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GNOME GUI HP Software

HP Drops Gnome 2 Efforts 141

Posted by timothy from the but-gnomeses-is-gentle-yesss dept.
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.'"
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HP Drops Gnome 2 Efforts More

HP Drops Gnome 2 Efforts

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  • So? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by infernalC ( 51228 ) <(moc.elgoog) (ta) (nollem.wehttam)> on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @03:43PM (#5746582) Homepage Journal
    The inertia of GNOME and KDE will eventually cause commercial UNIX vendors to at lease include them.

    It's not over until the fat lady sends a KILL signal.
    • I meant 'least' no least. Perhaps a nice improvement to the submit form would be to place the "preview" submit element to the left of the "submit" submit element.

      • Re:So? (Score:3, Funny)

        by stubear ( 130454 )
        You should have checked your correction with preview too. I think you meant to say "I meant 'least' not lease". [Corrections are in bold]

  • timeframes and open source (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This seems to be a problem with other open source projects too (mozilla).

    Is there a general trend in free software to move slower than business likes?

    If HP would have forked the code, would they have been happier with the results, since they could proceed without community approval?

    • Re:timeframes and open source (Score:5, Funny)

      by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @03:58PM (#5746710) Journal
      I have 3 words for you.

      Duke. Nukem. Forever.

    • Is there a general trend in free software to move slower than business likes?

      Yes, and it is a good thing. Because Free software can evolve indpendently of corporate timetables, it will evolve at a much more natural pace. One thing Microsoft can do nothing about is the fact that Free software is always moving forward (on average, of course).

      One day, there will be no desktop, browser, or word processor that companies like Microsoft can compete with, and this, too, is a good thing. These are types of sof
      • Yes, it seems inevitable to me too. However, I am occasionally sobered by the thought that Marx said the same thing about the ascendency of the proletariat.
        • Straying OT but...

          for Marxism to work, human nature (developed through [creation|evolution|your theory on the origin of man]) would have to be scrapped. Humans are not the most altruistic species on the planet, the natural drive to kill a bigger mastadon, have a bigger cave, and to spread your genetic info on to the next generation are in us from birth, until Marx or his intelectual decendants can move this feature out of humanity (socialism|communism) can not work.

          Software development (and any other
          • The one thing that really does define us as humans is our ability to train ourselves not to act on our instincts.

            (Let the flood of counter-examples speweth forward.)
            • True, but that repression of the core drives may be flawed in some cases. Few would argue that basic laws we have against murder, robbery, and rape are bad outgrowths of man's ability to repress their natural urges, but the same framework that gives us those laws gave us prohibition, the DMCA and a Progressive Income Tax.

              I think that business competition is good, if HP can make a faster, more stable, and more feature rich unix machine with CDE instead of Gnome, let them try it, but I do think that they a
          • What saved humans from extension were our social traits.

            The young taking care of the elderly, the orphans being cared for by the rest of the community, the clan's men hunting for days the protein (in the form of any animal you care to mention) to be shared with the rest of the clan.

            And then sedentary towns, cities, countries.

            Drop the tired Thatcherism. Society does exist and has provided many evolutionary advantages to have a healthy balance between reasonably selfisheness and cooperation.
            • Elderly was 25 for the Cro-Magnon, these people could still hunt and bear young. Man only formed clans to secure larger prey (Mastadon) there is no advantadge for man to hunt rabbits or goats in packs.
      • > > Is there a general trend in free software to move slower than business likes?
        >
        > Yes, and it is a good thing. Because Free software can evolve indpendently of corporate timetables, it will evolve at a much more natural pace. One thing Microsoft can do nothing about is the fact that Free software is always moving forward (on average, of course).

        As living proof of the superiority of Free software's "more natural pace" approach to software development, observe naturally-paced Netscape's tota

        • Well, Mozilla and Netscape truly are better than IE, that's for certain!

          The fact the world hasn't caught on to this is simply a glitch.
          • > Well, Mozilla and Netscape truly are better than IE, that's for certain!
            >
            > The fact the world hasn't caught on to this is simply a glitch.

