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Bounties for Gnome Optimization
Eugenia writes "Novell and OSNews are sponsoring the memory reduction project led by Novell's Ben Mauer by providing bounties to developers to help to clean up bloat in GNOME and related programs."
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I use gnome 2.4 with about 100MB of ram
Money is sometimes a very good incentive, but sometimes things you work for money don't seem as much fun. It's hard to explian but it's true. When you get paid to build a system, it's not as much fun as when you build your own system. Myabe its the whole intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation thing. My two cents.
This is great news. I switched from KDE about a year ago because of the newer gnome interface. (2.4+?) I run gnome on FreeBSD 5-stable and found that my biggest complaint is the memory usage. I have a dual xeon 2.0 gig with 1 gig of ram and gnome + xorg eat up at least 200-300mb of the ram. Maybe while they are at it they can fix some other problems with gnome like the fact the default stack size needs to be increased in many non linux systems when porting it!!!!!
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
This is a realy good idea, something like this should be done not only to GNOME but also to other window managers such as KDE. Even non linux based systems could need some work when it comes to memory leakage and optimization. This does'nt only help people with little RAM but helps everyone.. Hope everyone are willing to help.
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Offering money is a great way of getting people interested in many things, but do the people who are capable of creating valuable bug reports and/or patches really need these bounties?
I wonder how many crappy bug reports and patches are to be submitted because of the "easy" money being given. I do believe that the bounties will go to the right people and for the right reasons, but more the crap, the more it takes work to find the gems.
Nevertheless, it's about time to unbloat Gnome.
Tapio 'itn' Nuutinen
Sometimes I feel Open Source stuff is even more bloated than their Closed Source counterparts...
I have a machine at work that struggles to run XFCE with only 256Mb of memory.
Windows XP runs fine with that... I know, I know, security sucks, blah, blah, but!
Open Source used to be pretty good at reducing bloat, but nowadays...
how long until
As you can see from Novell's actions they are totally biased towards Gnome but still they make more money out of Suse distribution which uses KDE extensively.
Feel the irony?
They should instead be desktop neutral and support KDE developers too...
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
Yeah, because GNOME is only developed by volunteer hermits living in caves at the moment. It's not like there are big companies paying developers' salaries to work on it or anything.
It's GPL therefore it's Free software. Whether people are paid to work on it or do it out of the goodness of their heart doesn't matter as long as their contributions are GPL.
Is this motivation for people to find the bugs, i.e., there's some programmer out there thinking, "Hmm, if I do this and this, then Gnome will run three times as fast. Oh well, I'm a KDE supporter so I don't care." Or is this a way to reward all of those people who do care about Gnome and are working on it by giving them a specific area to concentrate on and then rewarding them for their hard work, in other words some programmer thinking, "Hmm, I've got some free time and I can either work on fixing eyecandy or fixing memory leaks. Guess I'll fix the memory leaks first and get a reward."
Everyone has been assuming that this is pure motivation, appealing to the greedy nature of people who aren't already contributing. I don't think that's the case. Generally speaking, those people who are good programmers and know the code well enough to actually identify and fix problem areas are probably already doing so. This "bounty" seems to be more a way of rewarding them and helping to give them a list of priorities.
I like this, from my observations it alwasy appears that OSS is a bit heavy on the memory while closed source tends to be heavier on harddrive and processor dependent (not to say it is bloat free, far from it). That said, I run Gnome 2.8 on my old Pentium 2 laptop with 128mb of RAM. It actually works decently well, other than the screen refreshes which can use up all my processor and still take a few days :) . It is quite usable though and future versions of gnome will hopefully perform even better.
Thank You Novell
Not at $100 or $200 a pop, notta chance. I think these are mostly to encourage the existing gnome hackers to attack some less-than-glamorous problems they would rather not do normally. I doubt we'll ever see a wild wild west bounty hunter who just roams around between vastly different projects. If the improvements were that easy to make, someone already on the team would just make them instead of giving up money. If they aren't that easy, like these, then you wouldn't be able to solve enough of them to pay your rent.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
So, why does XP load so quickly? By accident?
Nope. it's because a lot of people put hard work into it.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
While they've still got a long way to go, each successive release of KDE is substantially improved in terms of required CPU power and memory usage. KDE 3 ran a great deal faster than KDE 2 despite all sorts of added functionality, and KDE 3.4 RC1 is the fastest yet by a pretty big margin. The upcoming Qt 4 has a whole slew of performance improvements which should reduce requirements further.
