'Gnome Foundation' Takes Aim at MS Office 300
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."
desktops are boring! (Score:2)
servers are the fabric of the future!
Re:half way across the river? change horses! (Score:2)
In the server market it's definitely competitive with Windows. On the desktop market there is a long way to go, but this effort, if done right, could go a long way to bridge that gap.
Wouldn't it be nice to also have a GUI offering that featured stability, performance, reliability, flexibility, scalability, cost and freedom?
As this announcement conclusively demonstrates, Linux has acheived critical mass. There are going to be a lot of Slashdotters who rail against the companies and consortia who came late to the party, but that's too bad because there are going to be an awful lot of them pretty soon.
Which, by the way, is a Good Thing.
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Re:One OS to rule them all (Score:4)
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:Brought to you by the OSF (Score:2)
Simon
Re:great another one (Score:2)
Ever hear of the OSF? They were a "standards body", sponsored by several companies, and they produced some of the greatest dain-bramages UNIX has ever known (Motif, CDE, etc.).
I'll agree that "there's nothing wrong with standards" (I like them myself), but design by committee can prove really problematic, especially when the committee consists of a bunch of big, competing companies who've only known how to do business with proprietary "standards".
~wog
Re:Who *Wants* A Standardised desktop interface? (Score:2)
The nice thing about GNOME nowadays is the fact that Andy Hertzfeld is working on the Nautilus project, a way to give GNOME a truly consistent and easy-to-use interface. I applaud this effort because Hertzfeld is one of the few people out there that -does- have a clue about GUI interface design; after all, he helped develop much of the "look" of the original Macintosh interface back in the early 1980's. From what I've seen so far, Nautilus looks potentially like a major leap forward for GUI environments on Linux.
Re:Sigh. Alternate office suites are doomed to fai (Score:4)
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:No really, why not KDE? (Score:2)
Re:Why Not KDE? - Sun/Java/ownership (Score:2)
Sun to use Gnome (Score:2)
Re:KDE is gonna cry (Score:2)
This is true and I'd like to see it happen, but there are some huge technical problems that would need solving (KParts and bonobo have little in common except for serving the same purpose) and they're all but simple.
KDE seems more bent on keeping everything dependent on qt while most of the gnome stuff is trying to be completely [...] tk independent
That's partially because of the internals - gtk+ is plain C, so it doesn't support inheritance and things. (And in the limited way it supports inheritance, gnome is as dependent on gtk+ as kde is on qt; gnome_entry_new makes use of gtk_entry_new).
Qt/KDE is C++, so you just use inheritance and automatically depend on the widgets you've used (code reuse).
Invent the wheel twice? (Score:2)
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?
Maori
MS-XML is a scam (Score:2)
<SOMETAG>LOTSOFINCOMPREHENSIBLEMICROSOFTSTUFFHE
Decoding the
As previous topic posters have noted, the
On top of that, you have to implement Visual Basic macros and all the other fun stuff that makes MS Office so "wonderful."
Re:Gtk, GNOME, and the desktop (Score:3)
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:Why Not KDE? (Score:2)
Very well:
This means that there is a single cannonical version of the software- the one released by TrollTech- and anything else is only allowed to exist as patches. That is not an absolute prevention of forking, but it puts up a sufficiently big obstacle to a fork that it is for all intents and purposes not possible.
uhh, crack? (Score:2)
Sure, I don't like everything about gtk's interface, but this comment is just pure FUD.
-W.W.
Don't worry about KDE [ Re: What about KDE?] (Score:2)
Re:Who *Wants* A Standardised desktop interface? (Score:2)
GNOME has the very promising Nautilus project from Eazel that Andy Hertzfeld is working on, and from what I've seen of screenshots so far, it appears to be the easy-to-use and consistent interface for Linux everyone is waiting for. It also doesn't hurt that Hertzfeld is one of the acknowledged experts on interface design; he did much of the design work on the original Macintosh interface back in the early 1980's.
Wealth by stealth (Score:2)
Plus the cost of an OS, plus technician-time for reinstalling it with monotonous regularity. Oh, and we must remember to charge for a non-OEM Windows if it's installed over the top of an OEM Windows. And $Oz2500 PER CPU for an "Internet Connector" licence if we want our SQL database to be web-enabled. Greedy scumbags.