            The problem is, both of those statements are akin to calling the Grand Canyon a "ditch" :)

      • That nasty marketplace (Score:3, Informative)

        by fm6 ( 162816 )

        Yes, and it is a good thing. Because Free software can evolve indpendently of corporate timetables, it will evolve at a much more natural pace. One thing Microsoft can do nothing about is the fact that Free software is always moving forward (on average, of course).

        That picture is much too black and white. Yes, corporations often impose silly deadlines on their development teams. But if the only alternative is the "we'll release it when we're finished" attitude, the Corporate Timetables are actually a good

        • Every product has a finite window of opportunity.

          This is too black and white, also. Free software could be described as working best for software that has no finite window of opportunity. For example, word processors were relevant twenty years ago, are relevant today, and will be relevant twenty years from now. All that matters is that the Free software projects keep marching on forward to create the word processor that finally can displace the proprietary ones.

          The windows of opportunity exist more fo
    • Software projects tend to be released too early (before they are ready) or too late (later than initially expected).

      It has nothing to do with whether the software is free or not, expect perhaps a preference of some free software managers towards "too late" over "too early".

      I suspect this is because programming is still a creative craft, which makes it harder to predict.

  • I said this before... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @03:57PM (#5746700)
    ...and I'll say it again. If OSS wants to play in the world of business they need to adopt some business attitudes and play by their rules. Deadlines and shipping dates reign supreme and the attitude of "it'll be done when it's done, no sooner" doesn't wash with the suits.
    • BSOD washes greatly with the suits. Conclusion?
      • At least you can get stuff done between them.

        And if you switch to Windows 2000, well, no more "BSODs".

        • Like... get a coffee?

        • Apparently, you got lucky (Score:4, Informative)

          by leonbrooks ( 8043 ) <SentByMSBlast-No ... .brooks.fdns.net> on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:45PM (#5747119) Homepage
          While W2k is an improvement over NT in terms of reliability, it still bluescreens occasionally. I note that the oldest IIS webserver finally managed to rack up 2 years, just in time for Slammer - but that every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that. And XP is a reliability unimprovement. And Foghorn Leghorn - er, I mean, Longhorn, or BlackComb, or whatever it's called today is gonna be all shiny new and with a fabulous and innovative range of unforeseen bugs too.

          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.
          • Ah, one of those urban legends post trying to prove than [Linux|BSD|OSX] is better than Windows.

            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

            • So does my Debian box running Gnome, and so does every other OS ("blue screen" being whatever passes for that elsewhere)

              Hmm. I've been running a Linux network comprising a variety of hardware since Slackware 2.0 (about 1993 I think) and the only setup that ever forced me to reboot was Red Hat 5.0 (a famous turkey if ever there was one - around the end of 1998?). I replaced it with the then-current version of SuSE (5.4 or something) a few weeks later and that was the end of that. No system lockups or crash

              • If you really are getting crashes or lockups on Linux therefore it's most likely you have hardware problems

                I have an older (~3 year) box, a Gateway with some mods. I boot to both Debian and RedHat 7.x (or maybe it's 6.x, it's the "Valhalla" build) on it.

                RH works fine. Debian crashes once in a while, especially when using Mozilla and/or xmms. Sometimes the OS as a whole will begin to get unresponsive to the point I have to reboot. All is well for a few hours after that.

                I don't consider myself a Linux e

                • Kernels shouldn't crash due to software errors. At all.

                  Conventional wisdom says that the acid test is kernel compiles (this is because it works the machine harder than just about anything else). If you have a working kernel .config that in a repeated test sometimes completes compilation and sometimes doesn't, this is usually caused by segment violations due to memory errors. This can be caused either by poor quality DRAM, or a BIOS config or jumper configuration running the DRAM outside its rated spec, or
            • In brief (busy, busy, too much Linux work to do)...

              I have a Linux user with a workstation uptime in excess of two years.

