HP Drops Gnome 2 Efforts 141
nauta writes "Now is official, HP will not make further investments in Gnome. They will stick with the old (and crappy) CDE. Here is the announcement This is the official statement if they are pressed for an explanation:
'The open source development of GNOME v2.0 was still on-going at the end of 2002, and did not stabilize in the timeframe that HP had earlier anticipated. This and other business and industry factors required us to re-assess our plans.'"
Apparently, you got lucky (Score:4, Informative)
Meantime, I get plenty done and there are no Windows machines in the house at all to "do stuff" with. I may not have the latest frilly border on my documents, and each screen I face may have more than three things to click on, but my documents and programs do come out hot and on time.
If you ever come to visit Western Australia, call ahead. I can show you a bunch of kids doing video editing on their Linux boxes and a highly productive office kitted out with nothing but Linux. No Windows, no bluescreens, yes productivity.
Re:Apparently, you got lucky (Score:3, Informative)
While W2k is an improvement over NT in terms of reliability, it still bluescreens occasionally
So does my Debian box running Gnome, and so does every other OS ("blue screen" being whatever passes for that elsewhere). The assertion that operating system X fails more than operating system Y is about as valid as other apples-to-oranges comparisons because I'm sure as heck not doing the same things with my Windows boxes as you are with Linux.
finally managed to rack up 2 years
Server uptime is a nice statistic that is irrelevant for people who buy computers to play games or send email to grandma. Windows 2000 has absolutely fantastic uptime compared to NT4, and yet that's irrelevant as well even in the server space. What matters is service availability. I really don't find it amazing that a box can serve static HTML for six years in a row without crapping out. In the real world, I don't care if the box never dies, it's being rebooted at 4:00 AM on a Sunday. Why? Because. It doesn't matter which OS it happens to be running. And since you can cluster Windows boxes very easily, you have 100% service availability. Period.
BTW, Slammer is not an IIS worm.
is gonna be all shiny new and with a fabulous and innovative range of unforeseen bugs too
So is the next version of Oracle. So your point is?
I may not have the latest frilly border on my documents
Good for you. I use Windows to write code, mostly and play games. In three years I've had exactly two blue screens, both caused by crappy Creative drivers. At work my workstation has had exactly zero blue screens in two years. These are boxes that get turned off about once a week.
No Windows, no bluescreens, yes productivity.
More power to you.
Moving targets (Score:3, Informative)
Are you kidding? That has to be one of the top complaints regarding alot of OSS development, including Gnome.
I do alot of testing and bug stomping for some Gnome packages, and I've frequently heard Gnome developers describe many Gnome and Linux libraries such as GTK as "moving targets". By the time you finish developing for version a.b.c, version a.e.f was released, and it breaks compatability with version a.b.c.
As a Gnome user, I've tried to compile everything from Source on a number of occasions. The dependancies drive me up the wall.
I use prepackaged products such as Gargnome [gnome.org], but it only solves some of the dependancy hell. If I want that new version of software X, I need to go and find and compile the newest version of several other packages.
Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX (Score:4, Informative)
That nasty marketplace (Score:3, Informative)
There's more to a successful product than quality engineering. Every product has a finite window of opportunity. If you miss that window, all your potential users have gone on without you, using some other product to satisfy their needs.
Look at Mozilla. That project has been wandering in the wilderness since 1998. If they had produced a useful, stable product back in 1999, when Internet Explorer still only had half the market, people might have resisted the pressure to switch.
In 2003, IE has ninety-six percent of the market. That's a huge mass of people who have every motivation not to switch back. So what if Mozilla is now technically superior? There are a zillion web apps that are designed around IE's quirks and "innovations". Users of these apps will never switch back -- and Mister Bill gets to dictate how web browsers "should" work. Depresssing thought.
Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX (Score:2, Informative)
Re:HP is being level headed in ditching.... (Score:2, Informative)
The transition to 2.x allowed the API to change, meaning that applications that were written to 1.x APIs would not always compile with 2.x libraries. This is common, and KDE and QT do it as well. The 1.x and the 2.x libraries are parallel installable, so that you can have both installed on your system.
The GNOME development platform is now backwards compatibable in the 2.x series and will remain so until 3.x
At least, this is how I think it works.
Re:haha (Score:4, Informative)
GNOME is not even meant to change that much from 2.x to 3.x, so the API should now be reasonably stable for quite some time. It was perhaps not ready for HP in time, but it is there now.