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Linux, UNIX Desktop Unity Sought

GNOME Foundation signs on major vendors to share code for common desktop interface.

By Phil Hochmuth, NetworkWorld   

Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems are joining the GNOME Foundation, a collaboration between commercial technology vendors and several open source groups to create a common desktop based on the GNOME desktop.

The GNOME (GNU Network Object Modeling Environment) Foundation is part of the GNU Project, an initiative to create "GNU" software--free programs that can be modified and shared without fear of copyright infringement.

Additionally, HP and Sun will include the next version of the GNOME desktop environment as the default desktop on future shipments of the companies' UNIX operating systems: HP-UX and Sun Solaris. GNOME is the default desktop that ships with most major Linux distributions.

The GNOME Foundation was announced Tuesday at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here. Members of the GNOME Foundation include Compaq, The Free Software Foundation, Gnumatic (an open source application developer), GNOME distributors Helix Code and Eazel, Henzai (a developer of handheld Linux systems), IBM, Object Management Group, Red Hat, TurboLinux, and VA Linux Systems.

"Our goal is to provide one unified user environment for UNIX and Linux," says Miguel de Icaza, cofounder of GNOME distributor Helix Code and founder of the GNOME Foundation. Having a common organization of large technology vendors and open source organizations to collaborate on a common Linux/UNIX desktop will be a first for the open source community, de Icaza says.

"GNOME has been an ongoing project involving over 500 developers across the Internet," he says. "In the past, when companies wanted to address the GNOME project, they didn't know how to do it."

Supporting Open Source

Because the GNOME Foundation is being based on the principles of the General Public License, which keeps open source software from being made proprietary by any one company, there is no threat that a company or group will take over developments made by the foundation, de Icaza says.

GNOME Foundation members will also work to incorporate office productivity applications into the next GNOME release from OpenOffice.org, a development project based on open source technology from Sun's StarOffice office application suite. Sun licensed StarOffice to the open source community in July.

"With GNOME, we're not just creating a good user environment," says Marco Boerries, vice president of application software at Sun, who was an original developer of the StarOffice suite. "We're creating a complete user environment" by including an office suite standard in GNOME, Boerries adds.

Additionally, the GNOME foundation will oversee the integration of Mozilla--the open source version of the Netscape browser--into the GNOME desktop for Linux and UNIX.

HP and Sun will continue to support their existing common-desktop-environment desktops for their respective UNIX versions. Both companies plan to ship GNOME 2.0 with HP-UX and Solaris workstations in the first half of 2001, when it becomes available.

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