Sun, Wipro, Ximian and GNOME 2.0

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hey Guys,
	The announcement below details a partnership between Sun,
Wipro and Ximian to help with the 2.0 drive.

	We would like to have made this announcement earlier, but
unfortunately the agreement was only finalised on Friday. Note, that
this isn't the official announcement as we would like to get the
GNOME community's reaction first.

	We're very open to questions and discussion on this, so please
feel free to ask questions here or on #gnome/#sun or wherever.

	Anyway the blurb is below ... :-)

Good Luck,
Mark.

****

With Sun's latest press announcement of strengthening its
commitment to Linux and Linux compatibility, Sun is further
committed to making GNOME the preferred desktop for the Solaris
operating environment.

Sun's priorities for the GNOME platform are threefold: stability,
accessibility and API compatibility.  For GNOME to be a viable
desktop for Sun customers it must demonstrate a high level of
robustness, be equipped with accessible mechanisms which allow
users with disabilities to take full advantage of its
functionality, and must offer a stable platform to ISVs.

To further these goals Sun is extending a project to accelerate
and assist with the GNOME 2.0 development effort.  As a part of
this project, contributions will be made to the codebase to help
complete any outstanding porting and bugfixing of GNOME 2.0
modules, equip them with accessible interfaces, improve their
performance, and contribute documentation and localisation.

Sun's existing GNOME hackers will continue down the path they
have been following for months, building and maintaining the core
accessibility modules (atk, at-spi, gail) and contributing to
various GNOME components such as ORBit2 and gnome-core.  In
addition, Sun is partnering with Wipro and Ximian to commit a
large team of full-time hackers to help drive GNOME 2.0 forward.

Though a newcomer to the GNOME community, Wipro is an experienced
outsource software development firm with expertise on porting and
migration across platforms with whom Sun has a long-standing
relationship.  During the past months, Wipro engineers have been
working on GNOME technologies. We are very excited to have Wipro's
talented programmers join the GNOME effort.

The following categories provide a high level overview of the work
that Ximian and Wipro will be doing over the next several months:

 * Porting unported GNOME core code from 1.4 to 2.0.

 * Bugfixing GNOME modules to meet Sun's quality standards.

 * Additionally Wipro will be developing and regularly
   executing an automated test suite for the core GNOME
   desktop and for many of its libraries and components.
   The output of these runs will be publicly available.

 * Setting up a continuous-build tinderbox for GNOME on
   Linux and Solaris, and producing and releasing regular
   packaged snapshots of the entire GNOME 2 desktop.  You
   can see what Jacob Berkman has done so far in this
   department at:  http://cvs.gnome.org/tinderbox

 * Cleaning up and organizing the GNOME bugzilla so that it
   is useful both for GNOME developers and users.  Some of
   you may have noticed this work already underway by Luis
   Villa from Ximian.

 * Ximian and Wipro will also be accessibility-enabling
   every core application in the GNOME desktop, including
   providing keyboard navigability.

 * Tuomas Kuosmanen and Jakub Steiner will be developing a
   full set of accessible GNOME stock and MIME icons
   (high-contrast, low-contrast, large sizes).

 * Wipro engineers will be performing a comprehensive and
   independent security audit on all core GNOME modules,
   checking for buffer overruns and other common errors.

 * Performance optimizing the desktop to improve user-apparent
   responsiveness, smoothness and system load.

Sun believes strongly that the GNOME community is GNOME's strongest
resource, and wants to respect that community and its decisions and
practices to as great an extent as possible.   All of this work will
be done within the framework of the GNOME community, using the
existing public CVS, bugzilla, and all the other standard GNOME
community practices.

Sun is very excited to be able to bring additional resources
to GNOME 2.0, and we are thrilled that this project is bringing a
large team of new faces to the community from Wipro.