Re: Sun de-emphasizes GNOME devel platform, supports KDE apps

In article <[email protected]>, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> Steve Hutton <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Interesting, I guess I can see some sort of small consistancy in
>> their strategy if they are positioning Sun Linux as a development
>> platform.  To see the consistancy you have to accept that the reason
>> Sun chose GNOME over KDE was on the advice of their internal development
>> staff and other C hackers.  I think they tried to "pick the one developers
>> will like best."  
> 
> I don't understand your logic.  If anything it seems to me that they
> don't want to encourage developers to develop for the GNOME platform,
> but rather develop for the Java platform.  It's not "Sun Linux" at
> all...  it's "Java Desktop".

Exactly, and that is consistant with their big picture strategy - not
what we may have percieved as thier Linux strategy when they cozied up
to GNOME.

> After being so gung-ho for GNOME, why do they now not want to
> encourage developers to target it?  I'd almost say that the GNOME
> development platform being C and all is somewhat retrograde compared
> to KDE and Java, and that Sun realises that.

Some in Sun surely recognize this.  But if they think developers want
a GNOME based desktop, they can give them that...and then push Java
development.  They have a vested interest in pushing Java development,
and none in pushing GNOME (or KDE development).
> 
>> Certainly Sun's track record on the desktop is not particularly strong,
>> even in recent years.  They remind us again here by pushing Java client
>> development.
> 
> Java is actually quite nice and clean as a development platform.

Java has a very complete set of libraries, and certainly its APIs
are superior to monstrocities like MFC, but I don't find the language
itself to be particularly exciting (I prefer Python as an interpreted 
alternative to C++; it supports C++ abstraction techniques like operator
overloading).  

Anyway, my last point was really that Java *client* development
has beeen a huge failure, and is still not particulary attractive.

Steve


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