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."
Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2, Insightful)
/Janne
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2, Informative)
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2, Interesting)
[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.]
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2, Informative)
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? (Score:2, Funny)
Therefore WinXP must be 1) open source and 2) non-commercial.
Very cool
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:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:5, Informative)
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
So there is a lot of love for different companies and technologies. There are choices for everyone to pick from.
Miguel.
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:3, Funny)
It's that rough anal sex from Microsoft I could do without.
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!
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
ROX for 3rd World Countries? (Score:2)
Phillip.
Ok Miguel, a question (Score:2)
After you finish Mono is the goal to make it a clone of
If technology is the purpose, whys compatibility so important????? Mono is sounding alot like Wine.
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2)
Miguel has expressed his desire to use some parts of MONO inside Gnome 4.0 (and maybe 3.0 - not 2.0 which is in feature freeze state right now if I'm not mistaken)..
I congratulate Sun for contributing some work towards GNOME, making it better. Help for open source projects is always welcome...
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:5, Informative)
>and his gnomies wanna base GNOME on MONO which \
>is an open source implementation of
>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
Re: (Score:2)
Having alot of developers who wont get along (Score:2)
Leaves mailing lists of programmers arguing for days at a time. Thats why KDE is ahead of Gnome, Gnome programmers are too busy fighting why kde is coding
Wake up and open source the java (Score:2)
Are there any real java applications out there? Unlike perl, Python, C, C++ etc java seems to have not a lot of really functional, fast widely used applications. Applix was a great office suite that (unlike Corel Wordperfect) really was ported to java and ran fast. It never got widely used and it's mostly dead now. Does Sun have any sample applications or any **proof** that java actually works?? (perl and Python we know work C#
Re:Is anyone else confused by this? (Score:2)
Do you mean the change to using the MIT license for the runtime libraries? The same basic license that is used by XFree86, Apache, and FreeBSD? Java is more open than this, how?
Countering .NET? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's interesting that they are targetting the small Windows server with Cobalt, I think they'd need some kind of
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?"
Re:Countering .NET? (Score:2)
You armchair CEO's are so feebleminded. Its pretty obvious that Sun would had to have sunk in a lot money to make Solaris a viable platform on Intel PCs, and that does not count the millions of dollars they would need to piss away to market Solaris for x86. Properly run (non-dotbomb) companies do not piss away their capital if they cannot reasonably expect a return on their investment.
Don't you know that Microsoft does not spend their money on implementing device drivers to their operating system? No, its hardware vendors that spend their money to make their hardware work on windoze! Picture the amount of money Sun would need to blow to either get some participation from vendors or the manhours to provide equivalent driver support that Microsoft gets for free. (Actually, the hardware vendors pay Microsoft for the privilege of incorporating their driver into the M$ OS.)
That's why Solaris for x86 was stillborn. Have you even tried installing Solaris on a PC??? Simply put, one piece of hardware outside of its miniscule sanctioned list, and you're screwed. The device may not work, and worse, sometimes the machine won't work either.
Sun Microsystems has the vision of a pre-surgical cataract patient, but this Dumbo (Solaris x86) was not going to fly. And yes, its too bad. What they should have done was tried to become a linux reseller like Red Hat. It would have solved some strategic niches which Solaris for x86 was planned for and it would have cost them the same amount of money. They probably would have crushed Red Hat in marketing and had a chance of snacking on Microsoft lunch. Oh well.
Offtopic analogy. (Score:2)
And yet I can't read a single article in the snazzy new apple section without some nimrod yelling about how good it would be for Apple to release OS X for Intel hardware.
Sigh.
This moment of bitterness brought to you by a Macintosh user.
--saint
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:Co-operation (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Co-operation (Score:2)
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:Co-operation (Score:2)
I don't think you can set system-wide defaults for an option, though.
Re:Co-operation (Score:2)
That has little to do with GNOME/GTK inconsistancies, though. Probably one of these apps uses the GNOME key bindings and the other app uses is GTK only and had to come up with its own.
I see the same inconsistensies in Windows too, though. Most modern apps for both GNOME, GTK, KDE and Qt seem to integrate well, all using the same technologies mentioned in parent post.
Of course, there are areas which can be improved. Sign up for a GNOME or KDE usability test and let us developers know.
Re:Co-operation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Co-operation (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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:Co-operation (Score:2)
Uh, why? It might not be of interest to Sun[1], but both Gnome and KDE run on many more platforms than just Linux.
