>From a user perspective, and I know this is a very tiny sample, but out of the 230 responses to the Friends of GNOME survey of those who gave money, 30% indicated that they use GNOME applications on multiple platforms. That's a significant percent of those who responded to they survey - just something to think about.
Paul On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Calum Benson <calum.ben...@sun.com> wrote: > > On 22 Jul 2009, at 12:50, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote: > > So I would like to ask the GNOME release team to please come forward >> and clearly state that the future of GNOME is to be a linux desktop >> system as opposed to a desktop system for any Unix-like system. >> > > This is by no means an "official Sun response" to this proposal, just the > thoughts of somebody who's worked on GNOME at Sun for the past 9 years or > so... > > It goes without saying that I'd be disappointed if GNOME were to take any > official Linux-only stance. Sun has contributed a great deal to GNOME both > technically and financially over the years, and although there aren't nearly > as many familiar Sun faces on the GNOME mailing lists and IRC channels as > there used to be (or, indeed, as I'd like), there's still a good-sized team > of GNOME development and QA folks working here and contributing upstream as > and when we can. (FWIW, in addition to sponsoring the event again this > year, a dozen or so of us made the trip to Gran Canaria this month, which, > bar a couple of exceptions, is about the same or more as we've sent to every > previous GUADEC.) > > That said, many of the Sun team do seem to spend more time than they ought > to just to keep GNOME running on OpenSolaris on the various Sun platforms > these days. They often have to deal with various Linux-isms at a code or > conceptual level, or with technologies that are coming late to Linux and are > implemented completely differently from the equivalent used by Sun (e.g. > RBAC v PolicyKit, Trusted OpenSolaris v SELinux), or with performance or > scalability issues that don't affect the average Linux desktop or enterprise > user, but that would make GNOME unusable on the hundreds of thousands[1] of > Sun Ray thin clients out there. > > All that tends to leave us less time to make the larger-scale contributions > that we used to make to GNOME and its related projects. Historically, that > included things like implementing multi-head support for gtk, designing and > implementing the original accessibility framework, writing and reviewing > large chunks of user documentation, collaborating on regular HIG updates, > performing UI reviews and usability studies, etc. All these things would > probably have been gotten around to eventually, but at the very least, I > think it's fair to say these sorts of contributions from the non-Linux side > of the fence got GNOME to where it is today a good deal quicker than would > otherwise have been the case. > > Now, there's no denying that until fairly recently, it was hard for most > non-Sun contributors to even test their stuff on Solaris, so you could argue > we're reaping what we sowed to some extent on that front. Nowadays, though, > OpenSolaris comes on a LiveCD and runs in VirtualBox or in a dual-boot > scenario pretty much as well as any Linux distro. So it shouldn't be all > that hard to at least check once in a while that whatever you're working on > is at least going to build, preferably run, and ideally function in an > OpenSolaris environment[2]. > > Anyway, if anything, I guess I'd argue that it's time to actually reinforce > the notion that the GNOME desktop is intended for use on any Unix-like > system, and to figure out how to better distribute the development and QA > workload to make that happen, so that non-Linux contributors have more > chance to make significant contributions upstream again instead of spending > most of their time treading downstream water. > > Cheeri, > Calum. > > [1] Okay, I don't actually have any idea how many Sun Ray clients are out > there, but I'm guessing the order of magnitude is roughly correct. If > anything, it's probably an underestimate. > > [2] Or indeed any other non-Linux environments that you might wish to > explore to expand your technological horizons in your copious free time :) > > -- > CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland > mailto:calum.ben...@sun.com OpenSolaris Desktop Team > http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 > > Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-devel-list mailing list > desktop-devel-list@gnome.org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list >
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