'Gnome Foundation' Takes Aim at MS Office

Spasemunki writes: "The NYTimes has a piece today on an agreement reached among I.B.M., Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and several other developers to create the Gnome Foundation, a developer consortium that will undertake, among other things, the creation of a standardized desktop interface for Linux, and a suite of productivity programs designed to compete with MS office. As the name might imply, their efforts will center around the Gnome desktop manager, with Sun moving to adopt Gnome as the GUI for Solaris. Looks like some big names are getting interested in putting Linux on the desktop."

Re:One OS to rule them all

This *will* happen though, though it will be Microsoft and UNIX (including Linux). OS/390, despite its strengths, will die. The bang for the buck just isnt there anymore. Commercial Unices have far surpassed it in that category, and Linux is catching up to them fast if it hasn't already.

For example, I work for a major futures and options exchange, and a increasing amount of our back-end stuff is running on UNIX (in our case, Solaris). All the new applications we write are UNIX-only on the backend.

The only major thing we use the mainframe for is for Clearing. The next version of our Clearing software is planned to be running on a UNIX cluster.

We use a Tandem for matching all the trades that come into the exchange. That system can be (and is planned to be) ported to UNIX!

Even though its been around longer than I have been alive, UNIX is the future. :-)

In an unrelated sidenote, I told my coworkers 2 months ago that within 2-3 years Sun would dump CDE in favor of GNOME as its desktop environment. You should have heard me shout in excitement when I saw this on /. this morning ;-)

siri

Re:Sigh. Alternate office suites are doomed to fai

Until one can guarantee 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with MS Office - including templates, macro functionality, and UI, and keep up with Microsoft's gratuitous changes every few years, it's dommed to fail.

I dunno about that. Even Microsoft doesn't rise to the standard of 100% compatibility with itself -- I find that office routinely alters the rendering of rather complex documents, which basically serves me right for confusing content with presentation. At least for word processing, competing suites need to do what MS itself does -- maintain the text and render the majority of documents reasonably consistently, without sweating too much about pathological cases.

I sincerely hope the Gnome office effort gets lots of dough to play with, but I don't think this is exactly earth shattering news. One way or another pretty soon we'll have quite a choice of Office suites which will probably have good enough MS Office import. I tend to view this development as some rather belated bandwagon hopping. If they had done this a year ago they'd have been visionaries.

I think that fonts and font rendering are much bigger stumbling blocks. Star Office has every feature 99% of people need and good enough import for most MS documents, but after installing, it by default produces documents that look hideous on screen because of font scaling issues. That is ridiculous in this day and age.

I'd be much more excited to see the money spent (if there is any money) on Berlin, or on producing a really great set of free typefaces, or on improving X. If there were Aqua quality graphics on Linux, then we'd really be ready for a fight.

Re:Gtk, GNOME, and the desktop

I think a reply to this needs to be said, (and moderated up) because nobody else is saying this:

Be grateful for the support that companies are giving us. Because we really need it. I know, I know, it's not in fashion to have the assistance of companies; but really, we can use the help. The IBM Linux commercial even admits it: Linux has found an ally from an unexpected source.

A lot of people will debate the question of whether we really need it or not, based on the previous attempts to jump on the bandwagon without joining the team properly. We've come this far mostly without "their kind" of commercial support.

Where are the figures behind claims that GNOME is bloated? Are you talking about when you used Enlightenment as your window manager? What?

OK, looking at my system right now, I have a panel running charpick, a clock, the pager, and cpumemusage. Each is consuming well over 1 Meg of RAM, and the pager is consuming over 2. Come on! Thats a CLOCK for christ sake!!! I used to have an Amiga with 512k of RAM, and I could fill the screen with about 30 clocks, and all would run in perfect sync and I'd have ram left to play with.

GTK+ code is beautiful

I'm not going to touch that one with a 6 foot barge pole. Try using a real nice GUI framework some time.

