CNET News.com: “Representatives from two open-source foundations, Mozilla and Gnome, met last week to consider a joint course of action aimed at keeping their respective Web and desktop software products relevant once Microsoft releases the next major overhaul of its Windows operating system, known as Longhorn.”
So, do you think this effort has any hope of competing agains Micro$oft?
What would really help OSS win desktop share over MS? Is there any current thinking about usability efforts? From what I’ve seen, open source is a valid rival when it comes to developers and product portfolio. But I haven’t seen much in the way of usability engineering to match MS’s investment in that area. Enjoyment and ease of use is argued as critical to wide adoption. Does anyone know if there are major efforts underway to look at those issues in the open source community?
I think opensource leaders are looking to microsoft with fear .. Now we are disputing the fight in ms’s field, they are getting affraid, why should opensource be?
In my opinion, projects such as gnome and mozilla should try to copy some features of ms’s software, but try to make some inovations.
The gnome 2.6 is a little bit a proof that gnome project is preocupeid to make gnome more and more like windows.
greetings
Luis Matos
If anything, Gnome 2.6 is a good example of the open-source community moving beyond simply imitating Windows. From what I’ve seen, there’s some pretty bold departures from the typical Windows behavior, like the Nautilus spatial view. Combined with newer Gnome projects like Dashboard, it appears Gnome is finally starting to come into its own from a platform perspective.
As long as Mozilla is a multi-platform sofware and Gnome is just unix I don’t see it.
Don’t get me wrong, I know they can work together but Longhorn is not on Gnome way.
I rather Mozilla and OpenOffice 2.0 united against Longhorn.