to know, business deals with business. If Trolltech were producing a commercial KDE, you would have seen something very different happening.
As for Ximian being the future of SuSE and KDE being "legacy" - be afraid, be very afraid. Novells only interest in Ximian was MONO, which happens to fit their new Linux story very well.
Go over to go-mono.org and read Miguels report on the recent Microsoft Professional Developer Conference. Look for references to XAML and other plans Microsoft have for Longhorn. Check Miguels assessment of what this means for non-Microsoft desktop Operating Systems. Then check his "solution" to this.
Once you've done that, come back here and tell me with a straight face that Ximian gnome as the standard Linux desktop is a Good Thing.
Someone tell Sun there is an easier way to make $50M than having to work this hard. Simply tell Microsoft you'd be willing to sue a major Linux distributor and the checks will start coming your way. Act irrational and scream something incoherent about source code and intellectual property and you might get $100M.
I guess this qualifies as a 1,2,3 Profit!
GNOME has always been the commerical desktop of choice. It has long been focussed on getting the basics right and building from there. Yeah, too bad they are still trying to master the basics. pointless eye-candy. At least show some link or give an example or something. you can't just say there is eyecandy and then not show the eyecandy. I can't find any of this eyecandy. I want eyecandy!!!
As Chairman Mao might say,
"Let a million dekstops boot."
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
This is good news for Sun and all, I'm sure. But I think it's more of a marketing win for them then a financial win. $50/license x 1,000,000 licenses is 50 million dollars. That's nothing to sneeze at but to put it in perspective, a little while ago Sun was hemorrhaging One *Billion* Dollars (finger in side of mouth) per *quarter*. So I don't think this deal by it's self is going to make a big impact on Sun's finances. But it's a good start, and certainly lends credibility to part of their business model.
And in even better news, BSD forward projects one million licenses in China for the year 2015...
I made $80 selling Knoppix CDs "on the street" in Vancouver, BC, Canada last saturday ($5 each). And I told them it was free and they could download it themselves if they wanted, and that to install Linux they'd need to download a complete distribution. People seemed to like the Idea.
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
With Sun's sinking fortunes, I for one have been a bit worried whether they could continue to fund OOo development. They absolutely need to sell quite a few StarOffice 7 licenses, and it looks like that is happenning!
They have a good plan in place for OOo 2.0, probably released in the first half of 2005. Good luck to them!
1. First they ignore you.
2. Then they laugh at you.
3. Then they say it's a toy OS.
4. Then they say it's great.
5. Then they change their minds again.
6. Then they write it off as crap somemore.
7. Then they realise their market share is going down harder and faster than New Zealand in a World Cup semi final.
8. Then they team up with an unethical has been company in an attempt damage you.
9. Then they bite the bullet and rip off somebody elses distro.
10. Then they proclaim they are the shining light of the OS and all should follow them.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Mandrake's not a very strong point, they're somewhat dying as well, but hasn't trolltech had some success selling a stripped, X-less version of Qt for palmtops, cellpones, and other small/embedded systems? That could lend support to KDE over time as well.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Am I the only one to remember the recent trade negotiations that went on recently in Mexico? The Chinese Govn't has been throwing so many deals our way its obvious China is trying very hard not to upset the forces in Washington who can't 'Campaign' away the freakishly huge trade imbalance.
Heck, even FSMLabs picked up some business with Redflag. On the same day!
In any case, its a Good Thing 1 million desktops will be running linux under the hood, but lets not forget the world is far from black and white.
--
Sure, Mandrake's dying, but not because they prefer KDE over GNOME.
You're kidding right? You think a million Linux installs spells the end for M$'s multi billion dollar markets? Yes, that's plural. M$ is fucking huge and they will compete until the bitter bitter end.
Honestly, I think Linux will gain more and more desktop market share (and in other markets as well), but M$ will not be crushed any time soon. Besides, if M$ was really cornered, they could always kamakazi and GPL windows. Think about it. Scarry.
because star office is better than openoffice
I disgaree with this, having spent some time evaluating both products on three platforms.