Re:UNIX - Linux - UNIX

Not to spark a big religious war, but I think that this points out a potential advantage of the GPL over BSD as a license. The vendors in the first case were able to make their own proprietary, incompatible extensions because the BSD license allows such behavior. The GPL places much sharper limits on the extent to which you can do so; you can develop proprietary programs that run under a GPL environment, but you can't make the environment itself proprietary.

I also think that this will have advantages for encouraging cooperation. With a license like BSD that allows proprietary development, there's a strong disincentive for commercial vendors to continue to release their hard work as Open Source, since it allows freeloaders to make their proprietary systems stronger. With the GPL, though, your competitors can't "steal" your hard work to the same extent; if they want to expand on it, you still have the opportunity to take advantage of their work.

Gtk, GNOME, and the desktop

Several things need to be said (and then moderated up), because no one else is saying them.

1. Be grateful for the support that companies are giving us. Because we really need it. I know, I know, it's not in fashion to have the assistance of companies; but really, we can use the help. The IBM Linux commercial even admits it: Linux has found an ally from an unexpected source.
2. StarOffice doesn't cut it! It's practically it's own little gated desktop system. It can't operate outside of it's bounds. It will be very difficult to communicate with StarOffice from programs outside of StarOffice. Do you think that you are going to be able to write your own application, and then embed a StarOffice doc within it? Yeah; right. Here's what you need: Bonobo. Trying to avoid it is like trying to engineer a system without shared libraries. Bonobo is a system fundamental.
3. Where are the figures behind claims that GNOME is bloated? Are you talking about when you used Enlightenment as your window manager? What?
4. Window Managers, BTW, are not desktops. They never were, and they never shall be. Window Managers, are Window Managers.
5. GTK+ code is beautiful. The C API is a little awekward because it partitions off it's own name space. GTK+ 2.0 is making it a little nicer. In the mean time, I refer you to the Python code to construct a window:
   • from gtk import *
   • win = GtkWindow()
   • win.set_title( "Hello, World" )
   • win.show()
   • win.connect( "destroy", mainquit )
   • mainloop()
   Go ahead, try it right now. Oh yes, another thing; the GTK+ library is LGPL'ed. As in Unambiguously Free Software.
6. If you are using KDE, you are on legal shaky ground. Have you been paying attention? KDE is a hodge-podge of licenses, sometimes in ways that make no sense. Does this attract business support? (Oh, that's right, you don't need business' sopport. You don't want any help. You want to stay within your 3133+ crew of Hax0rs. Whatever.)
7. It's a Good thing that your grandmother can use your system. It's a Good thing that AOL is being ported to Linux. These are Good things; these are what we have been working so very hard for. At least I am.
8. Okay, I'm done ranting here. But again; these things need to be said. It's sad to look at the list of Score: 5's, and they all essentially communicate to companies: "We don't need your kind around here..."

Re:Why Not KDE?

Although my heart is certainly with Kde (the true innovators in this area) there are several valid reasons why commercial backers would choose Gnome.

Qt licensing. Although Kde's use of Qt has been generally accepted as license compatible with GPL and LGPL (the naysayers have clearly been over-ruled here) Qt remains the property of TrollTech. It can't be forked. This is simply not acceptable to commercial backers of a linux desktop standard, because THEY may want to work on the underlying gui code as well, independently of Qt. Why is Java not more widely used on the Linux desktop? Because of Sun's "ownership" of the standard. Nobody "owns" gtk and gnome, and this philosophy is agreeable to all commercial parties involved because they are all competing on a level playing field with Gnome/Gtk. While in my opinion, at least, Gtk is a vastly inferior toolkit it is far more maleable because there are no such restrictions on redesign and extension. No commercial entity has veto power as TrollTech has over Qt. TrollTech has made the decision not to GPL Qt, and it was a bad decision. Therefore, TrollTech has lost. It's over, folks, unless TrollTech GPL's Qt and does it VERY quickly.