[1] And IMHO, it should be - there are some really nice KDE apps, why shouldn't Sun want their customers be able to use them without unnecessary quirks, once Gnome is the "official" Solaris desktop? Then again, /me is quite confident with the current state of interoperability.
You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop (Score:2)
Re:You'd think Sun would do a Swing desktop (Score:2)
Trying to keep MONO out ??? (Score:2)
Sun I am certain would HATE to see MONO/.NET implmented in ANY core Gnome technology.
This is good for Gnome, either way if its sincere, and the help is actually there, and not just in a press release. I still have to wonder how self serving it is to keep
If your going to guess... (Score:2)
diffrent conspiracy theory?
Maybe they are doing it as a back door way to get some control over a new standard Microsoft is pushing.
Re:Trying to keep MONO out ??? (Score:2)
[Ximian+Sun hat off] How does it benefit Sun to keep Mono off their platform? Either
Sun vs. Slashdot (Score:2)
Does this mean we get another couple of years of Slashdot flamage? Suits me, I like a good flame war ;)
Wipro (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I would hope so (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd really hope a community build around a project started by a Mexican will appreciate that.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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:I would hope so (Score:2)
GNOME has contributors from Antarctica? Cooooool.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I would hope so (Score:2)
Keeping these people in country is a good thing for other reasons - it will bring money into the country (and from a stable currency, like the US dollar). A programmer making $40k US who lives in New Delhi is a major earner by foreign standards. In a sense its Trickle-Down economics.
...
The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies?
This statement misses an important fact (that you even mentioned earlier in your post) -- making software, even is a "sweatshop" environment -- is fundamentally different from making shoes. You can't write software unless you're educated, and if you're paid too little it's relatively easy to migrate somewhere else because the demand for programmers is high. Thus, as you say, this practice will only increase the size and power of the educated middle-class, which every economist in the world has acknowledged is one of the most best economic stabilizers you can get.
The wonderful thing about a large educated middle-class is that it tends to be self-supporting, economically speaking, as its presence tends to drive both the production and consumption of goods and services. (Say what you will about consumerism
So, by all means support the use of overseas programmer farms (and international knowledge workers in general), even if like me you don't buy shoes from Nike.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A few random comments. (Score:2)
The workplace is obviously a better environment than any of the alternatives given to the people who work there, so a project like this can only improve the working conditions for Indian programmers. This, of course, should not be an excuse for first world consumers (in this case Sun) not to insist on some reasonable standard for the working conditions, but keep in mind that it a priori is an improvement.
The Gnome project should only accept quality code, this doesn't depend on whether the code is from Sun programmers in Ireland or outsources in India.
Their motivations should not matter, just the license and code quality. Any commitment to a postulated OSS ideal is beside the point. I'm sure Sun does this for purely selfish reasons.
It is true that once at the level of first world countries, cheap labour will be found elsewhere. Former third world countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan now has to rely on their skill and highly developed infrastructure to compete with other first world countries. As this continues, eventually, we may run out of third world countries to provide cheap labour. I consider this a feature, not a bug.
US is probably the nation in the world that is most self-reliant, so to say that it "depend on sub-serviant nations" is stretching it. While restricting free trade always has a cost, US could survive economic isolation better than anyone else, and certainly a lot better than the so-called "sub-serviant" nations. In the US, prices would rise, unemployment would rise (irionically, since the pro-isolation pinheads can't think beyond "they steal our jobs", to the many more jobs created by an improved economy), but the economy would survive on a lower level. In much of the rest of the world, the economies would collapse, as most other nations are much more dependend on trade than the US.
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:I would hope so (Score:2)
Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, not the solution for them
And on the other...
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.
Trade is not the solution! Trade is the solution! Make up your mind.
The rest of your argument is specious. Trade does help other countries's citizens, as well as our own. This has been established for centuries, if not millenia.
Other countries have internal problems, such as a lack of property law and (therefore) huge underground economies. We can't fix that directly. But if we trade with the citizens of those countries, the underground economies composed of regular citizens will one day become the above-ground economies. It happened in the U.S. It happened in Western Europe. It can happen other places. Read The Mystery of Capital by Hernando deSoto, a Peruvian economist.
Re:I would hope so (Score:2)
Nope. A lack of global trade is an obstruction to social mobility. It results in an aristocracy of citizenship. There are obviously people with a vested interest in creating and maintaining such a thing (namely, lower/middle class citizens of wealthy countries). But a lack of global trade is certainly not good for curing wealth imbalances.