Star Office 7 does include features that OpenOffice does not, but Star Office is an absolute pig in terms of comparative performance. I am recommending to my client that Open Office is a better selection because the functionality advantages of Star Office do not outweigh the poor performance in my opinion.
(MOST of the code is the same, not all)
I'm not sure that that's something to be shouting about as it's not necessarily a factor in Sun's favour.
Remember that Star Office 7 is a fork of Open Office 1.0 (i.e. NOT derived from Star Office 6.0) because Sun realised that the OpenOffice code base was superior to Sun's internal Star Office codebase. I suggest to you that if Sun's internal development was superior they would have continued to develop from their own tree.
I have to say, this could be one of the biggest boons for Linux on the desktop yet.
;) But the user is usually better off kicking the habit! The only problem I could see is a bunch of redneck Americans going around saying that Linux is a Communist operation system.
;)
And $50 a seat, including Office-type software? Fugedaboudit. No way in hell MS could EVER match a deal like that.
Once the world's most populous nation starts using Linux as their day to day "this is just the way a computer works" OS will show the rest of the world that yes, Linux on the desktop is a perfectly viable solution, and just because there may be some migration pains in places where MS software has a stranglehold doesn't mean that the migration shouldn't occur.
Every addiction has a painful withdrawl process
oh, wait, they already do that.
This is good for everyone. It's good for Sun, who will hopefully continue to stay afloat now that they seem to be scoring some new big customers. They also will be more strongly motivated to stick with the Linux game in earnest this time around instead of being schizophrenic about it. It's good for Linux, with yet another big name player now firmly in the open source camp. And it's good for all of us, who depend on OpenOffice in order for our Linux desktops to remain viable and interoperable in an office suite dominated world.
The only party for whom this is a bad thing is Microsoft. And that's exactly how it should be. While it is certainly way too early to declare the Great Satan of Redmond defeated, we can call this one more important step on that journey. I applaud Sun for this and hope they score more Linux wins.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
His solution is to bring what is unique to Linux and open source to the managed world. Your problem with this, is? Personally I'm really excited about it. With things like Evolution, GStreamer, Gtk+, GNOME being brought to the managed world, a new set of opportunities is available for the Linux developer. The point is that Mono isn't just a .NET clone. It's not about cloning Longhorn. It's about giving us a great language (C#), the managed world, an outstanding set of API's that go above and beyond what Microsoft provides, and bring the already outstanding applications and frameworks developed by the open source community to the managed world. This is an opportunity, as Miguel points out, for us to really shine, to really innovate.
Celebrate the finer things in life
Sun has made a huge investment of time, money and energy in Free Software for the desktop. Especially for GNOME and Open Office.
I'm very glad that this is paying off for them. Hopefully IBM, HP and DELL will want to start competitng with SUN in putting Linux on Desktops.
It is interestering to think that anybody can now put Fedora 1 on their machines and bundle a whole load of high quality software for 0 licensing cost.
I wonder if these will appear in 1st world countries?
Martin
I would really like to see a graph on Linux Usage vs Windows usage on the Desktop for the past , 2 years.
So many governments are embracing Linux. Will Corporate (North) America wake up and finally see its potential?
[alk]
GNOME was chosen for much, much more important reasons, my friend. Companies such as Sun, IBM, Red Hat, Novell have large enterprise costumers. A desktop with poor usability, ABI compatibility, accessibility, and hacks such as fake drop shadows and fake transparent menus won't cut it. GNOME had the right combination of licensing, adherence to strong usability principles, commitment to ABI-compatibility, award winning accessibility framework, and a platform that is written by people who are committed to "getting it right." You'll see transparent menus and such in GNOME when it's done right--and that work has already begun. People complained about the file selector for ages, and yes, it needed replacing, but the hundred different attempt to rectify it were rejected by the core developers because of various problems in the design. In GNOME 2.6 you'll see the new file selector designed by Owen and Federico, if I'm not mistaken, and it looks strong. So to make a long story short, if you actually talk with the people at these companies who have chosen GNOME as the de facto open source desktop for the enterprise, you'll see that the fact that Ximian supported GNOME has precious little to do with it when there were much larger factors.