After the IPO frenzy - real funds! Dollars for PostGreSQL, DebIan, Apache, SaMBa, now Gnome - where will it end? (-:
Re:Invent the wheel twice? (Score:2)
Agreed, and this seems to echo some of the sentiments (if not the letter) of the talk by Miguel deIcaza posted here a few days ago. The principles that made Unix beautiful to begin with appear to be better exemplified these days by (GAAAK!) IE than by KDE or StarOffice, and I admire the design choices being made by the GNOME and GIMP teams which appear aimed at bringing "small is beautiful" and "laziness is laudible" up from the low-level, "traditional" *n*x utilities and into the application space.
Re-use the code; make the same bits able to function in many different (unforeseen) situations.
Re:UNIX - Linux - UNIX (Score:3)
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.
Re:Gtk, GNOME, and the desktop (Score:2)
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Re:great another one (Score:2)
I think, it's not another Linux UI, but Sun and others joining their forces to push Gnome. This is remarkable in my eyes because
I think, this is very good news.
Gtk, GNOME, and the desktop (Score:5)
Several things need to be said (and then moderated up), because no one else is saying them.
- 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.Re:Why Not KDE? (Score:4)
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.
Re:KDE is gonna cry (Score:2)
I would assume it is actually for legal reasons. The Qt libraries are not GPLed and this has caused ample problems in the past when there are legal conflicts. Using GNOME is the obvious way around this. Besides GNOME is currently looking to become more powerful with "new" ideas like Bonobo, where as KDE is basically doing more of the same. Are they adding an office suite and such? Yes, but this is really just a natural evolutionary path. GNOME, on the other hand, seems committed to following a more revolutionary path and revolutionary paths usually produce startling results much faster.
No registration required (Score:4)
Racketeering? (Score:2)
Think about it. A bunch of companies joining together to specifically target the a product of another company...
Of course, IANAL and other disclaimers apply.
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bukra fil mish mish
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Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Guppi Charts in the next release of Gnumeric (Score:3)
Re:Why Not KDE? - Sun/Java/ownership (Score:3)
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:Another story about this (Score:2)
1) Produce the best possible spreadsheet.
2) Embrace and extend MS excel so that existing sheets can migrate smoothly
Until we get access to code there is no way of knowing which code base will get there faster.
Brought to you by the OSF (Score:2)
They were going to produce a whole stack of software standardised across all their hardware platforms. This included
- A kernel (OSF/1): only partially delivered and implemented only on DEC.
- A complete distributed computing environment (DCE): the RPC was delivered and a few services, largely ignored by the industry and essentially dead.
- A common user interface (CDE, based on Motif): unfortunately delivered, and implemented on all proprietary UNIX systems, including Sun. However, completely stagnant, not to say ugly.
- A common binary format (ANDF): never delivered, even though the technology already existed.
Given the success of the OSF I can't see this initiative going anywhere. If the aim was to improve the computing environment then it might, but a short term alliance to kill a competitor has little chance of success.Re:Several Troubling Questions (Score:5)
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.
Thank you, thank you! It is about competition! (Score:2)
It is arguable that this particular example probably points out the manufacturers' attorneys, but then again, it is not the manufacturers who had anything to lose. The big losers were the other OS guys and the consumer--neither of which had any leverage to change the situation.
Article isn't clear - let me clarify (Score:3)
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 (seth@eazel.com - I don't *necessarily* represent the views of eazel
Re:Who *Wants* A Standardised desktop interface? (Score:2)
But the problem is there is *no* standard baseline right now at all. If I wanted to train the 35 customer service reps on a Linux system, I have to pick wich window manager, which desktop manager, configure its basic setup, and then design the ground-zero level training for that specific interface myself.
With a standard in terms of 1) how you write aps for a GUI, and 2)a baseline look and feel and interaction that I can expect to be available, if not default, on any system I sit down at, I solve two very gnarly problems: that of getting developers to write aps that run properly with my system (wouldn't you rather write to one standard and be able to easily run it anywhere instead of writing to 4?), and that of getting a basic and universal interfacing system that is suitable for training newbies with skills that can be used in multiple locations. Power users can still go above and beyond (and even around) the baseline interface, but I have something consistant to introduce people to, that they can take with them to multiple computers/departments/companies.