              Slammer may not be an IIS worm (but it's one of the few that aren't... sorry, couldn't resist :-) but it did kill that IIS server by raping MS SQL Server on the same machine,

              Betcha Longhorn has more bugs than your front lawn when it comes out, and Oracle has maybe a few hundred.

              I use Linux to write code and play games, too. What a coincidence! (-:

              I also use it to write articles, do gr
            • The Bungi wrote:

              uptime is a nice statistic that is irrelevant for people who buy computers to play games

              I have to disagree. Having BSODs thrice a day back in my EverQuest-playing days was certainly not fun, and I'm definitely not the only one to echo that sentiment. One must admit that the game publisher's crappy code bears much of the responsibility, but I still fault the platform for making it possible in the first place for the game to go BSOD.

              So while gamers may not care between 2-year uptime

          • leonbrooks (8043) wrote:
            up 2 years ... every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that
            Only if their sysadmins are complete idiots. The truth is that exploits happen. Kernel updates happen. Recompiles happen. Reboots happen.

            If not that, then intrusions happen. Get the point?

            • up 2 years [...] every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that

              Only if their sysadmins are complete idiots. The truth is that exploits happen. Kernel updates happen. Recompiles happen. Reboots happen.

              If not that, then intrusions happen. Get the point?

              Well... no. At least, I understand what you're saying, but it's wrong.

              Go back and count the number of Linux kernel security issues over the last 5 years. Now divide by ten because your original kernel featured OpenWall so 90% of the vulnerabilities we

        • And if you switch to Windows 2000, well, no more "BSODs".

          So, is that because the default in Win2k is to just reboot instead of showing the blue screen? :)
    • One problem. A lot of OSS happens in spare time. I can't sleep, I write some code. Im too sleepy, i don't.

      You can't deliver a product easily when your staff has erratic schedules. Moz and freebsd do well, probably, and I'm guessing, because they have a lot of people doing work in real life.
    • But what if OSS doesn't want to play in that world, but rather to build stuff that works?
    • And when you aren't getting paid for developing, you probably won't give a fuck what the deadlines are.

    • Re:I said this before... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by m1a1 ( 622864 )
      Deadlines and shipping dates reign supreme and the attitude of "it'll be done when it's done, no sooner" doesn't wash with the suits.

      It "washes" fine with those interested in quality. Have a look at any Blizzard game, AMD's Hammer, and id's Doom III.

      Sure, everyone wants things out the door fast, but those who pay attention to quality over rushing are rewarded not only with some nice $$$ but with consistent trust and respect from customers.

      I drop $50 on a blizzard game without ever having played it

  • CDE bashing...getting old. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pmz ( 462998 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @03:57PM (#5746705) Homepage
    They will stick with the old (and crappy) CDE.

    The redeeming qualities of CDE are exactly those that people criticize. It is a dry designed-by-committee desktop that is really good for day-to-day engineering and other technical work. It is simple, mature, stable, and predictable.

    It is unfortunate that the mass market feels it necessary to have a one-size-fits-all Windows XP or GNOME eye-candy orgasm whose users somehow equate experiencing its visual greatness to getting work done.

    With CDE, users don't have to deal with the volatility associated with the other mainstream desktops, becase CDE is an industry standard and has the inertia of some of the biggest corporate bureaucracies behind it.

    I can understand why HP is questioning GNOME, even Sun's new GNOME 2.0 release has a long ways to go before it reaches the usability and stability of plain-ol' CDE.
    • CDE may be simple to look at if you accept the defaults, but it is way more a PITA to configure than even Gnome, and Gnome is no picnic sometimes.
      • ...it is way more a PITA to configure than even Gnome...

        I disagree with this, because CDE's customization is performed primarily through the "Style Manager" and the "Create Action" tools. Actions can be dragged-n-dropped onto the workspace manager to customize the pull-up menus. Once these basics are covered, CDE is pretty trivial to keep up with.

