Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Corel Corp. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (9531)	8/18/2000 9:01:52 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 9798

Regarding the ongoing Gnome vs KDE face-off for the Linux interface: osopinion.com Beating them with their own code: why GNOME can't kill KDE Thanks to the recent press releases at LinuxWorld regarding the GNOME foundation, some journals have already written off KDE. The reason for the write off has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with a narrow vision of computing's "history". From their point of view, Windows won the desktop "war" and the huge (minority) of Mac users and the small (growing) band of Linux end users simply don't exist. So they expect that just one single desktop environment will survive in the Linux world and, thanks to the money going into it, they believe it will be GNOME. I think that both GNOME and KDE will survive and ultimately thrive and some of my reasons (in no particular order) are these: 1) The promises of what GNOME will deliver will take time to come on stream and meanwhile KDE will continue to be improved. Many people wanting jam today will use KDE and having become used to it won't want to change. 2) Although RedHat's Linux distribution is probably the best known and most widely used there are at least hundreds of Linux distributions, and some of them like Debian, SuSE and Mandrake are very popular. Has RedHat "won" the "distribution war"? The world is a pretty large place with a lot of people and these people have different priorities and tastes; one person may prefer RedHat, another Debian and so on. And this goes tenfold for desktop environments. 3) If you want to program in a VHLL (very high level language), then the two main contenders are Perl and Python. Perl is the most widely known and probably the most widely used because of its excellent support for web programming through the CGI.pm module and the mod_perl Apache module. (Python has equivalents of these.) But Perl hasn't killed Python and isn't going to: in fact the languages are helping each other to improve. Python now supports Perl regular expressions, and in the Perl 6 announcements at least one person suggested adopting some of Python's benefits. 4) Because open source is not developed under commercial pressures but essentially for the love (or vanity) of the developers and because developers differ in their priorities and views on how things should be done we have this wonderful variety of software being produced. Of course this can be a real pain; to use any Linux command line utility you have to read the man page because everything works in its own sweet way, and this assumes of course that you know what the required command is in the first place. But GNOME and KDE are helping to provide easy wrappers and common idioms for doing things however different the underlying programs are. The outcome will be that we have many different tools, email clients, newsreaders, and eventually word-processors, spreadsheets etc., to suit a great variety of tastes and needs all available through attractive and easy-to-use user interfaces. Word may be the most dominant word-processor, but there are hundreds of other word-processors, each with its niche and special appeal. GNOME and KDE may end up being the most popular desktops but others will also survive and suit some people. Like it or loathe it Windows is the desktop environment that drove the creation of KDE and GNOME. Linux developers recognized the need/desire for a GUI and since Motif wasn't available, started to build their own. (I'm really glad Motif wasn't free or we'd have ended up with it:) Now of course KDE and GNOME are not limiting themselves to the Microsoft way (or the Mac way) but are beginning to break new ground. But if Windows hadn't been so successful would we have KDE or GNOME today? And as advanced as they are? In the case of Linux distributions and VHLLs, having multiple solutions has not led to the kind of shake out one sees in the commercial sector with just one size fitting all; but rather we've seen different solutions adopting each others benefits. (After all, open source code is meant to be shared and reused), so instead of competition killing the competitors it has made them stronger. There isn't just one way of computing or using a computer and we shouldn't narrow ourselves to a single view. Corporates should be as interested in the success of open source software as any individuals because open source will save them money. Whilst it may well make sense for a corporate to have a single desktop environment and single set of tools, as many corporates know to their cost, being locked in to just one vendor can prove to be very expensive. Being able to choose from a variety of high quality environments and tools (all of which can either interoperate directly or can properly read/write each other's file formats) means that they are not locked in to spiraling costs. It is this variety and file format openness that open source offers, be it through GNOME, KDE or some of the lesser-known environments. Because open source encourages the sharing of code and ideas, "competing" projects can adopt the best parts of each other, each becoming better and better in the process. This simply cannot occur in the closed source IPR-retentive world and is why open source slowly but surely will displace more and more closed source, except in vertical markets. The open source world may be coming more and more into contact with the corporate world. Indeed many open source developers work for corporates, but nonetheless the open source world is different and writing off a major project may make good press but won't change the (uncomfortable for some) fact that both GNOME and KDE will be around for a long time to come.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (9531)	8/18/2000 9:01:54 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9798

