Re: GNOME and non-linux platforms (release team please stand up)

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Jason:

> Obviously the alleged pointlessness of something that we are arguing 
> about is relevant. Whether or not there are--you know--actual people 
> using said OS is what this is really about. And apparently even Sun 
> doesn't think so since they no longer invest the same level of resources 
> in it that they once did. I'm calling a duck a duck here. It's a failure 
> and even Sun knows that it is. There's no reason we shouldn't be 
> scrambling a few eggs on Solaris to advance the Linux desktop experience.

I didn't realize that Sun was the only company involved with GNOME that
has had resources negatively impacted by this long-standing downturn in
the economy.

Even though, it is true, Sun does have fewer resources working on GNOME
than we did several years ago, there are still several dozen engineers
at Sun working on GNOME and GNOME-related technologies.  Recently Sun
has been focusing a lot of time and energy into making a new accessible
installer, the Time Slider GNOME ZFS integration application, adding
better wireless and printing support, improving the multimedia
experience, and lots of other things.  The latest releases of
OpenSolaris have been well received, I think because we are doing a good
bit of work making GNOME available on Solaris.

  http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=10250

Sun is already working to add DeviceKit support to Solaris, GNOME
runs fine on Solaris without PulseAudio.  Sun does not have much of
an interest in shipping modules which have a strong dependency on
PolicyKit (e.g. Sun is moving to use VisualPanels instead of wanting
to ship GNOME system tools), and it typically isn't hard to make those
few programs that use PolicyKit that we do want to ship use RBAC
instead.

I am not sure what the big deal is here.  Nobody from Sun has been
complaining about GNOME being too Linux-ey, have they?  Sun has always
had a good relationship with the GNOME community, and it has never been
particularly hard to get patches upstream to support things needed for
GNOME to work well on Solaris or OpenSolaris.

Brian