        Also, Sun's on-line CDE documentation is thorough and even covers the file formats stored in the user's .dt directory. This allows a sysadmin to create site-
        • How does one map Meta-F1/F2/F3/F4 to switch workspaces? Finding this in CDE took me ages to discover when CDE became the default (perhaps docs have improved by now); this was key to usability for me because I had relied on this function under olvwm. Finding the equivalent in Gnome took me a couple hours of research.

          This is just one example where drag-n-drop doesn't do me one bit of good. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

      • This here KDE 3.1 desktop seems mighty stable, and it's easy to configure, too. You can have an "eye-candy orgasm" (excellent buzzphrase!) and still keep your I-am-an-accountant-I-am-so-boring-people-forget-t o -breathe-in-my-presence shirt on.

        I've not had any noticeable issues with GNOME recently, either, and I can't see that there's enough of an issue for Hewlett-Pacquard to throw a hissy fit over it, especially given that most of the desktops hp ships are laden with oops-another-special-case Windows.
        • KDE unfortunately relies on Qt, which, if you want to resell or redistribute in the normal ways starts becoming expensive to distribute as a corporate entity. Personally I prefer KDE, but I understand why Sun and HP don't adopt it.
          • starts becoming expensive to distribute as a corporate entity

            Huh? It's free to distribute! Even the proprietary version!

            But it's not free to develop for. You need a per-developer license to create non-free software with Qt. But once you've done that, you can distribute the finished product any way you want, including in ways in which you don't have to pay any with no royalties for anyone. You can even distribute the Qt runtimes royalty free!

            No, it's not free-beer, not even for billion dollar companies l
            • Given how many developers use Solaris, and some apparent confusion over who pays (the developer? Or the distributor?), you don't see that as expensive to distribute? It's an entangling license that incurs costs and liabilities easier done without by using Gnome. I didn't say that it wasn't Qt's right to license it however they want, btw, just don't be surprised when people don't adopt it.
              • If you check, you'll find that Qt based Kylix (as well as other commercial Qt based libs and tools) doesn't require developers to pay Trolltech. Ever wonder why? Because Borland, which is significantly smaller than Sun, negotiated a simple deal with Trolltech. I don't know what the details are, but I suspect it's a small percentage of each Kylix purchase. Sun could easily do the same thing with the same triple licensing that Trolltech uses, so that non-commercial development on Solaris would be free.

    • Re:CDE bashing...getting old. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:52PM (#5747162) Homepage Journal

      I remembered being offered the opportunity to run CDE on my early 1990's vintage RISC workstation.

      I didn't consider drag n' drop advantage and integration (there weren't lots of "dt... " applications) worth the performance hit compared to running ctwm under X.

      Maybe now, on current hardware, CDE performs tolerably.

      It still seems to lack "pizzazz" compared to either Gnome or KDE. I think the OSS efforts tend to attract people who fervently believe they are working on the most important thing in the world.

      If you choose to work on some project without being paid to do it, then you must feel motivated that you are doing something really worthwhile.

      • I think the OSS efforts tend to attract people who fervently believe they are working on the most important thing in the world.

        That's a bit farfetched. My humble motivation for participating in OSS efforts is to learn stuff and build my resume. This chould enhance my ability to get employed and/or get customers for my own business. That others could benefit from my OSS efforts is not particularly relevant.
      • I didn't consider drag n' drop advantage and integration (there weren't lots of "dt... " applications) worth the performance hit compared to running ctwm under X.

        It's ironic that, now, CDE can be considered "fast". It's bascially the same scenario you describe but on 400MHz+ RISC workstations rather than 40MHz+ RISC workstations.

        CDE runs well enought that it really isn't worthwhile to run twm or fvwm, unless you really want it. GNOME is noticibly less responsive than CDE, but it's still usable.
    • I hear what you're saying but...

      using CDE cuts my productivity. given the choice between a good HP workstation running CDE and a good PC running linux - i'll take the linux box for the UI alone.

      weirdly - my kde3.1 setup looks so much like cde that's it confuses cde users... and the cde users look at my linux box as a toy.

      i was thinking that this was why hp was ditching gnome. the established cde users see gnome as eye-candy from a toy os. nothing really to do with cde or gnome... more just momentum
      • I hear what you're saying but...

        using CDE cuts my productivity.