All in all, I think (or hope) what the Foundation is aiming at is not locking down a single appearance or setup that cannot be altered, but instead providing a baseline that you can expect to be present on multiple systems, as well as simplifying the process of writing aps for the desktop.
Instead of thinking of it as a straightjacket that can't be modified, think of a desktop standard as being like the QWERTY standard for keyboard layout. Qwerty isn't best for everyone. So if you want, you can put in a split-key board, a dvorak board, a chording system, or remap your keys to your heart's content. But if someone else sits down at your machine and needs to use it, they can always plug a generic QWERTY in, read in the default keybinds, and start cooking. And you yourself might like your Dvorak board a lot, but if you changed jobs and suddenly discovered that your only option was to learn chording on a ten-key board of some sort, it would lengthen your learning curve significantly. But you could always put in the standard QWERTY board you learned in high school to get some work donw while you tried to find the manual for the chorder.
Making a standard isn't about limiting your control, or eliminating features that some users like or need. It's about making a lowest common denominator that you always have the option of falling back to when the above-and-beyond solution isn't the one you need.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:half way across the river? change horses! (Score:2)
Just some examples to show that these companies make valuable code contributions to the free software comunity:
HP
Mauve [redhat.com]
A free (GPL) test suite for the Java[tm].
Compaq
iPAQ port [compaq.com]
Compaq Ports Linux to iPAQ Handheld Computer.
They should also be mentioned for their Linux work regarding 64bit processor architectures (Alpha, Intel).
SUN
StarOffice [sun.com]
Under the motto: Lets use the best of breed components (read filters) in our GNOME office suite. And let us not forget their donations to the Debian developers for the UltraSparc port.
SGI
SGI OSS Projects [sgi.com]
Look at this long project list
- Just my Euro 0.02c
I agree ... (Score:2)
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Re:How will Sun sell hardware for a portable OS? (Score:2)
This is not a choice between a Ultra 2 processor and a Celeron, and IDE or a SCSI, but a different raison d'etre for the hardware. The closest thing that Intel has is the Xeon which does not scale well, has too little cache, and is still prohibitively expensive. Alpha's are nice, but good Alpha systems cost just about as much as good Sun stations.
I work on a 10 year old Sparc Station, and it runs better than my 3 year old PC. I have an old dinosaur that runs Sun OS 3.5 on a Motorolla chip that powered the Mac IIfx and IIci. (Where are those Mac's now? Doorstops for the server room.) The Dinosaur acts as an application server for 10 graphic artists in advertising production. It's probably 15-20 years old and has 8 MB of RAM. Whay haven't we replaced it?? We haven't found anything better.
Sun may be expensive, but for the 3-5K you'll spend for their workstations, you really cant do better. (Well, there's the SGI O2 servers... Dear Santa,)
Sun has it's troubles as do all hardware vendors nowadays, but to think that Intel would pose a threat to their high end server business just because of OS is ludicrous.
~Hammy
Linux on the Desktop (Score:2)
Last I checked, Solaris was not Linux. Digging even deeper, I made the startling discovery that neither is Gnome!
Corporate ADD (Score:2)
After repeatedly waiting with baited breath for the promised miracles to arrive, I've come to the conclusion that as often as not these things are corporate misinformation, meant to throw a competitor off its game or to appease the stockholders by burnishing the dowdy old corporate image with the buzz-du-jour. In the corporate world, real competitive cards are held close to the vest.
In any case, the charm of free/open software is that we are no longer beholden to the nanosecond scale length attention of corporations who seem more interested in poking each other in the eye than taking care of customers.
Re:Why Not KDE? (Score:2)
"Pretty" is not what's important at this point. What is important is addressing the issues that Miguel talks about in his "why unix sucks" article (on Slashdot the other day). The object model that is built into Gnome will be a *great* improvement on Linux program interoperability. The architecture is a good solution to a real problem. What can KDE offer? Do we really need to endorse a dekstop environment that doesn't solve the fundamental problems well, but can paint pretty pictures?
I think that the major reason that Unix/Linux is very shaky when it comes to user experience, is the lack of things like the Gnome object model. Program interoperability on Unix (aside from command line utilities that can be piped together) is horrid. We need a solution. Pretty or not, Gnome is it. Looks and efficiency can be improved upon incrementally. Fundamental architecture cannot. We need a thorough, well architected object model. We need Gnome.
