Re: Sun, Wipro, Ximian and GNOME 2.0

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi,
This is great news. A big welcome to the Wipro hackers and a big thanks
to Sun for this contribution. 

I heard that the number of people that will be working at Wipro on GNOME
will be somewhere between 30 and 50 people so this is really a big
thing!

Christian

On Sun, 2002-02-24 at 13:45, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 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.
> 
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