        I'm not sure I understand how the desktop can cut productivity. I've experienced the same overall levels of productivity regardless of desktop: fvwm, olwm, CDE, GNOME, KDE, whatever.

        IMO, the things that have first-order impact on productivity are shell scripts, sed, awk, perl, etc. rather than the look and feel of the desktop. All the desktops are approximately the same in the time it takes to do something, such as switch virtual desktops

  • haha (Score:4, Funny)

    by Flamerule ( 467257 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:01PM (#5746732)
    Quoth the marketer:
    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.
    Erm, so HP needed development on GNOME 2 to stop, by the end of 2002, so that they could use it? What the hell?

    What does "stabilize" mean, anyway? Halting devel work on GNOME 2 because work on GNOME 3 has started?

    • Moving targets (Score:3, Informative)

      by stefanlasiewski ( 63134 )
      What does "stabilize" mean, anyway?

      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 So

    • Re:haha (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 )
      > What does "stabilize" mean, anyway? Halting devel work on GNOME 2 because work on GNOME 3 has started?

      Hint: If you're using an HP workstation, you're probably not using it to keep up with the state of the art in fancy desktops.

      If my boss is paying me $100K per year to do CAD, and then he buys me a brand-new $20K CAD package that runs fine under CDE, and it just happens to work under GNOME (for about a week before another dependency makes it stop working again), guess what desktop I'm gonna be

    • Re:haha (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:00PM (#5748633) Homepage Journal
      What does "stabilize" mean, anyway?

      Well, since you're a GNOME user, I can understand why you don't understand the term, since it's so rare to see it. [ducks]

      "Stable", among other things, means that the development APIs are not changing. It does NOT mean that development has stopped, only that they have finalized the interfaces, allowing other people to develop for it.

      A stabilized GNOME 2 means that you don't have to rewrite your application next week when things change. Ideally, you shouldn't have to rewrite it when GNOME 3 comes out either. Consider the great unwashed evil that is KDE: the API is stable. It doesn't matter if you love or hate KDE, if you look at the project with an honest perspective, you have to agree that they have a relatively stable API. They may add new interfaces, but they keep their old ones as stable as possible. I ported several KDE 2 applications to KDE 3 for the FreeBSD ports collection. Average porting time was half an hour, including compilation and testing. And this was between MAJOR release versions!

      An unstable API is a public announcement that the developers do not feel that the project is ready for public use, regardless of other statements to the contrary. GNOME is not alone in this regard, but that doesn't make the practice right.

      • Re:haha (Score:4, Informative)

        by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Friday April 18, 2003 @12:49PM (#5760524)
        KDE 3.0 to 2.0 was not a big step and the main reason for it to go from 2.x to 3.x was the major change in Qt. KDE 1.x to 2.0 was however a huge step and changed things pretty dramatically. GNOME just went through the same step for GNOME 2.0 and the API is not expected to change much for quite some time. GNOME 2.0 came out last june. GNOME 2.2 came out 2.5 months ago, and GNOME 2.4 will be out in september, all with the same basic API.

        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.

  • Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:03PM (#5746751) Homepage Journal

    Ok, I don't get it. Gnome 2 is good enough for SUN Solaris, but not HP-UX? Which OS has a larger user base? (seriously, I don't know and a quick search turned up little) If SUN is willing to put it's faith into the Gnome developers and their own, why wouldn't HP just ride the coatails and get a good Gnome 2.0 for their OS as well?

    • Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pmz ( 462998 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:18PM (#5746865) Homepage
      Gnome 2 is good enough for SUN Solaris, but not HP-UX?

