NASA switching to the "GNOME Linux environment"?

[GreyGeek]

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/found.../msg00044.html

GTK Questions

* From: "TILLMAN, MICHAEL D9" <michael d9 tillman lmco com>
* To: "foundation-list gnome org" <foundation-list gnome org>
* Subject: GTK Questions
* Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:27:56 -0700

Guys,

I work at NASA, and we’re moving to a gnome linux environment. I was wondering if you could give us some inputs on the GTK toolkit. We’re migrating from X.

We have several huge applications (One of which displays lists of several thousand commands to be sent to the ISS). They are memory hogs, and graphically intense (e.g., currently use a series of XmList widgets to display various fields of commands as a single row).

Our options include: GTK, OpenGL, Qt, Swing, SWT, Tk, .NET and AJAX. Languages include Java, C, C++, Perl, TCL, etc.

We can’t go with something that is LESS responsive than our current “X” applications written in C or C++, and we were wondering if GTK, generally speaking, is comparable to compiled "X" applications in response speeds and memory usage.

Any info you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike Tillman

Mtillman3_houston1 comcast net<mailto:Mtillman3_houston1 comcast net>

I am not sure how he thinks that a "GNOME Linux environment" can run .NET, and I am sure he isn't too familiar with Swing, SWT, Tk or they wouldn't be in the "fast and easy to use list".

Now that the GNOME marketing crew has seen that message they will, as one GNOME poster remarked, "smell blood in the water" and I can see a full court press on getting them to adopt MONO or even SilverLight 4, which de Icaza now extols as the next big thing because:

Silverlight: Universal GUI toolkit

The most important piece of news from last week's PDC was Microsoft's decision to turn Silverlight into the universal platform for building cross platform applications.

The upcoming version of Silverlight will no longer be a Web-only technology. It will now be possible to build full desktop applications with Silverlight.

Desktop Silverlight applications differ from the standard Silverlight in a few ways:

* Full access to the host file system, like any other .NET application would have.
* None of the socket connectivity limitations that are present on the sandboxed versioned of Silverlight. Full network access (we should build a MonoTorrent UI for it!)
* Built-in Notifications API to show up bubbles to the user when they need to interact with the application.

Although Moonlight has supported this mode of operation since day one, turning this into a standard way to develop applications was going to take a long time. We would have needed to port Moonlight to Windows and OSX and then we would have to bootstrap the ecosystem of "Silverlight+" applications.

But having Microsoft stand behind this new model will open the gates to a whole new class of desktop applications for the desktop. The ones that I was dreaming about just two weeks ago.

This was a big surprise for everyone. For years folks have been asking Microsoft to give Silverlight this capability to build desktop apps and to compete with Air and it is now finally here. This is a case of doing the right thing for users and developers.

... and he signs off

Droolingly yours,
Miguel de Icaza.
Posted by Miguel de Icaza on 23 Nov 2009

[sithlord48]

Re: NASA switching to the &quot;GNOME Linux environment&quot;?

thanks GG for bringing this to us..
NASA should use QT if they can.. its first of all free, as in the FSF's free. and best of all no M$ code required...

i don't know about you, but to me it sounds like MR. Miguel de Icaza, has become a convenient tool for microsoft, kinda makes me wonder with that fanboy attitude toward microsoft ,when can we expect a port of gnome to windows. since u know it will be dependant on mono soon enuff and since gnome is considering removing themselves from the GNU project and droping the GPL when that happens will we be hearing from him about the wonders of win7 and how that will be the next greatest thing of course running the fancy gnome 3.0 desktop. (naturally for only $19.95) gnome is becoming a JOKE. time for those devs to switch to QT and join the people who care about free and open source computing and help develop kde

[GreyGeek]

Re: NASA switching to the &quot;GNOME Linux environment&quot;?

I don't know if there are enough votes on the GNOME Foundation to take GNOME out of the GNU. I saw only two people on that GNOME thread who seemed to support it, Van Hoof, who is a member, and "Lefty", who is not.