Kde is not a superior desktop to Gnome any longer. Sure, it was superior a year ago or even 6 months ago. What many people fail to realize is that the new Kde 2 is far from stable. It's shaping up, but the underlying architecture will continue to be changed right up to the date of the final release. There are many problems with the current implementation. Read the Kde developer lists.

Gnome, on the other hand, has its architecutre pretty much in place for the 1.x series which is very competetive with Kde 2. Notice that Gnome updates (at Helix) are incremental. A few packages are updated every week or so, instead of a major new release every 6 months. The continuity for developers is much smoother. New Kde apps are NOT being ported from Kde 1.x to Kde 2 in great numbers because the architecture is so different and Kde 2 is a moving target and an unstable one at that. Frequent crashes of the core components are very discouraging to developers (outside the core Kde team) who are considering porting their old Kde 1 apps or developing new apps for Kde 2. Gnome, on the other hand, is rock solid in my opinon. Sure the clunky gtk+ objects using C are less than sexy for C++ programmers and others, but they work with the current Gnome quite nicely and developers are developing for Gnome in far greater numbers than for Kde.

Regarding esthetics, that is a matter of opinion. Kde and Gnome have very different looks, although with the ability to import some themes from Gtk Kde can overcome the difference somewhat. I think the Kde 2 desktop is beautiful, but the new Gnome using Sawfish as the "standard" window manager may be more 'commercial' looking. The new Kde has a sort of a classic Egyptian look but the Tigert artwork has its own kind of appeal as well. Both Gnome and Kde are far more visually appealing and customizable than Windows. It's a tossup in the artistic area.

In summary, TrollTech has blown it by refusing to GPL Qt. Nothing else is really relevant here. TrollTech could have had it all, but instead chose short term profits from exhorbitant licensing for its "professional" edition over having its toolkit adopted as the standard for linix and unix as it should have been. Troll Tech still has a small window of opportunity in which to rectify its mistake and give Kde a fighting chance. Let's hope they do.

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Guppi Charts in the next release of Gnumeric

My main focus of development recently has been adding charting support. The next release will support a subset of MS excel chart types via a guppi component. Thanks to the anti-aliased canvas they already look better than XL.

Re:Why Not KDE? - Sun/Java/ownership

Relative to other offerings available in the windows environment at the same time, Java was free, open, and easy. Also it made it easy to design dialogs (v. important!). The license isn't very restrictive to an applications programmer. Etc.

In sum, Java is as popular as it is in part because it is so open. This in contrast to MS Visual * which is also popular, but certainly not because it is open. OTOH, compiled binaries of developed programs are freely distributable, as opposed to some other choices (e.g., Omnis Studio) which have runtime licensing.

When we look at things from an OS perspective, however, we notice that Java is much less than truely free. We notice that the development direction is in the hands of one company, etc. So the environment segments into those who see Java as free, and those who see it as bound to the decisions of one company.

What we have here is a spectrum, ranging from the most bound (limitations for distribution of runtime compiled code) to the least bound (public domain). Where you pick as ideal along this spectrum depends on your goals and your resources.

Independent developers generally have little in the way of financial resources, so anything that costs will meet with disapproval. OTOH, as coding may be their recreation, necessity for time investment is not that great a deterrent. Companies tend to measure things exactly the other way around. But if a company wants to get the independent coders interested, it needs to be aware of their point of view. E.g., Sun was trying for this with their community license. This was acceptable to some of the community, and sent others up in flames.

ETC.

Re:Several Troubling Questions

1) Is this the death knell of KDE?
2) Is this a move by the big corporate tech companies to 'Bogart' the Linux marketplace?
3) Is this really good for the open-source movement?

I don't think that this is a death kneel for KDE. Will it mean that more and more standard installations will have Gnome as the primary desktop? Maybe. Just because several major companies have said that they are adopting Gnome as their standard does not necessarly mean that it will happen. First, we have to see Gnome distributed as a standard. Second, see Gnome actually implemented on those distributions. If those two things actually occur, then there is a higher chance for Gnome to take a more high profile existance in the different Linux distros. But just because the major UNICES are using it doesn't not necessarly imply that the other Linux distros will.