      GNOME 2 is not yet good enough for Sun. They have released it only in an unbundled package, and for good reason, too. There are still several severe usability issues, especially related to desktop customization. I would bet that after another year or so of refinement, it would finally be good enough to replace CDE as the default. Even then, it would be hard to beat the fact that CDE has been around for years, and GNOME 2 is just a toddler by comparison.
      • But Sun is pretty deeply committed to helping get it to work. Sun won't replace CDE as the default until its ready, but it seems ludicrous to say "well, they're not making our time to market goals, so we pull out completely." Sun at least sees that the future is not CDE.
        • Sun at least sees that the future is not CDE.

          More encouraging for me is that Sun hasn't caved into the buzz surrounding GNOME while still finding a way to embrace it. They are approaching it they way they should be: engineering before marketing. HP, as we all know, appears to have become a marketing-first company, which is unfortunate.
    • Ok, I don't get it.

      Hint: I see OpenOffice for Solaris on Sparc, but I don't see OpenOffice for HP-UX on PA-RISC. Why?

      I'd guess that (some) people at Sun believe that one day Solaris will make it to the non-techs desktops at large, while people at HPAQ basically don't.

      In order to make it to the desktop, Sun needs (badly) something to replace the CDE, which is almost wasted disk space by today's standards (and IMHO also by yesterday's standards: NeXTStep provided a infinitely more useful desktop than CDE

      • In order to make it to the desktop, Sun needs (badly) something to replace the CDE, which is almost wasted disk space by today's standards (and IMHO also by yesterday's standards: NeXTStep provided a infinitely more useful desktop than CDE, and that was before the CDE was born in early '90).

        Interestingly enough, Sun (along with NeXT and HP, IIRC) did the OpenStep specification, which GNUstep and Cocoa are based on. There were beta OpenStep frameworks for Solaris and HP (as well as WindowsNT).

        It never m

    • Re:Gnome 2 on SUN but not HP-UX (Score:4, Informative)

      by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:14PM (#5748694) Homepage Journal
      HP wants to write commercial proprietary applications for GNOME. They cannot do that when the development has not stabilized. HP does not want to develop for and support a moving target, and their customers won't want to install a patch every week just because someone at GNOME changed the API. Geez, even Windows managed to keep a stable API through three different desktops, nine major release versions, and one complete decade!
    • >
      good enough for SUN Solaris, but not HP-UX? Which OS has a larger user base?

      Sun Solaris. Sun only does Solaris (mostly), while HP does several OS's.

  • Was this a good marketing move for HP? (Score:3, Troll)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:14PM (#5746817) Homepage
    HP should have thought more clearly about this. What is the cost to HP of Timothy of Slashdot calling HP software "crappy"? It is difficult to imagine that it is less than the cost of continuing development.

  • Bill Won -- Deal with it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @04:15PM (#5746830) Homepage Journal
    It's tempting to blame the usual politics and infighting and general flakiness for Gnome's "instability". But if Gnome were at all important to HP (or to Sun, or to the other corporate backers of the Gnome Foundation), they'd pony up the money or the programmer expertise needed to stabilize it.

    Or just accepted its current level of stability. I'm no expert, and I'm not even a Gnome fan, but the Gnome appears to me to be at least as stable as CDE!

    You have to look at the reasons so many people jumped on the Gnome or KDE bandwagon starting around 1999. They'd been fighting with Microsoft for access to the desktop for a long time. They saw the sudden emergence of open source desktops as one last chance to offer a serious competitor to Windows.

    Which it wasn't. Microsoft won the desktop wars a long time ago. There will always be people struggling to offer alternatives to the Microsoft monopoly. (At least I hope there will.) But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.

    And even if it were possible, there's no longer any point. The traditional "personal" computer market is saturated. It won't see any more drastic expansions until the next Big Idea (a solution to the last mile problem? cheap mobile computing? if I knew I'd be off building it) makes its splash.

    • But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.

      Don't look now, but they're doing it already.

      Bill's desktop may be pretty, and officially possessed of useability, but if that were what really counted then Apple would long ago have won the desktop wars, wouldn't they?

      A lot of things go into making a desktop corporately acceptable, and many businesses are waking up to the fact that i

    • Gnome and KDE, like Linux and free software generally, are international projects, funded and written by many different organisations with different needs and resources. (The German government, RedHat, Sun...)