Celebrate the finer things in life
Ok, forget about stupid Mandrake. They suck and I hate them, seriously, I'm so glad I switched from them to Debian and now to Gentoo. But how about Lindows their a good argument against the statement "KDE is effectively dead for business" right?
This is good news. I am glad that Microsoft lost a lot of potential profit here. This is making me very happy.
Oh, by the way, I'm happy that Linux will get more exposure, too. Maybe with the addition of a million installations in China, there will be more resources invested in improving Linux. Hopefully the research and development that is going into this will find its way into other free operating systems, like the BSDs, and into other free software. The world will be a much better place when Microsoft doesn't dictate everything to the tech sector.
I am extremely glad at this news.
Sun isnt spending much money on development so 50 bucks is about right. I mean really Sun is not spending billions like Microsoft.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
...but also in hardware. Every linux user knows that you need a quite powerfull machine to run M$ bloatware. With linux you can extend the life of computers and delay upgrades.
The KMT was able to Change the language to simplify Grammar, and Mao was able to actually simplify the characters as well. Can you imagine if the US government tried to change English spelling? They can't even get us to use the Metric System.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Chinese government really did want a nation-wide standard, and not windows.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What I would like to know is this. If China decides to completely adopt a Linux-type OS and dump Windows, will it mean that spammers will have a more difficult time hijacking their systems for spamming. (Probably a dumb question, but I thought I'd ask it anyways.)
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
I see how much you know about GNOME. Basically nothing.
They've pissed off everybody else, why not piss off their (minority) investors, too?
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Aside from the direct financial benefit of the sale, the presence in China is a major window of opportuninty for Sun. 1,000,000 users is adequate financial justification to establish a strong support and sales presence which will aid signficantly in further sales. I wonder how much the issue of locale support factored into this decision. While China seems to be pursuing non-Microsoft sourcing for their own reasons, it is possible that the Sun environment and StarOffice provide better support for Chinese locale considerations above MS and/or other vendors.
Why do they need Sun at all?
I'm sure they have enough technical expertise in China to do the deployment themselves. I don't understand why they need a company like Sun to do it for them.
And another issue - if security was a concern of using windows (which many here think to be the case) why do they not use a BSD? Why Linux at all?
Something tells me there is more going on here than they let on.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
God Bless them every one!!!
When Mandrake first came out, their selling point was "We're RedHat but with KDE included."
I've only used 9.1 and 9.2, but all the Mandrake written code (most notably all the system configuration tools) in those releases uses GTK. So I wouldn't call that favoring KDE.
Well, you might have a problem with torture, but this is China we're talking about.
They want one...million...desktops.
Last I heard they were installed in those Walmart PCs but have no idea about that venture.
I went and dug out the link, so... I might as well post it.
Their support for KDE was always better. Their rpms worked right out of the box always, but the gnome ones were always substandard compared to Redhat's. I'm not sure why they coded their little GUI utils in GTK, but that's a separate issue.
One thing GNOME seems to have going for it in the context of government deployment is the accessibility of the desktop. It has been a high priority for a long time to make it easy (or even possible) for people with various disabilities to use it.
I read recently that a major KDE developer (sorry, don't remember who, might have been Waldo Bastian) said that accessibility was one thing KDE should focus, because it is a strict requirement for many organizations (including US federal ones as far as I know).
Hi,
It's been interesting to read your post.
But you're using the same weapons, and hence, the same weaknesses as your fellow writer.
As a very newbie (4 years) Linux user, I've been using first KDE, and then Gnome, for the policy was more transparent, and because I like to stick to the GPL, and GNU philosphy.
I'm not against KDE. But I'm agaisnt useless disputes (Gnome is better than KDE/KDE is better than Gnome), because at the end, Linux and the various free softwares have been made to offer choice. You may just want to use KDE, and I may just want to use Gnome, but what really surprises me is that we are arriving at a point where people argue on who made the first step, on who made the first implementation of this feature etc. This is supposed to be backed up by a community sense, and a will to share. It just looks like stupid competition. KDE AND Gnome are here to make people happy. And that's it. Those stupid endless disputes can have only one exit : make development even slower.
