Wipro, Sun, Ximian to develop open source desktop

BANGALORE: Wipro Ltd., Sun Microsystems and Ximian Inc. have jointly agreed

to develop an open source desktop environment for the Solaris Operating

Environment (OE) based on the upcoming GNOME 2.0.

Sun will draw on the expertise of Wipro and Ximian, and functionality

developed by the GNOME community to build a modern desktop environment that will

serve as the preferred desktop for the Solaris OE. As a result, users of Solaris

OE will benefit from the intuitive modern look and feel, built-in accessibility

support and internationalization and usability functions provided by the GNOME

2.0 desktop.

In addition, the agreement serves as a culmination of multiple Sun

contributions to the GNOME project and is an indication of Sun’s continued

commitment and support of open source efforts. Targeted for online delivery by

Sun in the third quarter of this year, the new environment is planned for

availability on the Solaris 8 OE and higher.

Wipro’s Platforms Group, besides coordinating the overall development

effort, will provide its expertise in porting and migration, bug fixing,

accessibility-enabling and testing of the GNOME solution. Wipro will carry out

the integration of the GNOME solution with the existing CDE (Common Desktop

Environment) environment and provide complete life-cycle maintenance in the

post-release phase. Wipro brings its several years of process expertise, an

integration Six Sigma methodologies, ISO process and SEI CMM framework to

develop a robust and scalable solution that would help seamless productization.

"What GNOME provides is a modern component-based design for a true

next-generation desktop environment for our enterprise customers," said Sun’s

vice president and general manager for Desktop and StarOffice products, Mike

Rogers. "GNOME provides a unified and advanced graphical user interface for

UNIX and Linux systems. Working with Ximian and Wipro, Sun will provide our

Solaris software enterprise customers a high quality and rich offering that

integrates the GNOME modern accessible desktop with a suite of applications,

accessories and utilities, StarOffice and Netscape to meet the everyday needs of

business Organizations. This partnership will help drive a higher quality

product, faster time to market and focused resources for further contributions

to the GNOME open source project."

GNOME is an open source software project that is developing the GNOME

desktop, which is in use by millions of people around the world (www.gnome.org).

The GNOME community includes hundreds of developers worldwide and includes

contributions from Sun as well as other GNOME Foundation members, such as Red

Hat, Compaq Computer, HP and IBM. GNOME 2.0, due to be released later this year,

includes significant improvements based on the contributions of the GNOME

community over earlier versions of GNOME. GNOME 2.0 Solaris software users will

continue to benefit from the power of the open source model by receiving the

latest updates based on contributions from the GNOME Project worldwide developer

community.