Re:KDE is gonna cry - not (Score:2)
The ususal "fundamentalists" in this case not only control the wording of the GPL (which at the end-users preference can be retro-active), but they are itching for a case that will provide legal precedence for enforcement of the GPL.
If I were part of the KDE team, which I am not, I would put some serious thought into rectifying their problems between the QPL and the GPL as outlined by the fundamentalists in the FSF. Like it or not, when it comes to the GPL the FSF calls the shots.
The KDE/QT folk might be clever folk when it comes to writing code, but when it comes to writing software licenses they have been incredibly dense, and it is coming back to bite them.
This particular announcement is a perfect example. KDE/QT should have become the standard desktop, but their licensing "issues" have cost them the support of some of the biggest powerhouses in the business. Sun, for example, is basically donating the entire StarOffice Suite, and all future modifications to the Gnome effort. That will no doubt include the services of a whole pile of full-time engineers working on Gnome. Those engineers could have been working on KDE, but they won't be.
Aside from all of that, there is a good chance that Sun, HP, IBM et al. chose Gnome for technical reasons. Yes, I realize that KDE 2.0 has KParts, but bonobo is already here, and it works now. The KDE-ers that talk about the instability of Gnome are almost certainly running RedHat's ancient version of Gnome combined with Enlightenment. HelixCode's version of Gnome combined with Sawfish is an entirely different kettle of fish, and it already has Bonobo.
The most important consideration, however, is almost certainly licensing related. Gnome's LGPL is not only unambiguous, but it is also Commercial Software friendly. KDE, on the other hand is neither as clearly legal, nor as commercially friendly.
Re:Invent the wheel twice? (Score:2)
Too bad my video card goes unsupported by X, else i'd go investigate this myself... but i doubt any of these suites runs under bash.
Technical evaluation, or American pariochalism? (Score:2)
This is not a troll, I really would be interested in the reasons.
Re:Why Not KDE? - Sun/Java/ownership (Score:2)
Yes, but Java is *very* popular in corporate
America. They like the fact that Java is
owned, and are suspicious of free stuff.
Also, will Sun use it's influence (money,
developers possibly) on the Gnome Foundation
to insinuate Java into Gnome?
Re: (Score:2)
is QT free for Solaris? (Score:2)
I know one has to pay through the nose for QT on Windows. I would assume that the same is true for non-free *nix?
If this is the case, then Gnome is a no-brainer...
Re:A fundamental change of business model (Score:3)
Re:Why Not KDE? (Score:2)
Re:Why Not KDE? (Score:2)
a. You must include this license document in the distribution.
b. You must ensure that all recipients of the machine-executable forms are also able to receive the complete machine-readable source code to the distributed Software, including all modifications, without any charge beyond the costs of data transfer, and place prominent notices in the distribution explaining this.
c. You must ensure that all modifications included in the machine-executable forms are available under the terms of this license.
Left that out because it doesn't support your petty little crusade, eh? A lie by omission is still a lie.
Sigh. Alternate office suites are doomed to fail. (Score:2)
But the network effect of standardization on the
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.
In my mind a better option would be to improve WINE - it can already run Microsoft Office applications well, and is not far from running them "perfectly." When that happens you will see a lot of folks moving to MS Office on the Linux desktop.
How will Sun sell hardware for a portable OS? (Score:3)
Re:NeWS (Score:2)
They could also release the X11-NeWS merge which was the official product, but that was really mess. I would prefer seeing pure NeWS underlying it with an emulation library for X11 that talks to NeWS. The fact that modern programs no longer assumme colormaps should get rid of the worst problems with X11 emulation (the emulator will just claim that a true-color visual is the only one available).
Merging in the FreeType font renderer and some anti-aliasing code from libart and it would kick MicroSoft's (and Java's) ass.
Windows/ MFC, not X/ Motif! (Score:2)
Re:Why Not KDE? (Score:4)
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.
Re:great another one (Score:2)
"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
No one can predict the future.