It reminds me of the horrible story of Xfree CVS access, not granted to Howard, for no reason. We shouldn't behave like that when we are supporting such a state of mind as the one that makes GNU/Linux live.
It really sounds like babbling.
I could have written the mail to the Gnome advocate, because the article/post is even more inane than yours. You are fighting with rules that do not define the GNU/Linux community.
Regards,
Jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
i wonder if they have to help out like Cisco did with the Great Firewall of China?
you know, put in government backdoors everywhere so THEY can watch what you are doing all the time.
I can see it now - Sun will have *special* chinese machines.
And my users would be grousing that they lost 5 minutes of productivity.
5 minutes?! Your company sucks! And without a laser corridor (y'know, the one in the resident evil movie?) to deal with axe wielding maniacs in the server room, your company obviously shows a lack of dedication to their users' productivity.
And on a serious note, your post was great.
Nobody in China buys software.
And its now official...Linux is for commies.
Hi,
I do not agree with your reflexion on competition. I really think, without being too much idealistic, that what drives free software projects is not competition, it is the will of making software useful. Dot.
I'd like a stastitical report that tells us in which context did programmers decide to write softwares. My instinctive opinion is that there was a need, and someone could match the technical requirements for it, did it, and freely distributed it.
By the way, I'd like pseudo-economic discussions to be a bit more imaginative. We have all learned in Samuelson/Stiglitz books that competition is responsible for innovation. But what most people forget is the fundamental underlying principle of this statement : this is true when people earn money for it. People do innovate in the name of competition when they are sure to get some money from it. The main economic statement is : 'there is no free lunch'. And the fact is that GNU/Linux seems to be one of the first free lunch appearing on Earth. Don't you think that the GNU/Linux experience is a blatant experience that shows that innovation can come from another incentive ? I'll let you meditate on that.
I really don't think that Gnome was made to compete with KDE. I think it was made to bring GNU a Gui, and to elude the pessimistic prospects, at that time, of a non totally-free GUI (the Qt library wasn't free at this time if my memory is correct).
What is, at the core point, interesting in Linux, is that competition is not the first thing that pushes up developpers to make their produces. Of course a some point there is a kind of competition, but this is a sound one, just like between MPlayer and Xine ; they don't have the same way to tackle problems, but at least they are not praying for the demise of the rival project. They are doing their best.
And this is all the contrary than what you're doing now. As I saw in a post following your response, you said that, unlike Gnome, KDE was useful/usable. And this is, from my point of view, a pure insanity to say so. Gnome is usable, as KDE is. Both are oriented in different ways, but you can't shed a cursed spell like that on one third of Linux GUI developpers. First they don't deserve it, and second, you're not skilled enough to make a better thing, so the best position is just to shut up. Or maybe you are, and then give me your adress at sourceforge ; I can assure you that I'll give you an unbiased point.
But please don't say that you did respond in an objective manner. Maybe you were angry when seeing KDE criticized like this, and I can understand it, but as I stated before, you did respond in the same way. Which is not very clever, from my point of view. And that's it.
Regards,
Jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
Sun couldn't have sold China a million Linux desktops: the report has to be a hoax. Linux isn't ready for the desktop. I know this for a fact, because Red Hat said so.
Good thing it is a hoax: otherwise Red Hat might be kicking themselves pretty hard for missing the opportunity to sell $1M units of their desktop product.
Although on Java-side of the world the Sun is getting Eclipsed..
Which planet? Last time I checked Earth, IBM was playing the most important role on the Linux market, Red Hat was the most one associated with Linux name in many non-tech minds, and Gentoo was (IMHO!) the best Linux distro. The only Sun I've noticed was the closest star to that planet, but that has nothing to do with Linux, neiher with the company from the article.
Oh, he might mean Open Office instead of Linux? Yes, I agree then - Sun Microsystems is No 1 Open Office play on this planet.
By the way, if he means Gnome instead of Linux desktop, then it cannot be No 1 either, it must share the place with KDE somehow.
Less is more !
Once you've done that, come back here and tell me with a straight face that Ximian gnome as the standard Linux desktop is a Good Thing.