Are the big corps trying to 'Bogard' the Linux marketplace? I'd say no. All of the companies listed above realize that UNIX is not ready for the home user. They also seem to understand that they have a worse chance of taking on MS in the low-mid size server market that Linux now has 24% in. By supporting a common user interface between the different UNICES and Linux they stand to gain in many ways, all of which include keeping Linux.

Linux is starting to eat away at MS's marketshare. By supporting a common GUI between Linux and UNIX, there becomes more incentive for a corperation to use Linux on their workstations and have their huge UNIX box in the background with seamless connectivity, no more WinFrame. As people get used to Linux, it will gain more market share in the home market, people don't like to learn more than one system. By making MS not the standard they can sell more of their product.

Are these companies after Linux's marketshare? Not really. The big corps listed in the article know that their product is not a good product for home use. In some of cases it is TOO powerful for workstation use, which is where Linux comes in. Linux can scale downwards very easily, which is something the brand name UNICES cannot do. At the same time the big corps are not worried about Linux taking their market share either, they know that Linux does not scale upwards at the level any of the brand name UNICES can (we all know that it is true, deal with it). Anyway, companies like Sun are more conserned with selling hardware and services anyway, why do you think they released Solaris 8 for free (8 processors or less). In the case of Sun, if pushing Linux means selling more hardware then they are all for it.

This is good for the open-source movement. The support of those big corps will only give more good press to Linux, which can only serve to increase the user base. A large user base means more testers and more programmers. It means that more programs will be written for Linux. This is a good thing for Linux.

Article isn't clear - let me clarify

The GNOME foundation is far more exciting than "yet another body of big companies trying to ride the wave". The foundation is being formed for and by GNOME hackers and other GNOME active parties (artists, etc) to steer and represent the needs of GNOME. Part of the descision to incorporate a foundation (think the Apache people, or the FSF) *is* to provide a way to interface with big companies, many of whom, such as Sun, are now betting some things on GNOME. However the foundation is not being formed by Sun, Compaq, etc - we're forming the foundation. There will be a corporate advisory committee with fees based the company size for companies interested in GNOME, but its not like they're going to be voting or anything...they just provide (much desired) input.

Any somewhat active GNOME contributor can join the foundation and vote...

Just wanted to correct a poorly worded artictle (which seems to be being misunderstood here).

-Seth ([e-mail] - I don't *necessarily* represent the views of eazel :-))

Re:A fundamental change of business model

Does anyone else find it disturbing that some little company writing code behind closed doors managed to create an office application far more advanced and mature than any of the open source projects attempting to do the same? Sure, it's GPL'd now... on version 5. What does that say about open source? It's more likely that CTO you mentioned will say "open source is still unproven."

How will Sun sell hardware for a portable OS?

Who's going to run Linux on an expensive workstation when they can run exactly the same software on a cheap PC? At the moment Sun can charge a premium for Solaris workstations because they're interoperable with its big servers. If it releases a version of Linux which is equally interoperable, who's going to run it on SPARC hardware? Of course Sun can still lock people in by refusing to support Linux on any platform except SPARC, but will customers stand for that?

Re:Why Not KDE?

Several comments:

1. TrollTech has already said it would GPL Qt, if the GPL v3 prevented proprietary development. Currently it does not, in this respect a lot of the trouble is caused because the FSFs PR engine refuses to admit this. See Eric's piece on FreshMeat a few months back (And Matthias E's comments expanding on it).

2. It is true that KDE 1.x is no longer better than Gnome 1.2, but KDE 2.0 blows Gnome 1.2 away. You are wrong that the underlying framework for KDE 2.0 will keep changing - it won't. There aren't 'many problems' with it as you claim, there are some bugs sure, but they are getting fixed extremely rapidly.