Regarding the ongoing Gnome vs KDE face-off for the Linux interface: osopinion.com Beating them with their own code: why GNOME can't kill KDE Thanks to the recent press releases at LinuxWorld regarding the GNOME foundation, some journals have already written off KDE. The reason for the write off has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with a narrow vision of computing's "history". From their point of view, Windows won the desktop "war" and the huge (minority) of Mac users and the small (growing) band of Linux end users simply don't exist. So they expect that just one single desktop environment will survive in the Linux world and, thanks to the money going into it, they believe it will be GNOME. I think that both GNOME and KDE will survive and ultimately thrive and some of my reasons (in no particular order) are these: 1) The promises of what GNOME will deliver will take time to come on stream and meanwhile KDE will continue to be improved. Many people wanting jam today will use KDE and having become used to it won't want to change. 2) Although RedHat's Linux distribution is probably the best known and most widely used there are at least hundreds of Linux distributions, and some of them like Debian, SuSE and Mandrake are very popular. Has RedHat "won" the "distribution war"? The world is a pretty large place with a lot of people and these people have different priorities and tastes; one person may prefer RedHat, another Debian and so on. And this goes tenfold for desktop environments. 3) If you want to program in a VHLL (very high level language), then the two main contenders are Perl and Python. Perl is the most widely known and probably the most widely used because of its excellent support for web programming through the CGI.pm module and the mod_perl Apache module. (Python has equivalents of these.) But Perl hasn't killed Python and isn't going to: in fact the languages are helping each other to improve. Python now supports Perl regular expressions, and in the Perl 6 announcements at least one person suggested adopting some of Python's benefits. 4) Because open source is not developed under commercial pressures but essentially for the love (or vanity) of the developers and because developers differ in their priorities and views on how things should be done we have this wonderful variety of software being produced. Of course this can be a real pain; to use any Linux command line utility you have to read the man page because everything works in its own sweet way, and this assumes of course that you know what the required command is in the first place. But GNOME and KDE are helping to provide easy wrappers and common idioms for doing things however different the underlying programs are. The outcome will be that we have many different tools, email clients, newsreaders, and eventually word-processors, spreadsheets etc., to suit a great variety of tastes and needs all available through attractive and easy-to-use user interfaces. Word may be the most dominant word-processor, but there are hundreds of other word-processors, each with its niche and special appeal. GNOME and KDE may end up being the most popular desktops but others will also survive and suit some people. Like it or loathe it Windows is the desktop environment that drove the creation of KDE and GNOME. Linux developers recognized the need/desire for a GUI and since Motif wasn't available, started to build their own. (I'm really glad Motif wasn't free or we'd have ended up with it:) Now of course KDE and GNOME are not limiting themselves to the Microsoft way (or the Mac way) but are beginning to break new ground. But if Windows hadn't been so successful would we have KDE or GNOME today? And as advanced as they are? In the case of Linux distributions and VHLLs, having multiple solutions has not led to the kind of shake out one sees in the commercial sector with just one size fitting all; but rather we've seen different solutions adopting each others benefits. (After all, open source code is meant to be shared and reused), so instead of competition killing the competitors it has made them stronger. There isn't just one way of computing or using a computer and we shouldn't narrow ourselves to a single view. Corporates should be as interested in the success of open source software as any individuals because open source will save them money. Whilst it may well make sense for a corporate to have a single desktop environment and single set of tools, as many corporates know to their cost, being locked in to just one vendor can prove to be very expensive. Being able to choose from a variety of high quality environments and tools (all of which can either interoperate directly or can properly read/write each other's file formats) means that they are not locked in to spiraling costs. It is this variety and file format openness that open source offers, be it through GNOME, KDE or some of the lesser-known environments. Because open source encourages the sharing of code and ideas, "competing" projects can adopt the best parts of each other, each becoming better and better in the process. This simply cannot occur in the closed source IPR-retentive world and is why open source slowly but surely will displace more and more closed source, except in vertical markets. The open source world may be coming more and more into contact with the corporate world. Indeed many open source developers work for corporates, but nonetheless the open source world is different and writing off a major project may make good press but won't change the (uncomfortable for some) fact that both GNOME and KDE will be around for a long time to come.