Yes, there are two problems with what Miguel is doing:
1) He seems to think that Microsoft Engineering isn't an oxymoron. It is.
2) He thinks polluting the Unix/Linux programming world with Microsoft 'technology' will help Unix/Linux somehow. It won't.
The good thing about the Sun announcement is that the #1 Java company is pushing a distro with a modern JVM included as a standard feature. That will go a long ways towards balancing Mono. Java always has been, and AFAICT always will be, the answer to .Nyet. C# and .Net are weak copies of Java and it's Frameworks. Most serious companies made their choice long ago, and nothing has happened to change it.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Well, all the usability tests done show that this layout works quite well. In fact, I always rearrange the default Red Hat setup back to the default as I prefer it. The Sun desktop system got quite poor usability marks, and when they looked into why, it turned out partly to be that they changed the default panel setup to be more like KDE/Windows/BlueCurve.
McNealy is a true hypocrite and an ass. fuck him!
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
The South China, where I work is a relatively rich area, the govs here spends much of their budget on IT Infrastructure for years. Officers, from the lowest layer to highest layer are very enthusiastic about IT, especially at Linux -- Because of fearing and hating Microsoft, almost of them advocate Linux.
IBM acts an active role among this for a long time: cooperating extensively with government agencies, supporting ISVs, advertising its idea all places, hosting series of exhibition and training of its products..., and of course, never forgetting selling its hardware, its websphere, its DB2..., but all of them are at high price.
China is poor indeed, people here need good things with low prices, but IBM only wants to provide high priced products. Then Dell comes in and succeeds with its low price policy, Sun comes in now and will succeed with its low price policy too.
-- forgive me my poor Engl...
Organized, available when you need it, accountable support.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... but access to somebody that knows what he is doing, can go and check the code, provide a patch and work with you, provided undistracted attention to your problem until it is solved.
A volunteer OSS developer in general will not do that for you.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I, in the other hand, have experienced support situations in which you have an Engineer helping for several days, 24/day, if necessary re-assigning the problem to a person in a different time zone so you are always in touch with somebody that is fresh and not as knackered as yourself.
USENET? Yeah, first place to look, it solves many problems, but the tricky ones *have* to be solved by the software provider or a competent support provider.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Onward to Victory.
whey the hell do they have that second menubar on the top of the screen and another on the bottom?
... I think you are ranting based on old information.
I haven't seen a Gnome desktop that looks that way since Red Hat 6.1
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sun Java Desktop System is a comprehensive, secure, highly affordable enterprise desktop solution that is simple to use and works with existing infrastructure. The software consists of a fully integrated client environment based on open source and standards including a GNOME desktop environment, StarOffice productivity suite, Mozilla browser, Evolution mail and calendar, Java 2 Standard Edition, and a Linux operating system.
Minimum Supported Configuration Pentium II, compatible PC 266MHz
This one really hurts Microsoft's FUD campaign that presents Linux/Open-Source as an anti-choice, anti-American, anti-Capitalist tool. They'll have a hard time arguing those points against Linux when China is buying Linux and Open-Source from an American corporation.
Way cool.
And on a related note-holy shit! McNealy might be right! His crazy business strategies might actually be working!
Erm, when Sun chose GNOME, it was at a time (gnome 1.2->gnome 1.4) that:
- gtk had *very primitive* internationalization - didn't support much unicode at all, and certainly had no framework for using it internally.
- gnome had little to no accessibility support, in fact, Sun played a great deal in contributing that.
- gnome had quite bad usability. Yes, Sun helped in this regard as well. KDE has actually had a much longer standing committment to usability and consistancy on it's desktop in this area. Yes, there has been large feature creep that have hindered parts of the desktop experience, but in general, you'll see a large amount of work being done in that area as of late. KDE 3.2 already has a large amount of usability changes, and 3.3 will have even more.
Your comment wrt 'hacks' on the desktop is on the verge of trolling. Gnome's panel supports fake transparency and Gnome's terminal also supports fake transparency. Why is this any more evil than anything KDE does?