-- iCEBaLM
Another story about this (Score:4)
Re:Sigh. Alternate office suites are doomed to fai (Score:2)
We need a real alternative. There are countless areas in which Office could be improved upon -- speed, stability, portability, etc. The heavy-hitters (IBM, Sun, et. al.) can provide the core codebase, and we open-sourcers can provide the trimming and debugging. The only thing I fear is a repeat of the Communicator 5 -> Mozilla process, where the maintainers and contributors realize a few months into the project that the old code is basically junk, and have to scrap it and start over. I have no idea what the internals of StarOffice look like now, but I'm afraid they may be less than pretty.
The FSF's PR engine? (Score:2)
What the heck is the FSF's PR engine? RMS?
I don't know what you mean by proprietary development. I doubt any version of the GPL will prohibit keeping private changes private. I quote from the FSF web site [gnu.org]:
Standard DE! (Score:2)
No more dealing with commercial software using Motif
instead of one of the DEs. Now what as Migual saying
about creating a standard Linux desktop environment?
I would have prefered KDE, but hey, you take what you can get, no?
(Excuse the formatting, I'm posting from Lynx.)
Re:A fundamental change of business model (Score:2)
I don't suppose it says anything at all, without knowing how much actual work has gone into the various projects.
If in fact SO was {faster, better, cheaper}, then maybe the cathedral is better after all. But without knowing the person-hours that went in, money or other resources expended, or relative quality of the end result, you simply can't make any comparisons.
--
Re:UNIX - Linux - UNIX (Score:2)
Full circle couldn't be more accurate, because we can predict the future:
Then:BSD (as in the real Berkeley thing) is good.
Now:Hardware vendors jump on the BSD bandwagon
Everyone touts open source compatability
Everyone develops their own extensions, incompatable with others
The market fractures and is unable to compete with MS
Linux/Gnome is good
What's next?Vendors beaten by Microsoft jump on the bandwagon
Everyone touts open source compatability
Everyone adds their own extensions
The market fractures and can't compete against foo
I wonder if foo will be microsoft?
Re:Why Not KDE? (Score:2)
This is a Good Thing(tm). If I am to believe the the collective wisdom of slashdot, Linux cannot fork because it is under the GPL. So if the GPL prevents forking, what is so wrong about the QPL restricting forking? Or to put it another way, if the forking is good, where are all the GTK forks?
As a developer, I want Open Source software that is *canonical*. I get enough grief with users complaining that they don't know how to type configure; make; make install, without having to hold their hands when their distro uses a non-standard version of a library. I would rather say "you need Qt to compile my program" than having to say "you need Sun's version of GTK to compile my program, because IBM's GTK will not work."
UNIX - Linux - UNIX (Score:4)
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? (Score:2)
Certainly, it isn't completely in line with Miguel's vision [slashdot.org] for the future of Gnome, but it could provide a lot of valuable code. What we have afterwards may not be completely recognizable as StarOffice, but that isn't important.
Re:Invent the wheel twice? (Score:5)
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.
Who *Wants* A Standardised desktop interface? (Score:2)
A Standard Interface is all well and good, but don't we all need different things from our desktops? This windows machine I'm using here is barely tolerable because the desktop is so dissimilar to the way I want to work, although the addition of Xmouse to get sloppy focus has improved things a little. If I look at each of my friends, we all have different ideas over what our ideal desktop should do. Myself, it's simplicity with Window Maker. Others go for speed with things like Fvwm2 or customisability with KDE. If we all used the same desktop, then it'd be one that was not quite right for any of us, because it does things that each of us find annoying in different places.
People, think! Standardisation isn't necessarily good for all of us- some of us like to work our own way.
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Re:great another one (Score:2)
"Thats the great thing about standards, there are so many to choose from" : Andrew S Tananbuam (Sp?)
I thought exactly the same thing to be honest though.
Re:half way across the river? change horses! (Score:4)
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.
Re:Why Not KDE? (Score:2)
Gnome's object model means that any object, written in any language, can bind to and use Gnome objects. KParts looks like an API for KDE for "plug-in" widgets.
These are hardly equivalent. Gnome's is much more powerful, much more pervasive, and language independent.
It's not so much having standards... (Score:2)
However, in this case Gnome is my standard of choice (and I pushed it at IBM whenever possible while I was there) so this isn't a problem for me.