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.
This goes against all existing experience. A country can use taxes and social problems to redress social inequalities. Currency increase is rarely bad for the economy. Countries with strong currencies have high standards of living, countries with weak currencies have low standards of living.
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.
Right on! You are one of the people with a vested interest in maintain an aristocracy of citizenship, and you aren't really that interested in fairness. In fact, fairness probably isn't in the interests of most people in western countries
American companies ...
American companies have their own interests too. They are neither moral or imoral. They are indifferent to morality.
A start to a real solution at eliminating global wealth disparities would be for us to start importing grain
Question 21: Based on the above, the authors goal is:
Instead we currently prefer to subsidize domestic production thus keeping prices artificially high.
Now I'm confused. Is protectionism good or bad ? First you were saying it's good, and we need more of it, and now you're attacking it.
Of course, you are right. (Score:2)
> not the solution for them.
Right. Ignore that just about anyone with any kind of economic background will disagree, they are probably brainwashed or belong to some interbational conspiracy. And also ignore that every country that have practiced economic isolationism (like Albania or North Korea) have ended up being by far the poorest countries in their region.
> Creating a wealthy elite in third world
> countries will just raise local prices even
> further out of the reach of the poor,
Right. Just ignore who *creates* the local goods, and sell them to the new middle class... or rather "wealthy elite" as you prefer to call these programmers who just a moment ago wos "poor oppressed sweatshop workers".
> adding to the problems caused by local goods
> being sold at global (i.e. western) prices.
Right. Of course, those who actually study global economics say the problem is the opposite, that the global prices are made artificially lower than the western prices, by trade protection and heavy subsidicing western farmers. Which, had it been true, would mean that third world farmers, who get no subsidicing, get paid a lot less than they would in a free market.
> 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.
It all sound so logical when you explian it. Lower production costs lead to higher consumer prices. This gives me an idea: How about we doubled, nay, trippled all our salaries? In that case, profit would disappear or become negative, and consumer good would be free!
Ah, I like your sort of economy so much better than the conventionel sort.
> 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.
Right. We would not want any manager to increase his bonus by reducing costs. What's next? We have already established that reduced costs leads to higher prices. And what's next? Managers increasing their bonus by improving quality? We don't want that to happen, do we. In the end we might end up with increased prductivity, and if world history has taught us anything, it is that wealth is inversely propertional with productivity. Back when we were hunters and gathers, everyone had their personal jet and lives on private palaces on Fisher island (thus the name). Every time we have invented something to do our work easier, we have become materially poorer.
Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And for proof, check out sun.com's Spotlight.. (Score:2)
Re:Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks? (Score:2, Funny)
What is fashionable now is to be pragmatic under all circumstances, but when it comes to Sun or any of their products (specially Java and Solaris). Being critical of Microsoft technologies is now "passé". Here are some simple guidelines so you don't look funny when posting:
1. If ever you make an argument against any company or technology (specially against MS), you have to always counter with something in favor. This a is not optional, it is a mandatory practice. If you fail to do so, you will look like a zealot lacking any critical thought. By opposition, if you are attacking Sun, it is always very clear-cut: it's black or it's white (and coming from Sun, it can only be black).
2. You must always use shorter yardsticks to measure MS. If S.B. says that Linux is a cancer, it's normal. Hey, they are the competition, what can you expect? If B.J. says that C# has not being designed to be completely secure, open fire. Obviously he is way of base, he is completely sold out and hasn't even read correctly the
3. If referring to similar products, even if one has been proven and is widely used, always take down Sun's. For instance, Java is slow and if I want to change a standard API I have to go throughout a community process that sux because there are to many companies involved.
Finally, as a general principle, be always suspicious of all things Sun. If they do something that may appears good for the open source community, there is certainly a bad reason. If you can't find any bad reason right away, just remember that they haven't made Java nor Solaris open source and they don't want to certify JBoss for free.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Where all the "Sun is Evil" folks? (Score:3, Interesting)
" 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.
Give us the money, or the monkey gets it (Score:3, Funny)
Uh oh, WIPRO. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Uh oh, WIPRO. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Uh oh, WIPRO. (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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
Re:Uh oh, WIPRO. (Score:2)
Nobody can stop improvements..... But getting things layed out, even if wrong.....
