Gnome is no Windows dwarf

Thursday, May 20, 1999 Published at 13:37 GMT 14:37 UK: Windows 98 may
still dominate the software shelves in computer stores, but it has been
joined this month by boxed software which could loosen Microsoft's
stranglehold on the market.

Windows is installed on 95% of the world's PCs, but its new challenger
Gnome is being developed and distributed globally by more than 250
programmers supporting a free software movement.

Gnome can look like a Windows or Mac desktop, giving a friendly
mouse-driven Graphical User Interface (GUI). It runs from the Linux
operating system and should appeal to consumers put off by Linux's
requirement for plain text commands.

Both Gnome and Linux are free to download over the Internet, but the boxed
versions, with manuals, CDs and tech support by companies such as Red Hat
and SuSE have gone on sale at retail outlets for less than £50 -
undercutting Windows prices and their licences allowing distribution across
more than one machine.

Gnome is the free software movement's most serious challenge yet to Bill
Gates' dominance of the desktop. It is led by a modest, 26 year-old Mexican
programmer, Miguel De Icaza.

"I'm only the Gnome co-ordinator," he told BBC News Online on a visit to
the UK recently for a workshop and conference organised by netproject. 

"At the release of Gnome 1.0 we had 250 people who could put changes back
into the source code. This main team of developers has been assembled over
the past 20 months and there are now 38 more since the 1.0 release in March."

Gnome stands for Gnu Network Object Model Environment. "It started off as a
component model," says Miguel, "So you could write small modules to build
bigger applications, but the GUI thing just took off."

There are other friendly front-ends to Linux, including the K Desktop
Environment (KDE), but Gnome is quickly becoming the GUI of choice to run
on top of Linux.

"I don't think KDE has a future at this point, it's not completely free yet
and it's bound to a single programming language in Unix. Gnome from the
very beginning has been accessible through any language. We are providing
the GUI for all the languages and programmers can choose the language they
like the most," says Miguel.

Gnome comes with some fully-featured applications such as a spreadsheet. A
word processor is in the works, as is an e-mail program with a radically
different approach to the current hierarchical structure for viewing mail.

Gnome and Linux can be installed on a PC alongside Windows as well as
replacing it. Would-be users are advised to install it on a separate hard
drive partition and configure their computer to have a dual-boot option so
they can choose between operating systems and try Gnome out.

Linux has made great strides among Internet and network professionals. It
developed into a robust operating system to challenge Windows on main servers.

This is the result of the efforts of programmers around the world working,
often in their spare time, to improve on the code first developed by the
Finn, Linus Torvalds.

Miguel leans more towards the Free Software Foundation's views on this
collaborative programming rather than that of the Open Source Initiative,
whose chief spokesman Eric Raymond is virulently anti-Microsoft and
campaigns for businesses to adopt open-source software as a cheaper and
more reliable option than Microsoft's products.

The Free Software Foundation of Richard Stallman set out to develop an
operating system, Gnu, whose source code would be open and which would be
distributed so that it could be changed and improved on by anyone else.

A jet-lagged Stallman explained this "copyleft", an addition to the
copyright principle, at a packed lecture in London recently as part of a
global tour of speaking engagements.

The terms of the copyleft agreement or GNU General Public Licence mean
those using the code cannot turn it into restricted proprietary software.
"Every time a copy of the software is passed on these freedoms go with it.
With copyleft we actually defend the freedom for every user," he said.

"We are doing this for the freedom issues, not for fighting a specific
company," says Miguel of the Gnome project.

One business model for making money from free software is to provide
support services for running the software. Tim O'Reilly runs a successful
business selling computer manuals seen as the bibles of programmers using
Open Source software.

Speaking to BBC News Online at the London International Book Fair, O'Reilly
said programs like Gnome could make the vital breakthrough in winning
acceptance for Open Source from consumers.

But really this had already been done, he said, with consumers now buying
computers in some cases just to buy books from the Amazon Website, which
runs on Open Source software.

"If you look at companies like Amazon and Yahoo, Yahoo uses the FreeBSD
operating system, the Apache Web server and they do most of their
programming using the free Perl language," he said.

"I like to remind people that the entire Internet infrastructure was
developed by the Open Source community," he added, quoting the basic TCP/IP
protocols, BIND which enables domain naming and SendMail, responsible for
e-mail transports.

"People have focused so much on the commercial players, like Microsoft and
Netscape, that they have overlooked this enormous change that has been
driven at a grass roots level by individuals who are able to collaborate at
a whole new level because of the power of the Internet."

O'Reilly sees Microsoft adapting to survive in the new climate:

"Open Source will change the way Microsoft does business, it already has.
But Microsoft is not going to go away. Open Source will create new players
but Microsoft is big enough to be around for a long time to come."

By Internet Correspondent Chris Nuttall
BBC News Online: Sci/Tech
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_321000/321433.stm>

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