I do wish they'd choose something less bloated and awful than StarOffice. Perhaps in the process of their development they'll make it less bloated and awful. I wouldn't even really complain about it if it didn't make me start up every damn thing just to get at the word processor.
Ideally they'll rewrite it as a bunch of bonobo components. This would have a profound impact on gnome, and all those IBM OS/2 programmers who got used to programming in SOM won't have a major conceptual hurtle to get over to get started in Gnome programming.
Re:upgrade for every undocumented API added to win (Score:2)
Microsoft's biggest competitor in this particular arena is not Lotus, Corel, or IBM, and it certainly isn't StarOffice or any of the other Linux office suites. Microsoft's biggest competitor is older versions of their own software. In the past Microsoft has been able to change document formats (and other fun stuff) to force people to upgrade, but with a freely available alternative (with decent import filters) Microsoft has to be careful of such tactics.
After all, if you are being forced to switch Office suites, which would you rather switch to, the freely available office suite (with free upgrades), or the office suite that is guaranteed to cost you $400/seat + upgrade costs every two years forever.
As Gnome Office continues to get better and better Microsoft is going to have a harder and harder time justifying their outrageous prices.
Don't leave Mozilla out of this (Score:2)
There has been a lot of performance work [mozilla.org] that has been conducted on the Linux builds lately so we're going to see an exciting future for Mozilla on the Linux platform. We just need a few more companies driving forward and making sure that we have a very fast and stable Linux mozilla (or mozilla based browser), and that it blows the Windows performance out of the window.
Re:No really, why not KDE?--Geography (Score:2)
<pThe bottom line GNOME will win because it's leaders have a much larger American presence, particularly the Silicon Valley. KDE is a big deal in Europe, and lesser so here in the US.
<p>However, who cares? I started disliking GNOME when it went from a freesoftware project to a HelixCode company. KDE is built by enthusiasts and not by MS hunters. It has a better browser, a better mail client, and that is a really big deal. GNOME is still way behind. The only thing I liked better on GNOME was the ps viewer ggv and the cool panel applets. The pretty icons display too slowly on my laptop, so I got frustrated with the eye candy and now choose raw number of features--- KDE2.
<p>NOTE: I am an end-user of the quasi-typical kind. I don't code, just play around with new software. KDE is easier and makes more sense to everyone I introduce to UNIX. GNOME is always prettier, but in the end, KDE gets chosen.
From the Life Imitates Games Dept.. (Score:2)
Anyway.. There was a dirty scorched earth tactic called 'Open Source', where you made a produce open source, and increased the quality of the product 10x, damn near killing the competition's share competing with the product.
Only problem? You don't make any money from it either.. But
half way across the river? change horses! (Score:4)
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)?
--
Re:Gtk, GNOME, and the desktop (Score:2)
It is very difficult to come up with a policy for accounting shared memory. Say you load a terminal window (this is the first load of all the nessesary libraries). Now create a second (this shares alot of the library code from the first so it's memory foot print is much smaller). Finnaly, close the first (do you resuffle your accounting of the share mem to the second terminal instance).
Sure you think this will work. Now imagine an arbitrarily complex start and stop of terminal windows; throw in a few other apps that share the same libraries; and viola who do you account the share memory to?
It would take alot of kernel level accounting code and a lot of policy to try to reflect real memory usage in top. Pretty quick it wouldn't be any more meaningful than typing 'free'.
In order to get a feel for a programs non-shared memory footprint just read the RSS field of 'ps aux'. Memory management is a black art.
Why Not KDE? (Score:4)
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...?)
Re:Why Not KDE? - Sun/Java/ownership (Score:2)
There are actually two significant GPL'd Java implementations, so whatever "ownership" Sun has should be less of a concern. GCJ [redhat.com] is one, on track to be in GCC 3.0 or maybe even GCC 2.95.next; and Kaffe [kaffe.org] is very well established.
But AWT support is mostly lacking, there. Having Gnome accessible from Java is a big deal, and is likely going to be the site of future major fights. I mean, nobody implemented a cleanroom Swing (over a cleanroom AWT); and who would want to? Do a good API to Gnome instead. Swing has major virtues, but from the perspective of Free Software it's a major downer -- too much code, too much history, too much corporate control.
