Sources Claim Novell Will Improve Mozilla and Other Parts of the Ximian DesktopTuesday November 25th, 2003Vidar S. Ramdal writes: "InfoWorld has an article about companies looking into desktop Linux now that support options are getting better. InfoWorld quotes Novell 'sources' claiming that the company 'will more than double the number of engineers working on the Ximian Desktop and will focus on improving the Gnome desktop environment, the OpenOffice suite, and Mozilla browser.'" Rock on, Big Red. Rock on. "will more than double the number of engineers working on the Ximian Desktop" So IF they have one now, then the more than double means they will have at least 3 soon :) Novell own Ximian.. so this means doubling the XImian work force. That's slightly more than adding 1/2 people. I think Gnome needs a quality release. I've used 2.4 and 2.4 and 2.4 has a lot of new functionality, new programs (that duplicate what could be done with other tools), but it still has bugs that are too basic to be there. I think maybe a company paying salaries to get it better will help. Well, the good news is that Novell has handed over 40 of their excellent coders in Bangalore, India to the Ximian group. The group's initial primary target is going to be whittling down the bugs in GNOME. The team they've assembled has already started getting patches accepted by GNOME maintainers, so things are really looking up - GNOME 2.6 should be the best release yet, in terms of both features and buglessness! Read more about it here: http://nat.org/2003/october/#16-October-2003 ...but everything Novell has touched is dead or dying: DrDos - dead WordPerfect - dying? no, dead Unix - you know the fate of SCO Netware - dying, will be dead in 2-3 years. The moral of the story, don't let it touch Firebird in any way, shape or form. Explain how Novell can make things worse? The only bad thing that they, or anyone else, could do would be to create a fork somewhere in the core, so that their code wasn't going back into the Mozilla.org CVS. Otherwise, it requires a pretty convoluted set of circumstances for the net effect of any outside organisation being to damage the project. Personally, I'd *love* to see any company donate funds or employees to work on the core gecko code. There are also things they have which are good. NDS/edirectory, groupwise, zenworks... Don't mistake marketing/business strategy blunders with technical capabilities. With the acquisition of SUSE, the best out of the box KDE distro out there, I'm wondering why they are spending so many resources on this. Does this mean that SUSE is going to drop their KDE support? No, but I wouldn't be surprised if they support BOTH, like many distros do. Personally, I like GNOME, but to each his own. SuSE has shipped both KDE and Gnome since the early days (<1.0) of both desktops although SuSE's own developers support mainly KDE. Support for Gnome in Suse has always been way less than the support in RedHat. It even didn't look great. Admit it. There was both KDE and Gnome in SuSE, but not up to the same level. |