Sun's commitment to accessibility in Gnome is quite commendable, but KDE isn't standing still in that area either. Qt 3.x (and hence KDE 3.x) already has a quite capable accessibility API, just not on the X11 platform (it hooks to existing solutions on Windows and MacOSX..) At the time that Qt 3.0 came out, there was no proven equivalent on X11, and Sun changed that. Qt 4.x (and hence KDE 4.x) will support accessibility on X11.
That they couldn't figure out where the future is going in the "enterprise" computing market. Give 'em a Ouji board, a crystal ball, and a pack of tarot cards, and they'll still fuck it up.
I'm no zealot, but if they don't think linux is the future, it's more a sign that they're clueless than anything.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
If it weren't for the Gentoo forums I probably wouldn't have found an answer. It turned out the solution was easy, I just needed to add it to "sessions" in the Advanced section of desktop preferences in the GNOME menu. It was also interesting that I could start up a gnome console and type "metacity &" and suddenly my windows were managed.
I had similar window manager problems when using Gnome in Debian as well. Clearly packagers of GNOME haven't been able to make it work as nicely out of the box as KDE. Of course KDE is easier to install, but it is more rigid in the sense that you can't use any window manager you want.
I'm having trouble configuring a lot of things in GNOME right now. Like how to see KDE apps in the menu? How to change icon spacing on the desktop? And it seems that you can't have different desktop wallpapers on different virtual desktops? Nor can you have a randomly changing wallpaper based on a whole bunch of images in a single directory (like in KDE). I don't know, GNOME seems cool, and I've seen a lot of cool screenshots of people running xfce with gnome-panel, gnome with enlightenment, sawfish, metacity, all sorts of combinations. It seems to take much more man hours to get it working that way one wants, compared to KDE.
That's the gnome default! I just installed with Gentoo which doesn't do any special configuration, and I have an applications menu at the top and the bottom is just a taskbar. Debian also does this by default as of last year at least (GNOME 2.x).
I'm having trouble configuring a lot of things in GNOME right now. Like how to see KDE apps in the menu?
Works here (again, on Red Hat 9). Of course KDE apps don't actually use the agreed upon menu system yet, that's coming in KDE 3.2, so until then it's really a bug in KDE and not in GNOME.
And it seems that you can't have different desktop wallpapers on different virtual desktops? Nor can you have a randomly changing wallpaper based on a whole bunch of images in a single directory (like in KDE)
Right, those features aren't in Gnome. You can get external programs to do wallpaper switching etc, but I agree, it'd be nice to have it built in.
Redhat has always pushed Gnome and has broken KDE on many occasions. But for the distros that don't TRY to favour either one, Debian and Gentoo are good examples, KDE always works better out of the box compared to GNOME.
I'm going to continue trying GNOME in the coming months. I just needed the hard drive space, and now I have it so I installed it last night. I have to nail down which wm to use, and also whether I want to run xfce with gnome-panel, or something like that. There's a lot of tweaking involved with GNOME compared to KDE I find, but actually I might learn to like this tweakability. Although lack of features like multiple-wallpapers-on-different-virtual-desktops which I take for granted in KDE and many other things might eventually piss me off.
I have to nail down which wm to use, and also whether I want to run xfce with gnome-panel, or something like that.
If you change either of those things, you're no longer running Gnome. Gnome has 1 WM, metacity, and one desktop manager. XFCE is a desktop environment in its own right, feel free to mix and match but don't think you're running gnome afterwards.
Fake transparancies on terminals have always been gay, even before they entered the whole GNOME/KDE thing. Even when we do get real alpha blending, they'll still be gay.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
How will Microsoft compete when they wont have a product until 2006? Even in 2006 their product so far seems to be nothing more but a bloated even more expensive version of XP. Microsoft has not learned and I do not see how Microsoft is going to compete 3 years from now after millions of Chinese are used to Linux. Microsoft is falling into the same trap that Apple fell into, too expensive of a product to compete. Microsoft also wants absolute control, Microsoft used the open and freedom of the PC to beat Apple and now freedom and open is being used to beat them. They can spend money all they want but how can they compete with free when free is of higher quality than what they offer?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.