It's easier to improve then to originate.
:)
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.
Re:Too many cooks... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too many cooks... (Score:2)
Ii don't agree. Competition keeps people moving. Linux didn't patch the kernel until the major branches became a threat.
Now, if only we could junk X windows and replace it with display postscript and other MacOS X goodies...
Re:Too many cooks... (Score:2)
Re:Too many cooks... (Score:2)
You are assuming that all developers who work separately on GNOME and KDE could have moved to a single project and made the resulting destkop better and faster. This is probably not true.
It is likely that some developers who are working on GNOME or KDE now would not be working on any desktop project if the only choice had been the other destkop environment. There are some significant technical and conceptual differences between both projects and some programmers are much more likely to contribute to a project that fits the way they think. The first difference is in the programming languages: although both projects use object-oriented concepts, the GNOME libraries are written in C (which makes it easier to add bindings for other languages such as Perl or Python) and the KDE libraries are written in C++ (which makes the development faster if you stick to C++). This is just an example; there are many other differences in the architecture of both systems.
Nobody should tell them. They should work on whatever they feel comfortable with. Some developers will prefer GNOME because they prefer the way the GNOME libraries are designed. Some of them will prefer KDE because they prefer the way the KDE libraries are designed. There are not so many experienced programmers who would feel equally at home in both environments. So let them choose whatever they want and work on what they like best. There is not much duplication of effort anyway.
Re:Too many cooks... (Score:2, Informative)
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).
Sun and GNOME (Score:3)
People are correct in pointing out that Sun has slipped on their deadline for integrating GNOME into a Solaris release.
I certainly see this is a win for Sun. I'm hoping that the GNOME people are seeing Sun's contributions as a win, too.
Me? I've used Ximian Red Carpet to install GNOME + goodies on my Solaris 7 box. My only unhappyness is that all my keys on the left hand side of the keyboard (copy, paste, raise to front, etc) aren't working. Some of that can be handled in the configuration, though.
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.
Re:Sun's history of making the wrong desktop choic (Score:2)
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)
It is not.
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)
What the hell does KDE have to do with CDE? What is "CDE icing" and why is it "too bad"? What does CDE's archecture have to do with blinding Sun? I use CDE every day, so please explain this to me...
How the hell did this post get modded up to Insightful? Is it time to differentiate Geek Karma from Polictical/Social Karma? The one group knows nothing about the other, and those that get a bunch of Karma by moderating Katz' insipid pieces jump into technology discussions with mod points burning a hole in their pockets. The result is embarassing, IMHO.
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.
Wait a 1/3 of a minute... (Score:2)
Re:Wait a 1/3 of a minute... (Score:2)
Re:Wait a 1/3 of a minute... (Score:2)
Sun is throwing its weight against KDE (Score:2)
The fact that KDE has been progressing leaps and bounds without Sun's help, is on schedule, and works *better* on Solaris than GNOME itself, must be a truly worrying prospect for Sun. Add in Mono, and they've got a problem.
However, despite being a KDE'r I wish the GNOMEs luck with their 50 Indian developers. It'd be instructive to see what they can do against the handful of volunteer KDE developers.
Desktop Sun (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Desktop Sun (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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).
Bye Bye Open Windows (Score:2, Interesting)
This will slow development down (Score:2)
What else really? (Score:2)
When I think that they had the opportunity to use OpenStep 7 years ago when they licensed it from NeXT. Idiots!
Oh, and the metal look is just a windows knock off. Better, if you want to have a good laugh, just read the "Designing UI for Java" by Sun Press. Hilarous!
If MS is a company that doesn't have taste (according to SJ), then Sun must be the company that has no taste at all.
PPA, the girl next door.
they are not in ireland (Score:3)
Re:*ducks for cover and waits for the inevitable.. (Score:3, Informative)
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: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:y gnome not kde (Score:2)
I don't see why this is an enormous problem. If they're using Suns C++ compilers, they're already paying an arm and a leg as it is. I doubt SUn would have trouble negotiating a discount bundle-ware deal with Trolltech.
So, I think it is a C vs C++ thing. It's not just about what Sun know, I think the linkage issues with C++ are probably an issue (because you're stuck with whatever compiler was used to build the libraries).
BTW, a lot of the closed source apps developed on Solaris either have no GUI, are never released (in-house), or both.
Re:y gnome not kde (Score:4, Informative)
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: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:Paid hackers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.