3. You are so wrong about the difficulty of porting from KDE 1.x to KDE 2.0. Most simple apps can be ported in the most minimal sense of the word in less than half an hour. More complex apps might take a week or so. If you actually look around you'll see that the process of moving over to KDE 2.0 has already begun with many of the non-CVS apps starting to develop 2.0 branches. This will become more and more common as we approach closer to the release.

I also doubt your comment that more people are developing for Gnome than for KDE. For one thing a big question is what are they writing? In many cases they are still playing catch up for apps KDE had a year ago.

It is really not an issue if Sun and Gnome try to do this - for one thing the effort involved will be huge, and I seriously doubt if the results will justify it. Star Office has some good points, but there's no getting away from the fact that it is a pretty hairy piece of software. By the time such a port becomes usable we will already have KDE 2.1, and maybe even 2.2.

One thing a lot of people has missed is that the plan for KDE 2 is to have a much more rapid release cycle than that between 1.1 and 2.0. We have spent a lot of time making sure that not only will 2.0 be good in itself, but also that it is an API that is well documented and will remain usable for a long time. KDE 2.1 and 2.2 at the least will remain source and binary compatible.

Another story about this

Here [theregister.co.uk] is another story about this over at The Register. My question through this whole thing (since the announced GPLing of StarOffice) is, what is going to happen to the Gnome Office? I personally like Gnumeric much better than the Star Office Spreadsheet.....is there space for two office suites in the world of Gnome?

UNIX - Linux - UNIX

Amazing how things are coming full circle. First Linux became a clone of UNIX. Now, the bastard child is coming out and:

1. Caldera owns SCO's UNIX
2. Redhat and VA have (or have had) larger market caps than many conventional UNIX vendors (SGI, SCO).
3. Traditional UNIX vendors like IBM and Sun are adopting Linux-created technologies like Gnome.
4. Closed source companies (IBM, SUN, HP, Apple) are adopting Open Source.
5. etc. etc. etc.

I read a piece 3-4 years ago that predicted that in 5-6 years (from the date of the article) there would be 2 main OS's in the market: Microsoft's offerings (Windows and derrived), and Linux. We are progressing rapidly in that direction. Not to belittle Solaris, Apple, BSD, etc., but Linux is gaining ground rapidly at the expense of everyone else.

With the opening of StarOffice, the use of Linux everywhere (embedded, desktop, server, super computer), high-powered desktops like Gnome and KDE, Linux is coming of age!

AC because I have to be.... Pls. moderate up!

Re:Invent the wheel twice?

There's already two GPLed Office Suites around: StarOffice (soon GPL but already functional) and KOffice (already GPL but not fully functional - yet, but it'll be soon)

Couldn't they concentrate effords?

With all respect to the Koffice team (I'm very fond of KDE), they should do with Koffice what the GIMP guys are doing for GIMP 2.0: making it toolkit/environment independant. The new GIMP should allow both KDE and Gnome front-ends with the same engine. Why not follow this approach for the Office suite?

*NIX would be even better if some of these common modules would seperate engine from interface, just like the OS is seperated from the GUI.

A few existing examples: Kicq has done this by creating ICQlib. XMMS uses mpg-123, aKtion uses xanim..

This would be harder for Koffice of course, because of the KParts integration within KDE, but there is no reason to have a unified rendering and file format (including filters) engine for office tasks such as word processing and presentation.

Re:half way across the river? change horses!

GNOME on Solaris gives Sun an immediate boost in the number of capable users and admins for their high-end systems -- I'd bet good money that the number of competent Linux-heads is rapidly outpacing new Solaris users, and unifying the GUI could help make many of those skills portable. No, it won't turn every Linux hacker into a gifted Solaris admin overnight, but it will give those who like to work in eye-candyland the same basic starting level of comfort as the classic UNIX CLI has given users for years.

