Re: Free press coverage for Gnome in Norway

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 12:58 +0200, Claes Nasten wrote:
> PS:
> This is what we have on Gnome so far, feel free to add information or correct any mistakes:

Note to others: Please don't swamp Claes with multiple replies with only
minor differences.

You can find more information at www.gnome.org/about.html and
www.gnome.org/about/why.html

> Gnome
> 
> The GNOME desktop environment is an intuitive and attractive desktop for
> end-users, users, and the GNOME development platform, an extensive
> framework for building applications that integrate into the rest of the
> desktop.
> 
> WHAT IS GNOME AND WHAT DOES IT DO?
> Gnome is a desktop environment relying on the GIMP toolkit (GTK+), a
> toolkit that uses the GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL), a free software
> license that allows software linking to it, such as applications written
> for GNOME, to use any license. The GNOME desktop is written in the C
> programming language.

These are technical details that are probably not our primary focus.

Better would be just
"GNOME is an easy to use desktop environment and development platform"

> WHY CHOOSE GNOME?
> GNOME is the ideal choice for almost any purpose: GNOME is the desktop
> of choice for industry leaders like IBM, HP, and Sun. Governments in
> places as diverse as Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the US, Extremadura, Spain,
> and Beijing, China, have selected GNOME for their desktops. With a large
> number of users, and a wide range of vendors, you can be assured of
> availability and support for a long time to come. GNOME is free, usable,
> accessible, international and developer-friendly.
> 
> MATURITY AND STABILITY
> The GNOME project was started in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and
> Federico Mena to provide an alternative to KDE.

The "alternative to KDE" bit is probably irrelevant to most people.

>  The first stable version
> was released in 1999.

I'd like to add "A predictable release schedule ensures stable releases
every six months."

> 
> SECURITY
> 
> SCALABILITY
> 
> INTEROPERABILITY
> GNOME now runs on most Unix-like systems (*BSD variants, AIX, IRIX,
> HP-UX), and in particular it has been adopted by Sun Microsystems as the
> standard desktop for its Solaris platform, replacing the ageing CDE. Sun
> Microsystems has also released a business desktop under the name Java
> Desktop System — a SUSE Linux system base with a GNOME desktop. There is
> also a port of GNOME to Cygwin, allowing it to run on Microsoft Windows.
> 
> CODE QUALITY
> Any contributor to GNOME is eligible for membership. Although it is
> difficult to specify a precise definition, a contributor generally must
> have contributed to a non-trivial improvement of the GNOME Project.
> Contributions may be code, documentation, translations, maintenance of
> project-wide resources, or other non-trivial activities which benefit
> the GNOME Project.
> 
> DEVELOPMENT TEAM
> August 2000 the GNOME Foundation was set up to deal with administrative
> tasks, press interest and to act as a contact point for companies
> interested in developing GNOME software. The foundation, while not
> directly involved in technical decisions, does coordinate releases and
> decide which projects will be part of GNOME.
> 
> UPDATES
> They release stable updates about two times a year.
> 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com