Sun Increases Commitment to GNOME 312
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."
Co-operation (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, doesn't anyone get the feeling here that Gnome is becoming less a desktop and more a political pawn every day?
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2, Insightful)
/Janne
Re:Wipro (Score:4, Insightful)
Definately. At worst, pumping some money into India will do nothing to help India's poor. At best, growth in the Indian economy will help everybody at least a little (even if it's just through an increased tax base).
I fail to see how this can be considered a bad thing.
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the Sun work will involve serious performance analysis and work. Hopefully this will benefit both GNOME/Linux and GNOME/Solaris, but obviously it'll be focused on GNOME/Solaris, and should make GNOME/Solaris a lot snappier.
Re:Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks? (Score:1, Insightful)
They can still want to kill linux and hijack a free software project to run on top of their proprietary system at the same time.
Re:Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh I love Java platform a lot a lot more than
Hat off to Gnome dudes! Way to go man!
Too many cooks... (Score:5, Insightful)
I gave up on coding for Gnome about 6 months ago because I got fed up chasing my tail with new and incompatabile libararies popping up every five minutes. It seems to me that this occurred because of a lack of communciation between all the developers. How adding a whole bunch more of them to the mix will help this is beyond me.
Having said all that, I hope it does work. Too much effort has gone into Gnome for it not to succeed. And I see KDE vs Gnome as a good thing. I think it keeps everyone on their toes.
I would hope so (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd really hope a community build around a project started by a Mexican will appreciate that.
Re:y gnome not kde (Score:3, Insightful)
Another explanation is that it's easier to develop proprietary software for Gnome: GTK and most Gnome-Libs are LGPL, while, if you would use KDE, you would either have to purchase a commercial license for Qt, or to use the GPL version (and, hence, make your own app Free). Sun probably isn't comfortable telling their customers either to stop producing closed-source apps for Solaris, or to pay money to some other company.
Re:Co-operation (Score:4, Insightful)
However: shouldn't it be possible to have some sort of user-definable GUI-wide setting for each shortcut? Instead of adding C-s in the code of an app as a shortcut, bind the action to the standard "save-document" keystroke and have the app notified when it occurs. Allow the user to override the action for certain apps. It's surely not beyond the reach of human ingenuity.
Re:Uh oh, WIPRO. (Score:5, Insightful)
the difference here is of course that Sun has a stick and a carrot available by virtue of paying them, and are being able to determine what they will work on, and can demand a higher level of professionalism.
/Janne
Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choices (Score:4, Insightful)
experience blinded Sun to the KDE advantage,
because KDE incorporates too much CDE icing.
It's really too bad, because KDE provides a
superior component architecture, and it much
more advanced in it's functional development
than is Gnome.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Too many cooks... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I would hope so (Score:4, Insightful)
Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, not the solution for them. Creating a wealthy elite in third world countries will just raise local prices even further out of the reach of the poor, adding to the problems caused by local goods being sold at global (i.e. western) prices. Using cheap overseas labor will just exacerbate the problem by increasing ocrporate profits at home thereby increasing wealth here and leading to even higher global prices.
Also purely from a selfish POV, I don't want to see my salary capped because some shortsighted manager is trying to increase his bonus by reducing costs by exporting jobs overseas. American companies sure seemed to be patriotic when it was an issue of "buy american", but apparently it's a different story when it comes to "support american workers".
A start to a real solution at eliminating global wealth disparities would be for us to start importing grain and to encourage cooperatives in third world countries which would help the little people sell into the global market. Instead we currently prefer to subsidize domestic production thus keeping prices artificially high.
Re:y gnome not kde (Score:3, Insightful)
There's two obvious reasons:
- They don't want to pay royalties to Trolltech for Qt (commercial use)
- They don't want a C++ only GUI toolkit (yeah I know there's PyQt, but there's no CQt that I'm aware of)
Too bad, since KDE/Qt is much nicer to develop for.
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to understand that the different file managers that you see have different requirements and target audiences. For example, although most of us are running high-end computers these days that have enough CPU power to do all kinds of graphics intensive user interface improvements, and can handle all sorts of situations and combination, many users in the third world countries are stuck with very old machines.
There is no reason why we should marginalize them as users. And I believe that both Rox and gmc fit that bill nicely.
I do not believe that there is a single true solution to all problems. Unix is being used in so many scenarios that it is hard to predict or generalize its use. You see people making Linux run on extremely low end PDAs, sometimes you are memory constrainted; sometimes your are CPU constrainted; Sometimes you are constrainted by the size of the application, and not by the size of available memory; Sometimes you have plenty of CPU to spare.
Although I would love GNOME to have an effort to ship a "light" edition, all I can do is suggest its use. For things to actually happen, interested parties (like yourself) have to take an active role and push for this kind of things to move forward. And by pushing i mean, contributing, packaging, testing, integrating, coding, and everything related to this.
I think its a great idea, and we should have a light version, and a high-end version of GNOME.
If Rox and sawfish fit the bill for your low-end terminals, please go ahead and use those pieces. Your experience will be useful to other people trying to deploy Linux on similar scenarios to you (and there is a lot of impact outside the first world for this kind of setups).
Even if you go with Rox/Sawfish, if you need to run a GNOME app or a KDE app, you will still be able to, but you could manage some precious bandwidth in this particular scenario you describe by using a lighter product.
Miguel.
Re:I would hope so (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking personally, not for Ximian: this question assumes that GNOME is in some way 'American'. That's... fairly wrong. Ximian has employees all over the place; GNOME definitely has contributors on every continent, except maybe Africa, and Sun's GNOME effort has always been based in Ireland. And of course the project was started by our favorite Mexican. So... I don't know. The answer to your question might be interesting or relevant if GNOME were an American project. But it isn't, so the question is at best misleading and at worst just dumb.
Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic (Score:4, Insightful)
It should tell you something that to launch Evolution you have to run at least 5 other processes! This is a horrible idea with horrible consequences. Not only is it stupid on a local machine, but it doesn't even *work* on a distributed network. So what's the point?
Most GNOME elements can't even talk to each other on the desktop. In KDE, *all* of them can. That's DCOP. In KDE, component embedding is a *piece of cake*. Can't say that for Bonobo.
Bonobo is the whole reason people are looking elsewhere to improve the GNOME development platform. I'm sorry, but the Network Object Model of GNOME never was. Come back when you have
Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic (Score:2, Insightful)
Just think of the stranglehold that'd give TrollTech over Sun and any software vendors that deploy on Solaris, can you imagine Microsoft giving another company control of the windows desktop toolkit?
Before you reply back with "they can afford it" or any other such arguments, I'm sure Sun's view was that despite KDE's advantages, it'd be easier to take gnome and bring it up to KDE's level, than hand over control of their desktop to a 3rd party.
Alex
Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic (Score:2, Insightful)
Each of the two projects has its unique qualities and advantages over the other. But there has been a tremendous exchange of ideas and concepts between the two projects that has benefitted both of them. This is one of the side effects of OpenSource competition; as opposed to commercial competition, which promotes individual activity.
Re:Countering .NET? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Sun would have shown some interest in Solaris x86 a few years ago -- say focusing on driver support, adding Apache, Perl, and GNU tools, and adding a PPP dialer, I think they would have done quite well. Instead of all the Linux Hype we've seen, we would have had Solaris Hype.
Sun might have even stolen server market share from MS, instead of fighting a defensive battle - and still made lots of money on support and upsizing to Sparc hardware.
Of course now Linux is so established that the question always was "Why run Solaris x86 when you can run Linux?", but if Sun had played their cards right it easily could have been "Why run Linux when you can run Real UNIX?"
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)