Look at Windows NT and 98 -- they start off with the easier, consumer-grade stuff, and move on to NT relatively painlessly. Yes, the underlying system is completely different, (and no, I'm not really trying to compare Linux to Windows 98 -- it's just for the purpose of illustrating this admittedly limited point) but because the widgets and desktop layout are similar, you could sit any relatively competent Windows user in front of any Windows machine, and they could run Office, surf the web, or copy some files.

IBM, HP, and Compaq get similar benefits -- their in-house UNIXes can have a familiar interface, and they can train an entire generation of UNIX users by cloning a dominant Linux UI. Personally, I think it could be great to be able to sit down at basically any decent UNIX box running a current OS, log in, and have the option of dropping into a familiar, high-quality GUI. No one will be locked into it -- hell, even if you're stuck with GNOME, you still have a lot of options for window managers, desktop customization, application choice, etc.

half way across the river? change horses!

Q: Why are these companies focusing on Linux as a "Windows killer"?
A: Because it is already a Windows killer. They want to ride the wave.

Q: And, up to this point, have any of the "Windows killer" features been GUI related?
A: No.

Q: What have they been related to?
A: Stability, performance, reliability, flexibility, scalability, cost and of course freedom.

Q: What are these same companies contributing to these "core values" of Linux?
A: With the partial exception of IBM, nothing.

Blah. I've seen a lot of "consortiums" and "joint ventures"--few (if any) of them produce anything of real value. Instead of hyping up how much "contributing to the community" they are going to do (jam tomorrow) why not just produce some code and release it (jam today)?
--

Why Not KDE?

I can't believe they chose GNOME when KDE is superior is every way.

Gnome is a bloated, memory hungry moster, while KDE actually has a negative memory footprint. That's right, when I run KDE, it magically *reduces* my memory load!

Gnome is also coded horribly. Miguel "buffer overflow" de Icaza realizes this - this is why he's getting all these other big companies (I.B.M., Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems , even Eazel) to come in and fix it for him. If coders were U.S. presidents, the KDE programmers would be Abraham Lincoln, and the Gnome coders would be Warren G. Harding.

Gnome is ugly. Especially the one's by Tigert (or "mspaint.exe", his alter-identity on IRC.) KDE is, on the other hand, so beautiful that everytime I log in, I collase to the floor in a state of blissful shock for the sheer beauty of my desktop.

So please, people, stop the madness - drop Gnome and start using KDE instead!

(P.S. I wonder how many people will take this seriously...?)

Article at The Register

Sun puts dollars and suits behind GNOME [theregister.co.uk]

It has quite a bit of analysis and history.

On interesting thing about Sun's involvement to date with help Linux and the "open source community" is that it's beeen more about helping with software, rather than Sun trying to sell Linux boxes. (Sun aren't likely to sell SPARC, or other, boxes with Linux pre-installed for some time - they're certainly not planning to at the moment)

Re:Who *Wants* A Standardised desktop interface?

The beauty of open source is that you always have the ability to yank pieces out and replace them with whatever you prefer. For the uninitiated, it is actually quite helpful for the 'vanilla' interface to be completely standardized. Newbies like the fact that they can sit down in front of any Windows or Macintosh computer and expect that it'll look like all the rest. Philosophize all you want about choice, but newbies don't see it as choice, they see it as inconsistency and it usually scares them away.

Bring the newbies in with a standardized interface, then let the power users customize their systems.
--

Re: Microsoft DOJ case, for the last time

For the last time (I hope): Microsoft is NOT being taken to court because it is a monopoly. It's being taken to court because it used it's market power to crush competition and do other anti-competitive things.

It's not illegal (or wrong) to control 100% of the market because you have a good (or popular) product. It is illegal (and wrong) to use your large market share to kill companies you don't like.

Why its a Good Thing

Im sure this will get the usual share of cliched responses, but lets' forget that for the moment. The interesting thing here is what the 'big boys' consider is needed for a commercially viable desktop-oriented Linux, why they're doing it, and what they're prepared to do about it.

