Sun Increases Commitment to GNOME

Ur@eus writes "Mark McLoughlin of Sun mailed the gnome-hackers mailing-list today announcing the deal between Sun, Ximian and Wipro. The deal means that Wipro will assign up to 50 people to work on GNOME including hackers, QA people, documenters and more. These hackers come in addition to the Sun hackers already working on GNOME at their Desktop Division in Ireland. The official announcement from Sun will come in a few days."

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Spirilis]

Except for the java-gnome project java-gnome.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]
which, unfortunately, I had nil luck compiling (just the java-gtk part) on my Debian 2.2 system the other day...
but still, I would LOVE to be able to write GTK/GNOME apps in Java :-)

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[miguel]

I do not think you have understood my position when it comes to Mono and GNOME yet. There is a detailed explanation about this here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002- February/msg00031.html

The short version of this is:

* I do not have any maintainership control over any piece of GNOME anymore.

* I like everyone else have an opinion on how GNOME would benefit the most.

* People will be free to use the tools the Mono project produces or not use them.

* Mono will integrate with GNOME right away, just like say, Java/GNOME is integrated with GNOME right away.

* So I believe that building apps with Mono will be a nice experience for people in the GNOME world.

I like different technologies from different companies. I like the .NET Framework a lot more than I like the Java platform, but that is my personal choice; And I do like the UltraSparc cpu over any other cpu, and I still love the fact that my IBM laptop is so cheap ;-)

So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies. There are choices for everyone to pick from.

Miguel.

Re:*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable..

[bigdogs]

wait for the flame wars about why its GNOME and not KDE, and vice versa... :P

Note: I work for Sun, but I don't speak for them in any way whatsoever.....
There was some discussion about this on the internal Linux mail alias, and IIRC, the consensus had something to do with C++ not being a "standardized" language.

Or something like that. I'm not a programmer, so I'm probably not using the correct terminology.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[tve]

[Which illustrates a difference between open and closed source: with closed source, you actually have a date that you have to meet and produce a product. To make that date, sometimes you have to cut features/additions/etc.]

No, which illustrates the difference between commercial and non-commercial software. Commercial software has deadlines, because commercial software needs to make money before the company producing it goes out of business. Non-commercial software doesn't have this problem and therefore may not have deadlines (it may have deadlines due to other reasons though).

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Wdomburg]

>Okay, let me be sure I understand this - Miguel
>and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which \
>is an open source implementation of .NET - which
>was developed to compete with Sun's Java - and
>Sun's throwing developers at this?

A few things:

The only developer who has said they are interested in making Gnome "based on" Mono is Miguel. Your inclusing of "and his gnomies" seems to imply that this is a widespread intention; it is not.

The term "based on" is misleading. As Miguel himself said:

Rewriting GNOME in C# with the CLR would be a
very bad idea, if not the worst possible idea
ever.

And furthermore Mono is being based on Gnome technologies, not the other way around:

Libart will be used to implement the
Drawing.2D API; Gtk+ and the GNOME libraries
will be used to implement the WinForms API and
of course Glib and libxml will be used in
various places

If anything, it would be more accurate to say that Mono is being offered as an alternate API for accessing the Gnome libraries, and that Miguel has belief that this API offers signifigant enough advantages that future code may be based on Mono, or embed the Mono runtime.

The next thing is that this has nothing to do with Gnome 2.0, which is the project that they will be working on. Miguel stated he would like to see Gnome 3.0 have Mono ties, but he has also stated that his guess is that Gnome 4.0 would be when developers start seeing the benefits of it.

And of course, the more important point - Miguel does not have maintainer control over ANY package in Gnome. He has long since given maintainership on every project he worked on to someone else.

What this means is that the only thing that will move Gnome to dependency on Mono is if it is reached as a consensus among the Gnome developers.

Matt

Misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you people get these perceptions? Sweatshop???? I have worked with Wipro myself. Why do you persist in comparing pay rates with your US based $$$ rates? Don't you realize that India is a much cheaper place? Everything is cheaper.... a $$$ goes much longer than it does in the US. A person making the equivalent of $200 a month in India can live more luxuriously than someone making $3,000 in the US. I know because I have been in both of the above situations.

Wipro is a fine organization and it is CMM level 5. Its work culture is great and it pays its employees very very well. So stop bashing something when you dont have the full information; with just a couple of biased articles as your news source.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[Ewan]

Interestingly, while Sun are funding a lot of Gnome development, IBM have already shipped AIX5L with both Gnome and KDE available alongside CDE as the desktop.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[luge]

A number of Wipro patches have already been rejected and sent back for reworking. Ximian and Sun can not and will not force maintainers to accept patches from them. Of course, Sun may apply those patches to their own builds of GNOME, but they could do that no matter what. It's important to remember that using GNOME doesn't make sense for Sun if they destroy the community in the process.