It'll be really interesting to see how supportive Sun is of GPL'd Java working in the Gnome environment. I suspect that if the community develops, it'll either be using GPL'd Swing (from Sun) or Gnome-from-Java.
Standardize multimedia, guys! (Score:2)
Whoohoo! This is what Linux needs to get on the desktop bigtime, some big players with some dollars to get some of the nastier pieces of code written. Perhaps they can work to write a standardized multimedia system for GNOME (Yes, I know there are standards and everything works from a technical level, I'm talking DirectX-write-games-for-me level). Stuff like putting a little joystick/HID icon in the gnome settings menu and having a little API so I can use that input in anything. :)
Linux rocks hard where it's (at least tried) to follow POSIX, Berkeley Sockets, and other standard APIs. (And gnome, with corba!) Carrying this through to the multimedia side will be a huge step. Then I can remove that nasty fat32 partition once and for all :).
I'd really like to see some of the big heavies come down and set up some sort of board to work with companies to a) show them the market and b) release drives and/or API information to allow drivers to be developed. It'd be sweet to walk into Future Shop / Fry's whatever and be able to buy (insert nifty gadget here) and know that there's linux drivers in the box. :)
Definately great news though!
Re:One OS to rule them all (Score:2)
I hope Tandem has improved their mainframe hardware since I had to deal with them 5 or 6 years ago. We had a 8-CPU "fault-tolerant" system (each "CPU" had an enclosure the size of a refrigerator) - and the standard joke was that you had to be very fault-tolerant to deal with the system.
The system was _supposed_ to be 24/7 - but a CPU would go down every other day, and when one CPU went down, the resultant shuffling of system services to the other CPUs caused ALL of the CPUs to go down like dominos.
Granted, the company I was at was cranking the I/O throughput FAR beyond the rated spec. of the entire 8-CPU, but the failure mode was definitely not grateful!
I did, however, hear envious comments from my teammembers about the capability of IBM mainframes to pump vast amounts of data w/o blinking an eye (even when overly stressed). I never got to play on one, so I dunno what I missed. I never want to play on another Tandem, however, UNIX or not!
Big businesses chose GPL over alternative? (Score:2)
I think the StarOffice plans are bold and probably on the order of Mozilla in terms of ambition. I don't know how many developers Sun plans to put on it. Breaking it up in to small components and bonobo enabling it will be awesome if they can make it work in a timely fashion. It is still the most functional and probably one of the easiest to use productivity apps on Linux, if they can make it smaller, quicker and interoperate with other Linux apps then it could be a real killer app.
Second, as a veteran of the OS wars of the early 1990's. I have to say that the GNOME vision sounds remarkably close to what I invisioned IBM delivering with Workplace OS or OS/2 with WPS and OpenDoc. Part of me that I thought was dead has come back to life and is happy by this. I think there is a huge lesson to be learned here since IBM failed and GNOME is steadily moving forward and gaining. I think that if you're going to do full desktop integration with component based applications and consistency you have two choices, you either do it like MS and do everything or you do it in the open and you out the source. I think it's too difficult to engineer a framework and API that is complete enough and keep it all secret unless you write both the framework and the apps intended to run on it.
ESR has said things to the extent that putting out 1.0 is much faster with a closed model but once you've got a product maintaining it and evolving it is far more easy with free software. I believe that, I've had experience with it. If they can avoid the pitfalls Mozilla had in trying to do way too much for the first release then if the theory holds out in a year or two the most sophisticated productivity environment around might not be Office200x but it could be the GNOME/Star Office. There are some big ifs there. I guess only time will tell. Of course since it's all in the open, this time around I feel like I get get in to the fray an join the fight to make my platform win and not wait and patiently rely on an IBM or somebody to do it for me. I don't know about most of you but I'm still young and stupid and fell pretty much invincable; between KDE, the kernel, GNOME, GNU and mozilla I don't think we can be stopped.