However, I can see de Icaza began pushing MoonLight "4" because it may be built copying SilverLight 4 technology, although, remember, Microsoft added COM dependency in SilverLight 4, to make the Apple iPhone applets built using MoonLight unable to continue on, as I mentioned in another topic..

[Adrian]

Re: NASA switching to the &quot;GNOME Linux environment&quot;?

I keep hearing that QT is much better than GTK+ and still I see people preferring GTK over QT, I wonder why? (Is the QT superiority not true?)

[GreyGeek]

Re: NASA switching to the &quot;GNOME Linux environment&quot;?

I keep hearing that QT is much better than GTK+ and still I see people preferring GTK over QT, I wonder why? (Is the QT superiority not true?)

Strange. I hear that too, but I still see people preferring the QT over GTK and, having used Qt for years, I know why!

Qt superiority IS true, IMO. Qt is a singular API not requiring coordination with external dependencies. All that is needed to write and compile Qt apps is Qt and programs normally found on about any Linux distro, gcc, make and dbg.

GTK it not singular. In order to use it one must install several external dependencies besides the gcc, make and dbg. They include some that the GTK maintains: GLib, Pango, and ATK. Other libraries are maintained separately.
The libintl library, the fontconfig library, the Cairo graphics library, and the shared-mime-info package. The use of repositories by most distros has made installing the GTK API much easier because dependencies are handled automatically, but before the GTK can version up all of its dependencies have to coordinate with it as well. Qt is not afflicted with that problem.

Qt is under two licenses, the GPL and the commercial license. KDE is built with the GPL version of Qt. For software houses to write and sell commercial Qt programs they must have a commercial license. There is NO difference between the GPL Qt software and the commercial Qt software except that the commercial version includes support and drivers for proprietary databases like Oracle. The GPL version of Qt comes with SQLite, PostgreSQL and other FOSS db connectivity.

The Big 3 commercial Linux vendors; Canonical, Novell and Red Hat (the others have insignificant usage) do not have to pay a license to anyone to use GNOME on their commercial desktops. Kubuntu is not a commercial distro so it can use KDE4 without paying QtSoftware a license. That also means that any business can use Kubuntu in their office without paying a license. Why do they pay for a commercial distro? They feel they need "paid support" for their desktops, and that is exactly what the Big 3 sell. In fact, it is their primary revenue model. The distros they ship are usually "free", but branded. Branding is how they control the distribution of their CDs.

Take RH for example. AFTER you sign a subscription for support you are sent the serialized install CD, so you can't install them on more than one server, or at least you can't buy a single license and seek support for 15 servers after installing that single CD on those 15 servers. Then based on your subscription level, you have a email support, phone support, or RH engineer visitations. RH brands the CD with copyrighted images and non-GPL software, which must be removed before one can legally copy the distro. In order to remain within the GPL, because most of Ubuntu, SUSE and RH are GPL software, the Big 3 must honor the request for the source code to the GPL software, AND, the source they supply MUST compile to give the binaries they ship on their CD. But, what the GPL doesn't require are those parts of the development tree which are not part of the distro itself. The compiler tools, the scripts and other software which is not part of the CD but is used to create the CD. RH also separates the CD's components in to 700+ individual tar files which are then individually tarred, then individually compressed with gzip, then packed again in a single tar file which is also zipped. For those not familar with group tar and gzip commands they would soon tire of downloading 700+ files, unzipping and tarring them, only to realize there is no build scripts, MakeFiles, project files, etc.

[Adrian]

Re: NASA switching to the &quot;GNOME Linux environment&quot;?

What has your last paragraph to do with QT or GTK?

[GreyGeek]

Re: NASA switching to the &quot;GNOME Linux environment&quot;?

Maybe I wasn't clear enough.

GNOME is part of their distro but access to it is restrained by branding. The last paragraph illustrates how their packaging makes assembling a working set of RH distro files just so one could then proceed to replace the branding with components which wouldn't break the distro. It illustrates that even though they use GNOME and other GPL software they have to go to great efforts to make access to the source as difficult as possible.