The GNOME Desktop project.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

  		       The GNOME Desktop project
   	        (GNU Network Object Model Environment)
		http://bananoid.nuclecu.unam.mx/gnome


* Goals

We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly
applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based
entirely on free software:

	- We want the applications to have a common look and feel, and
	  to share as many visual elements and UI concepts as possible.

	- We want to use the GTK toolkit as our toolkit for writing
	  the applications.  

	  The GTK toolkit (http://www.cs.umn.edu/~amundson/gtk and
	  http://levien.com/~slow/gtk/) is the toolkit written by
	  Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball, Josh MacDonald, for the GNU
	  Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) project
	  (http://scam.xcf.berkeley.edu/~gimp).
	
	- We want to encourage people to contribute code and to test
	  the code, so that the software will compile out of the box
	  by using GNU's tools for automatic source configuration.

	- We plan to export the GTK API through a procedural database
	  (which will in fact be an object database) to allow easy
	  integration with scripting languages and modules written in
	  other languages.

        - We plan to use GTK/Scheme bindings for coding small
	  utilities and applications.  When these bindings are more
	  mature, it should be possible to write complete applications
	  in Scheme.	

* Some common questions regarding the project

Why don't you just use/contribute to KDE?

    KDE is a nice project; they have good hackers working on it and
    they have done a very good job.  Unfortunately, they selected the
    non-free Qt toolkit as the foundation for the project, which poses
    legal problems for those desiring to redistribute the software.

Why not write a free Qt replacement instead?

    The KDE project -in its current form- has about 89,000 lines of
    code, on the other hand, the source code for the Qt library has
    about 91,000 lines.

    Qt also forces the programmer to write his code in C++ or Python.
    Gtk can be used in C, Scheme, Python, C++, Objective-C and Perl. 

    Also, we believe that KDE has some design problems (they have lots
    of good ideas though) that we plan to fix.

Under what license does the GNOME fall?

    As most GNU software, GNOME application code will be released
    under the GNU GPL.  GNOME specific libraries will be released
    under the terms of the GNU LGPL.

Will you rewrite everything from scratch?

    No.  We will try to reuse the existing code for GNU programs as
    much as possible, while adhering to the guidelines of the project.
    Putting nice and consistent user interfaces over all-time
    favorites will be one of the projects.

    We plan on reusing code from KDE as well.

* Joining the GNOME mailing list:

We have created a mailing list for people interested in discussing
the development of this project.  To subscribe, use this command:

   echo 'subscribe gnome' | mail majordomo@nuclecu.unam.mx