Lastly, and perhaps most interesting of all to me is the fact that these big companies have chosen GNOME and not KDE. I don't want to rekindle the war or come across the wrong way but this essentially says that there is something more important than the quality of a GUI kit, being all C++ based, eleged stability (I only say that because I've not compared the stabilty of KDE and GNOME, they are both very stable on my systems) or how far along the project is. KDE is clearly further along, QT is fully documented and easy to use, it's in C++ and not C (and GNOME is having C++ conflict right now with GTK-- and Inti and developers leaving) and arguably KDE is easier to use and more stable but they chose GNOME instead. Say what you will about those companies, they know how to make a product, they know how to make a product succeed and they know a crap load about making money. This could be a new chapter in the CatB. The only thing I see GNOME having over KDE is freedom; freedom that is secured by one of the more anti-corporate licenses around, the GPL. Is there anything else? Because if there isn't then I think that it is significant. With the GPL, GNOME and Linux you'll never lose your investment anything you put in to it will be in the public domain forever. Your competitors can't take your contributions behind their closed doors, change them and then beat you with them. I remember the OSF/Opengroup and this seems like what that was supposed to to 15 years ago but never became because everyone was worried about their investments and their technologies.
Re:Who *Wants* A Standardised desktop interface? (Score:2)
It isn't just newbies. Many Linux fanatics have a difficult time understanding that. If your goal is to play with configuation then, yes, endless choice is a good thing. But other people want to do more than be their own UI designers. I'm talking about brilliant technical people, not grandma. The feeling I get is that choice is used as a way to dodge important decisions.
Article at The Register (Score:3)
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? (Score:3)
Bring the newbies in with a standardized interface, then let the power users customize their systems.
--
Re:KDE is gonna cry - not (Score:2)
Of course, even if Troll Tech satisfies the FSF crowd and goes GPL compliant, that wont exactly improve the situation from commercial software standpoint. GNOME/GTK is almost entirely LGPL and thus very friendly for commercial development, while a GPL equivalent Qt would require payment for commercial proprietary development. Exchanging Motif/CDE for another proprietary royalty encumbered toolkit might not be as palatable as exchanging it for a free one.
That is as succinctly put as possible. Although I would point out that if QT was GPLed at least the free software critics would be mollified. As it stands now QT's licensing makes Gnome a better platform for both commercial and free software development. The free software advocates appreciate Gnome's well understood license (and the fact that Gnome is bundled with Debian GNU/Linux), and the commercial folk appreciate the fact that they can use and modify Gnome without having to worry about licensing fees.
This is especially true now that Gnome has reach a point where it is essentially stable, mature, and full-featured. The Gnome folks took the time to nail the infrastructure first, and so they don't have to worry about things like KDE's switch from DCOP to KParts. The fact that Gnome is Corba based is also a plus in the eyes of companies like Sun, HP, or IBM.
The most important factor, in this particular case however, was almost certainly the license.
Re:Who *Wants* A Standardised desktop interface? (Score:2)
A Standard Interface is all well and good, but don't we all need different things from our desktops?
People, think! Standardisation isn't necessarily good for all of us- some of us like to work our own way.
It has nothing to do with working your own way or wanting your own desktop colors or borders or icons or anything else. You always have the option of installing whatever window manager you want to fit your needs.
This has everything to do with corporate standardization for training and support purposes. Windows wins big in the corporate market because it is easy to use and allows all the desktops to BEHAVE the same way so the internal help desk folk can deal with it. A HUGE amount of Windows' market share is huge corporations who buy thousands and thousands of copies of Windows because they want everything to be the same.
By coming up with a "standard" desktop and office environment, Linux finally has a chance to penetrate that market and really put a dent in Windows' market share.
Perhaps the Microsoft-free office of the future isn't so far away after all.
-C
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Re:great another one (Score:2)
Re: Microsoft DOJ case, for the last time (Score:4)
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.
Re:half way across the river? change horses! (Score:2)
A: With the partial exception of IBM, nothing.
That's not completely true. The future of Compaq's Alpha processor is tied to Linux, to which they've contributed substantial code (don't know if they've done anything for Linux/x86 though).
Sun however is likely more interested in Gnome on Solaris than Linux.
Re:great another one (Score:2)
The reason I like Linux and Unix is the choices offered. Sure multiple GIU's is duplicated development, its also a race to put out better and better software.
Why its a Good Thing (Score:5)
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 (Score:3)
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 (Score:5)
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 (Score:5)
Never knock on Death's door:
Re:KDE is gonna cry (Score:3)
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 (Score:4)
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.
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? (Score:3)
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.
TomM@pentstar.com
Get a second horse so more people can ride along! (Score:4)
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