The bounties Novell is offering are too low. They're offering $1-200 for tasks that will take an adequately skilled programmer, already familiar with GNOME, something like 2-4h to complete, including the docs that will let GNOME integrate the code (which will help win the bounty). The programmer doesn't need to spend time testing the code, though that will increase their chances of winning. So they're offering $50:h.
That isn't enough to support a community of coders, even if the range of bounties were scaled up to supply a significant headcount with enough work to keep busy (say, 500-1000 bounties a year). The labor might be fueled by people who are coding GNOME anyway, to prioritize completion/submission of some tasks. But the better, even more productive coders won't be available at those rates. It remains to be seen whether a multitude of mediocre submissions can compensate for too-cheap bounties that can't attract quality coders. Or perhaps this model will merely send all coding offshore, to programmers who can work so cheap that a single $100 bounty won can fund a month of unsuccessful submissions to other bounties they lose.
--
make install -not war
I think this is a horrible idea. When you have to offer bounties to encourage people to alter open source, then you're basically hiring and paying programmers...Open source isn't about hiring and paying people, it's about everyone working together to make better software for themselves.
I think you are confusing Open Source Software and Ken Kesey's Magic School Bus. One solution to this problem is for your to do way less drugs.
> Remove all deprecated libraries from the codebase of the Gnome core.
I believe that deprecated libraries tend to be replaced by stubs that backport the new functionality to the old API. Eg, the gnome_sound_play function currently sends a sound file to Esound; when (if) GStreamer becomes part of the platform, the function in libgnome will be replaced with code to do the same thing in GStreamer.
The old APIs can not be removed until the developers decide to make a new release backwards-incompatible--this will be Gnome 3.0 (http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero).
> Remove or replace subsystems which never really were useful
Most people I see using Gnome use GnomeVFS all the time. Being able to access files shared on the network without having to be root to mount them is really nice. Even nicer is the sftp virtual filesystem, used for accessing files over SSH's SFTP. If GnomeVFS is to be replaced by something else, it will be by freedesktop.org's D-VFS.
As for Bonobo: I believe panel applets use it all the time, and I don't think KParts can be a sensible replacement for it: Bonobo isn't just for GUI components. Since it is a Corba implementation, one can use out-of-process components with it, as well as components running accross the network. It's more like DCOM, whereas Kparts are analogous to ActiveX.
Furthermore, I don't see the Gnome developers starting to use C++ any time soon. Besides the matter of taste and familiarity, C++ has problems with ABI stability. It took an age for Debian to recompile every C++ program when GCC 3.2 came out; I believe one of the reasons GCC 3.4 won't be in Sarge is because it breaks ABI compatibility again.
> Make all demons optional
Sounds like you want to duplicate the code from the daemons and copy it into each application. This would only increase memory usage and the number of bugs, while decreasing functinality. The reason GConf is really, really good is because of the signals/notification system. I'm not sure one's desktop would run much faster if every program one used polled its config file for updates every second.
As for Esound, it will go away in the future if GStreamer becomes a part of the Gnome platform. This will be really nice when it happens, because the job of picking which sound server to use (esd/polyp/arts/jack/none), configuring it, etc will be left up to the distributor. But GStreamer has a fair bit of improvement to do before this can happen; and since removing Esound all together is backwards incompatible, it will have to wait for 3.0.
There is no need to hide the fact that you took the code. It is perfectly legal and ethical to take GPLed code and integrate it into another GPLed project.
Thus, what I'm saying is that to get a guy to create GPLed code for you for free, you only have to start a "contest", don't take the guy's submission, wait until he forks your project with the code he created for the "contest", and integrate that code in your own project. Perfectly legal and ethical, since your project is also GPL, and you didn't pay a penny for that code.
perception is reality
Well, those patches would no only have to pass scruitiny by those offering the bounties, but more importantly, the package maintainers as well. I'm not concerned.
Sourceforge should extend it's donation system and create a bounty system. When you donate money to a project's bounty system, you get a vote for each dollar you give. People submit for the bounty, and then, you can vote for who will get the coding contract.
perception is reality
If gnome really wants to reduce bloat they should consider moving back to gnome office from OO.o
Basic visual cues are "eye candy," the favorite intellectual fallback weapon to describe anything that makes you feel less elite for using it.
This isn't 1987 anymore. My CPU can handle drawing pleasing visual effects so that after 13 hours of programming, my eyes aren't fatigued.
And there's nothing better than "oops, something screwed up my registry, gotta delete it and start from zero."
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001