Re:y gnome not kde

[__past__]

uh, kdelibs is also LGPL. Qt is GPL.

Show me how you develop a KDE app without linking with Qt, please...

However, Qt is not only GLPed, but also available under the QPL and a commercial license - and it's not even that expensive to buy a commercial version (AFAIR ~2K$ per developer per platform) if you plan to develop proprietary apps. It's probably more about what Sun might think that those licensing issues might imply than what they really do.

(Please note that I do not want to bash KDE or Trolltech because of this. Even if it were a problem to develop proprietary apps for KDE (and the available apps e.g. from theKompany imply the opposite), I couldn't care less.)

Re:Too many cooks...

[martijn-s]

Thinking up new stuff is really fun, and probably the main cause of all those libraries popping up. Hobbyists will do this fun stuff all the time, but these people are paid do to an entirely different job.

Don't forget they've been assigned mostly clean-up, ready for commercial rollout jobs. They are not designing completely new libraries (except for maybe that accessability thing).

Re:Co-operation

[damiam]

One of the nicest features of GTK is dynamic key bindings. Just hover your mouse over the Find menu item in gedit and press Control-F and the keybinding for Find will change to Control-F, just like Galeon. Or you could do the opposite thing in Galeon and the rest of your apps, to get searching standardized on F6.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Co-operation

[Permission Denied]

Have you tried using Konqueror using a window manager other than kwin? Really, have you done this?

It does not work very well. First of all, QT has a bug where it expects to receive a certain X message before it accepts the input focus. Most window managers don't send this X message when the keyboard is grabbed, so QT apps won't take keyboard input. Try this: launch twm or an older version of WindowMaker, launch a QT application and try using Alt-Tab to cycle to the application (you'll need to configure twm to allow you to do this). It will no longer take keyboard input even though it is the focus window.

Try setting up Java to work with Konqueror in any window manager except kwin. You'll fail. That's because Konqueror's java support requires DCOP communication with the window manager. It could do the communication via X atoms (which means your favorite window manager such as WindowMaker could implement it), but it uses DCOP instead. Konqueror will never fully work on any window manager except the KDE window manager.

So what have KDE and GNOME standardized? They have a common way of creating application links on your desktop and they have the _NET_WM stuff. Theoretically, this would mean that you could use the KDE pager in any window manager that supports the EWMH (the _NET_WM hints). Try using kpager (the KDE pager) with fvwm+fvwm_ewmh module. It won't work very well. Kpager won't work very well at all unless it's engulfed in kicker (the KDE taskbar).

The GNOME-KDE cooperation is mostly useless at this point. It's even worse if you don't want to use KDE or GNOME but only want to use a KDE/GNOME application under a non-KDE-GNOME environment (like using Konqueror under WindowMaker or blackbox, etc.).

Re:Co-operation

[Dr. Sp0ng]

It does not work very well. First of all, QT has a bug where it expects to receive a certain X message before it accepts the input focus. Most window managers don't send this X message when the keyboard is grabbed, so QT apps won't take keyboard input. Try this: launch twm or an older version of WindowMaker, launch a QT application and try using Alt-Tab to cycle to the application (you'll need to configure twm to allow you to do this). It will no longer take keyboard input even though it is the focus window.

Yes it will. The problem is that the alt from the alt-tab causes the menu to get selected, and kwin works around this. Look up at your menu bar and you should see the first menu item selected. Tap alt again to unselect it, and it'll work fine.

Re:Desktop Sun

[ogren]

Snowfox asks: I'm curious; please believe that this isn't a troll: Does GNOME on Sun really matter?

Where are Suns being used as something other than a server? Are there business sectors where Sun workstations are common?

I thought SGI pretty much owned the UNIX workstation market.

Nope. Sun has 76% marketshare for the RISC workstation market. SGI does well in the graphics workstation market, but Sun has the technical workstation space.

Yahoo article on workstation marketshare [yahoo.com]

Re:Desktop Sun

[rnash]

Where are Suns being used as something other than a server? Are there business sectors where Sun workstations are common?

I work (or more exactly am being rent by) for a company working in the private mobile radio area (selling to corporations or public safety).

And there I see 200 people develloping on Sun workstations and behind them lie Sun servers. They've been using them with Rational Clearcase (plus debugging tools) for years before Clearcase became fully functional on Linux (seems like only RedHat is officialy supported by Rational, full power since R4.1).