      And even if it were possible, there's no longer any point. The traditional "personal" computer market is saturated.

      Been to China [com.com] recently? How about India [rediff.com]?

      And even if the market for desktop PCs was 'saturated', there would still be a market for operating systems!

      • Been to China [com.com] recently? How about India [rediff.com]?

        Ouch. Good point. We in the west, particularly the U.S., tend to think the technological world begins and ends with us. Whereas China or India each outnumber us 5 to 1. And both countries have their share of techies. Still...

        I used to be part of the team that created Kylix [borland.com]. Now, you can use Kylix for many kinds of development, but where it really shines is developing GUI applications. So I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that Borl

      • Been to China recently? How about India? ... there would still be a market for operating systems!

        Not if infringing copies of Microsoft operating systems outnumber genuine copies by an order of magnitude in China and India.

    • Gnome appears to me to be at least as stable as CDE!

      Stable does not merely mean that the software doesn't crash much. It also means that the software has a consistant and reliable API.

      Not only do you want your desktop not to crash, you also want the software you write for it today to be valid tomorrow.
    • I don't think you should put SUN in here with HP. SUN is still commited to GNOME, and have released official GNOME 2 packages for Solaris already. It is still slated for inclusion in the next version of Solaris.

      SUN also have put quite a lot of money where their mouth is, and have contributed extensively to documentation and accessibility for the GNOME-platform.

  • So sad to see HP go (Score:4, Funny)

    by SewersOfRivendell ( 646620 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @05:23PM (#5747400)
    He did such a great job on fontconfig and metacity. Maybe he'll bring those innovations to CDE, if he doesn't decide to work on improving xfontsel and twm instead. Good luck, Havoc!
  • According to HP, Ximian GNOME for HP-UX was developed under a partnership with Ximian Inc [hp.com].

    I'm pretty sure that Ximian doesn't make alot of money by selling Ximian Desktop to end users (I bought it, but most people don't buy, they download for free). Many of Ximian's recent headlines talk about their deals with large companies like HP and Sun. Now that HP is dropping out, will Ximian lose some of the planned contracts?

    I hope not. Ximian are some of the best contributors to the Gnome project.
  • We couldn't get all these Open Source developers do do everything we wanted for free so we're going to take our ball and go home and play Techmo Bowl.
  • Following the posted 'announcement' link:
    "The connection was refused when attempting to contact h21007.www2.hp.com"
    So much for HP servers...

    j

  • s/stable/stagnant (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kinema ( 630983 )
    I don't know much about CDE but isn't it's development more stagnant then "stable"? Or does "stagant==stable"?
  • GNOME which unfortunately had been known (correct me as this is what i have read and witness when the programs i tried to compile with different versions of glibc breaks) to yank the API rug from beneath application developers.

    Compared to Sun, i always have the impression that HP is willing to work with Microsoft, IBM, Linux, Sun or anyone as long as the business gets done. Some may see this as not being principled while some may see this as being profit minded. Say what you want, but you have to admit the
    • The GNOME API remainded backwards compatible (IE, no functions taken away, only functions added) throughout the 1.x series.

      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 w

  • Ehr (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jarth ( 666336 )
    This post says Gnome 1.4 is still available and will continue to be so ... GNOME 2.0 is not YET available. Personally i wasn't under the impression gnome 2.0 has THAT many plusses over any other desktop such as KDE, thank the Gnome developpers HP didn't revert. Maybe GNOME2.5 might win their hearts if it's a worthy and COMPLETE environment.
    • "Personally i wasn't under the impression gnome 2.0 has THAT many plusses over any other desktop such as KDE"

      You are probably talking about CDE and not KDE. Afaik KDE has never been part of any plans of HP. My guess is that HP is in no hurry to make this change, since they do not live on fancy interfaces and flashy visual effects on the desktop.
  • Most of HP servers that are sold, will never need one. So why invest in a new one?

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