You might not think you need a fancy GUI, especially if it looks like Windows, but there are an awful lot of consumers out there who just wantr to click on buttons, not memorise a new and unique argument set for every action they want to undertake. Hence an elegant GUI is a Good Thing for a certain group of users. A unified GUI is a Good Thing for developers, and thus commercial interests. A unified GUI with the features that simplify cross-porting of established software (ie drag and drop, unified colour printing, clipboarding, all that sorta stuff) that's a Good Thing for those developers tired of doing it all again from scratch. Whether KDE or Gnome is better is moot. For the desktop, those features can be incredibly useful, even if you can get along without them

Very little of Linux, per se, is desktop oriented. That means whatever solutions are developed, are probably pretty much cross-platform. For the other Unix vendors, even those competing against Linux for share, that makes assisting in the development of the solution also a Good Thing. If you're paranoid that Sun might hijack it, thats dumb. Gnome is still GPL'd, so they can't. But if they use it as a stepping stone toeards features they want, then that benefits us in the long term, if only to spur KDE to compete.

Whatever happens, this is a Good Thing. Don't let the zealots and bigots persuade you otherwise. Any expansion or improvement of the available feature set is a good thing, because Open Source is a Darwinian process. If its cruft, it'll fall by the wayside. And it doesnt matter if Sun et.c have selfish motives; the process is one they can only partake in; they can't, ultimately, control it.

Do we need another office suite? Maybe not, but is it a problem if we get one? At the end of the day, its all down to choice, and more available choices is never a bad thing. At least we do get the choice.

Pax,

White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++

bah

gtk is the obvious choice for anyone coming from a motif background. Nothing else is sufficiently awkward to program with - it just wouldn't feel natural.

I mean code like this:

attributes.y = widget->allocation.y;
attributes.width = widget->allocation.width;
attributes.height = widget->allocation.height;
attributes.wclass = GDK_INPUT_OUTPUT;
attributes.window_type = GDK_WINDOW_CHILD;
attributes.event_mask = gtk_widget_get_events (widget) |
GDK_EXPOSURE_MASK | GDK_BUTTON_PRESS_MASK |
GDK_BUTTON_RELEASE_MASK | GDK_POINTER_MOTION_MASK |
GDK_POINTER_MOTION_HINT_MASK;
attributes.visual = gtk_widget_get_visual (widget);
attributes.colormap = gtk_widget_get_colormap (widget);

attributes_mask = GDK_WA_X | GDK_WA_Y | GDK_WA_VISUAL | GDK_WA_COLORMAP;
widget->window = gdk_window_new (widget->parent->window, &attributes, attributes_mask);

is almost ugly and verbose enough to make a motif or X programmer feel comfortable. Plus GTK has got it's own home-grown C based OO model, just like X, so you can get all the complication and grief of OO techniques without having to deal with any of the syntactic sugar like operator overloading or templates which can (but normally doesn't) make C++ readable. Instead you can have a C++ wrapper that never quite works right stuffed on top of a subtly incompatable object model. It really is the perfect choice for motif converts.

A fundamental change of business model

This is really it. The major corporate players are now USING open source to achieve that which their business models could not.

They are using it to break the Office monopoly. They want to be able, in a year's time, to go to a CTO and sell them on linux, GNOME, and StarOffice. With players like Sun, HP, and Dell, and the bottom line (the price), this strategy will work.

Once StarOffice makes inroads in Office Suites against MS Office, Microsoft will be forced to compete on quality and service with a free adversary that already kicks Microsoft's butt in service. Make no mistake about it. IF StarOffice meets corporate expectations, it will rapidly grow in its user base. As will linux as a desktop OS.

The open source model will have broken a very strong monopoly being maintained by anticompetitive tactics.

Expect lots and lots of FUD coming out of Redmond. This threatens their living more than the antitrust suit.

