[OpenIndiana-discuss] Gnome to become a Linux only project

[Ken Gunderson]

On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 13:25 +0000, Ben Taylor wrote:
> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Apostolos Syropoulos
> <asyropoulos at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have read the following
> >
> > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQ1Nw
> >
> >
> > Are they serious? I think we should seriously consider abandoning GNOME
> > and replace it with KDE.
> >
> > A.S.
> 
> Think a Redhat guy might have an axe to grind with Oracle, given the most recent
> attempts by the RH kernel to stiffle by ofuscation the changes they
> made to RH kernel
> to prevent Oracle from bundling up the changes in their unbreakable product.

Yeah, RH sucks.  Following the demise of OpenSolaris and a free to use
Solaris 10 as potential contenders, however, RHEL is rapidly becoming
the defacto standard in the Enterprise.  So much so that they've been
able to at least double, if not triple, their support contract fees in
the past two years.  Still, this is about 1/4 of Oracle support fee so
where are enterprises heading, especially in a tough economy where
shareholders are looking closely at corporate budgets?  Been a big boon
for RH.

> 
> It really is the antithesis of open source.  hope he chokes on his
> triple expresso.

Unfortunately all too many have an axe to grind with Oracle.  Hence,
present audience excepted, many Penguinistas will likely be open to his
arguments, if not outright supportive. Especially sycophants hoping to
be hired by RH. Moreover, don't forget RH's deep roots with Gnome, as in
addition to paid developers, they also sponsor the website, major
bandwidth, and other infrastructure.  

Bottom line is that I wouldn't blow this off as non trivial threat to
the future portability of Gnome.