>> Solaris is uniquely situated to make this dream a reality. > > With the support of Sun Microsystems, resources > > Solaris is not very well positioned in the UI competition. Sun, it > appears, has consciously chosen not to actively develop a desktop, but > to patiently swallow whatever gnome.org is producing. Hire a few more > GNOME polishers - and you get another Ubuntu, why bother. That's the > real frustrating part: most people see the problems (except those in > denial), yet very little can be done about that. Cheerleading only makes > it more bitter.
Artem: This is hugely unfair. Sun created the accessibility infrastructure that is used in GNOME based (and compatible with) the accessibility infrastructure used by Java. Sun has contributed a great deal back to the GNOME community and delivers well received value add products on top of GNOME including Trusted JDS and APOC. Korey: Considering Section 508 government requirements that all U.S. government funded agencies (including schools, libraries, etc.) must purchase accessible software solutions, distros that use GNOME are well poised to compete with Windows in these markets. Sun is probably better poised due to its already established customer base in the U.S. government and the fact that Sun dedicates more engineering effort towards supporting accessibility than other distros. Overall accessibility works better on Solaris (with one important exception...). At the moment, Ubuntu does have a slight lead in the accessibility market since their installer is accessible. I don't think that Sun would require a great deal of effort to catch up in this area especially since we are already working on a GTK+ based installer (though accessibility support is not currently planned for the initial release unfortunately). Having said that, I think there are a few things that would be good to get done before trying to compete with Windows and other Linux vendors in the desktop arena. - Finish the port from Xsun to Xorg Xserver, including on Sparc. - Virtual Terminals support which is in the works - Complete the SunAudio to OSS migration. - Make further progress with Project Indiana (e.g. provide the sorts of tools that Linux users expect like autoconf, automake, libtool, etc.). This is also in the works, obviously. - Media codec support (MPEG, encrypted DVD, WindowsMedia, etc.). If not directly in the OS, at least users should be able to buy and download plugins from somewhere (e.g. Fluendo). I think it would be great if Sun gave these sorts of tasks a bit more priority and started to seriously consider the desktop market. It's not high margin like selling mainframes, but I'd think Sun could make a serious competitor to Microsoft and Apple if we wanted to. Just my opinion... Brian _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