Re:great another one

Its interesting that so many people on /. are against standards. There's nothing wrong with standards so long as they are not controlled by one company. I think its interesting that we have 5 big names involved in this one. This is defenatly something Linux needs. So everyone might start using Gnome on Linux. So what? You don't have to use it, and they didn't squish anyone to get there it is just the one being adopted. Maybe that only means its the best.

Never knock on Death's door:

Re:KDE is gonna cry

I have used both KDE and Gnome at home. I don't consider either of them to be very mature (both seem to be a work in progress) though both of them have a lot of potential.

KDE seems to be very much a coordinated effort to put together a good enduser desktop. Things like consistent look and feel of applications seem to matter on the KDE side.

Gnome on the other hand seems to value the coolness factor a bit more, making it a logical choice for the educated geek since there's more to tweak and configure.

I never liked staroffice, mainly because it added another application framework and therefore felt rather bloated (since it duplicates stuff I already have). I can't believe that merging staroffice and Gnome will result in something consistent (what will happen to Gnumeric, Abi word, dia, etc.).

Feature wise it will put some pressure on KDE. However, competition is good and will ultimately make sure both Gnome and KDE get better. Perhaps it would be good if the KDE people started to work on interoperability with GNOME (e.g. by using the same component model rather than their own KParts).

If SUN and IBM think they can compete with MS by just slapping together some stuff, they are going to fail. The attraction of MS Office is not so much the features but the integration of the features. I like it when I can select a class diagram in visio and paste it in to word. I like it when I double click on the diagram in word I get the diagram loaded in Visio.

Both Gnome and KDE promise this kind of integration in the future, which is good. But in my opinion the KDE style of trying to provide a consistent UI will ultimately be more successfull than the Gnome style of slapping together features. Maybe I'm wrong, we'll see. I won't be using Gnome or KDE at my work for a while since in my opinion the windows UI is superior at this moment.

Re:UNIX - Linux - UNIX

From what I can tell, Sun seems to think of Linux as the home desktop and workstation OS. Sun makes more of their money off of selling hardware and services than they ever did selling Solaris.

By supporting Linux, and other Open Source alternatives, and by creating a single user interface between Solaris and OSS solutions they stand to gain on several grounds.

1. Solaris isn't a good home machine, Sun knows that. Put Linux on the home machine, oust MS, Sun wins.
   
2. Companies that have a Linux solution for the workstations are more likely to have a Sun solution for their heavy duty servers that need the ability to scale (Linux is to Solaris as Solaris is to AIX for scaleability right now, deal with it, don't flame).
   
3. Linux works on UltraSPARCs, and there could be a huge market for it.
   
4. etc...
   

Sun may not be openly saying this, but considering Solaris 8 is now free (8 or less processors), has GPL'ed StarOffice, and has now openly adopted Gnome, I'll let you connect the dots to see what you see.

Re:Invent the wheel twice?

Actually StarOffice and the Gnome Office are probably merging behind the scenes, note that SO 6.0 is the one that will be GPLed, and it is supposed to be a fairly complete rewrite of 5.0 (which is free beer, but not GPL). Also, from the early stages, they were in talks with Miguel. They are probably Bonoboizing and GTKing the original SO so it can play nicely and run faster with the Gnome Desktop. So in fact, they are concentrating their efforts - call it 'GnomeStar Office' if you wish.
Also, note that Helixcode is focusing its efforts where Star Office is pretty Lame - 1) Contact/Email manager 2) Gnumeric (and other) Macro/ VB script compatibility with Excel

Tom M.
[e-mail]

Get a second horse so more people can ride along!

Q: And, up to this point, have any of the "Windows killer" features been GUI related?
A: No.

Q: Is Linux hindered in killing Windows in mainstream markets by its lack of simple, high-quality GUI features?
A: Yes.

Q: Are companies used to producing commercial software likely to be able to help Linux develop such features?
A: Yes.

Q: Then why complain?

- Michael Cohn