Does Sun adopt Gnome ?

[Brian Behlendorf]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, David Johnson wrote:
> I goes even further than this. One of the founding principles of GNOME
> was that unfree software made people unfree. Praising Sun for choosing
> GNOME as the desktop for their proprietary Solaris seems to throw
> these principles right out the door.

It's a fairly well-known fact that the main reason most of the proprietary
Unix vendor's operating systems are *not* free today is that they all use
a significant amount of licensed third-party code that would be well-next
to impossible to rip out or replace without a seriously huge investment
(more than occurs on most major-version-number releases anyways), and
an open source license would prevent those companies from recouping those 
costs.  In many cases those third-party companies no longer exist except
for a shell that survives on the revenue from continued licensing, and
who thus have no reason to give that revenue up.

Instead, the best approach for those vendors (and one the open source
community *should* be applauding) is for the gradual replacement of closed
components of these systems with open components.  Some people, instead,
prefer an all-or-nothing mindset; I don't think that attitude is why
vendors are picking up on open source these days.

It's like the difference between shoving someone down a flight of stairs,
or leading them by the hand as they walk down.  We're all still arriving
at the same place, but one approach is far more effective than the other.  

	Brian