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."

all I go to say about this

[the_2nd_coming]

Cool.......soon, Gnome will be the best DTE around, undisputed. Hell right now, Gnome seems to have cleaner interface than KDE.

one of the things about KDE is that they have all these cool technologies, but they are not implimented by any one...what good is it if it is not used?

Countering .NET?

[JohnBE]

Is this in any way related to Miguel De Icaza's .NET comments? It'd make sense for SUN's purposes. Does this mean that they'd push for heavy Java (J2SE) integration? If so, what JVM?

It's interesting that they are targetting the small Windows server with Cobalt, I think they'd need some kind of .NET competitor complete with J2SE integration.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[restive]

Good point.
On the other hand, Sun doesn't always think through their decisions and announcements, and later changes their minds. However, they were planning on releasing Solaris 9 with GNOME originally. Now, it looks like it will be bundled in a later release of the OS.

What they're really trying to do is give people a classier environment than CDE bundled with the OS. At least that's my opinion. If the performance of GNOME/Solaris ever equals GNOME/Linux, I'll be surprised.

You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop

[PRR]

You would think that Sun, of all folks, would do a separate desktop based around Swing to showcase their Java technologies just as Trolltech contributes to KDE to showcase their Qt.

Wipro

[AirLace]

I've had some experience with Wipro in the past. It's a software [redherring.com] sweatshop [isanet.org] based in India. I guess that's how Sun can affort to devote 50 whole programmers to GNOME. Does the GNOME community really want to be associated with this kind of establishment?

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[allenw]

IIRC, Sun committed to GNOME 2.0 shipping with Solaris. Since Solaris 9's gate is going to be closing in a few weeks, GNOME 2.0 won't be ready by then to actually integrate, test, and ship with the first cut of Solaris 9.

[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.]

Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks?

[Derkec]

The last few weeks, I've been reading post after post which says "Sun is alienating the entire open community" or "Sun is out to destroy Linux" or something similar. I'm curious what you people think of this action. Is Sun's entire motivation to improve a desktop environment that can be used on Solaris or are they trying to make *NIX more competitive on the desktop? Or - now just maybe - is Sun at least a little bit motivated to give back to the community like it says it wants to.

Re:Co-operation

[JanneM]

Exactly what do you see as missing? We have a common window manager standard, we have a common standard for menus, with QT3 the clipboard should be interoperable, and there is quite a bit of talk about fixing some kind of standard for desktop themes - though that last one is difficult.

Is there anything else needed?

The projects will never settle on one toolkit, that's for certain; that cuts right to the heart of each projects goals and identity. They're unlikely to ever agree on a common component model either (although there's been attempts to bridge between them). None of that is really needed, however. If the applications can interoperate on the user-visible level, that really is the best of both worlds - the developers can choose whichever project they prefer to write the software in, and the users can run it fine either way.

/Janne

Uh oh, WIPRO.

[mrsam]

At my day job (a huge corporate behemoth), they decided to use WIPRO to build a business-critical application. Well, they've been regretting this decision for two years now.

Everyone had dollar signs in their eyes at first: using cheap overseas labor, how much money they'll save, yadda yadda yadda...

Well, the PHBs discovered that if they wanted cheap overseas labor, that's exactly what they got with WIPRO: cheap, shoddy labor. Spaghetti, unmaintainable code all around.

I really hope that WIPRO's "contributions" to the GNOME project would undergo the same scrutiny and vetting as anyone else's submitted patches and contributed code.

Re:Is anyone else confused by this?

[bhsx]

I'm sure you've got better things to do than explain a month-old 'out of context' quote to everyone, but I really appreciated seeing you jump into the fray, as always. I have a question for you that has nothing to do with Mono... Have you tried the Rox file-manager/desktop? What are your impressions? I've just started using it, and love the direction it's going. Do you think we might see a 'gnome-lite' ditching some of the heavies like Nautilus for Rox or equivelent? I know I can obviously do this on my own without you; but I'm really curious what your impression of Rox is. I run a tiny little project we've dubbed The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project [dynu.com] and I'm concidering ditching GNOME and KDE for the fast-as-hell Rox with sawfish/pygtk. Your impressions/comments are highly anticipated. Thanks.

Re:Uh oh, WIPRO.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Luis, you've got your work cut out for you. I've seen the effect of outsourcing development and even just maintence work to third world countries. Typically the programmers jump in and start producing patches way before they have enough domain experience to know WTF they are doing. I've seen companies blindly trust the 3rd world developers to do things right and let them check into the tree themselves. Worst mistake those companies have ever made, at least one company spent 3 months just trying to recover from it.

You guys are going to have to be exceptionally vigilant in dealing with the output from wipro's people. I expect that for the first year or so, while they are getting up to speed, their contribution will be net negative because of all the work everyone else has to do make sure they don't F it up.

Re:Paid hackers

[elflord]

One has got to wonder if mandating programmers is the correct way to spur the development of a publicly developed UI. When Corel tried to do that with KDE, they ended up being pushed out simply because they could not contribute code at the level and skill of the rest of the KDE hackers.

I think putting QA people on the job is a very good move. If they focus on bugfixes, running backtraces and fixing core dumps, and that sort of thing, it's probably a lot easier for them to contribute than if they try adding substantial new features. The problem with Corel is that they wanted to substantially extend existing code, with their "innvative file manager" (yes, they really called it that) and other things.

Re:Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks?

[benmhall]

Mod the parent up:

" I've never seen any evidence Sun is evil. They opened services like YP and NFS and released (BSD-style) free source code before open source became a buzz-word, they bought out StarOffice and turned it into an open source project, and most important of all they supported Unix during the dark times, when it was virtually the only open platform in existance.

There are complaints about Java not being open source or free, but what did anyone expect them to do, given the 5000lb Gorilla that would have destroyed what they were trying to achieve before it stood a chance.

Sun is on my list of the "good guys". But I guess it all depends on where you stand..."

He's right. Other than pull Java out of the standards bodies, what exactly has Sun done that can be seen as negative by anyone other than MS?

Unlike Intel, their first attack method isn't to sue, they've said over and over (for years) that they want an open system with lots of competition, as mentioned they've made NFS and NIS Free, they constantly innovate (with things like Java) and they seem to be doing a good job of taking over, and often opening, other companies.

Cobalt is doing just as well now, StarOffice is turning out great, NetBeans is now Free and improving, Java, while not yet as open as many would like, is progressing well and is available for Linux and FreeBSD, Sun's pouring lots of resources into Gnome, StarOffice and other technologies that directly benefit the OSS community, and they do all of this while putting up with all of the sniping from the very community they're working so hard to help.

Personally, I think people should be a touch more suspicious of IBM and a bit friendlier with Sun.

Desktop Sun

[Snowfox]

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.

Bye Bye Open Windows

[hfk]

As a side note, Open Windows will not be included with Solaris 9. Remember all those pop-ups in Solaris's Open Windows warning of it's impending abandonment? They meant it.