from the New York times 

   
      March 4, 1999
      
New Program Is Introduced to Ease Use of Linux System
     ______________________________________________________________
     
     Move Is Challenge to Proprietary Software 
     
      By JOHN MARKOFF
      
     SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The free software movement Thursday took its
     most significant step yet toward a direct confrontation with the
     Microsoft Corporation by introducing software that gives the
     powerful and free Linux operating system the ease-of-use found on
     Windows and Macintosh computers.
                                                                    
     The program, which is known as Gnome, for GNU Network Object Model
     Environment, was introduced here at the first Linux World computer
     exhibition. Its designers said that Gnome would make it possible
     for people who are not programmers or technicians to use Linux and
     the software that runs on it comfortably.
     
     Linux, which was developed over the last 15 years by a loosely
     organized movement of programmers known as GNU (the name is a
     Mobius strip-like acronym that stands for "GNU's not Unix") has
     been rapidly gaining ground among corporate and technical users of
     server computers and workstations because of its power and
     stability.
     
     But as a member of the Unix family of operating systems, it is
     manipulated by esoteric commands, not with the point-and-click
     graphical interfaces to which mouse-wielding consumers have grown
     accustomed.
     
     Gnome puts a friendly face on Linux by inserting a graphical
     interface between the operating system and the user, in much the
     way that Windows was originally an interface between users and
     MS-DOS.
     
     In the last year, the corporate world has begun to take Linux
     seriously, and its prospects brightened considerably with the
     announcement that I.B.M. would begin shipping it on some powerful
     server computers that manage large networks.
     
     The organizers of the free software movement have said, however,
     that they do not intend to limit Linux to corporate systems
     engineers.
     
     "This is aimed directly at the Windows desktop dominance," said
     Jean Bozeman, a research manager at the International Data
     Corporation, a market research firm.
     
     Gnome offers a set of "themes" that imitate the appearance of
     various operating systems, including Windows and Macintosh.
     
     Gnome's development has been led by Miguel de Icaza, a 26-year-old
     Mexican programmer and systems administrator for the Universidad
     Nacional Autónoma de México.
     
     He predicted that the program would attract a strong international
     backing, noting for example that the Mexican Government was
     planning to distribute a million copies to schools as part of a
     system known as Scholarnet.
     
     "Gnome is not just a pretty face," he said. It adds to Linux a
     number of sophisticated and attractive technical features.
     
     Gnome is distributed with a word processor, spreadsheet, data base,
     presentation manager, Web browser and e-mail. The program's
     designers said they were hoping to persuade commercial software
     developers to convert their Windows programs to take advantage of
     Gnome's features.
     
     Today's announcement, which was made by the Free Software
     Foundation and Red Hat Software Inc., a Linux developer, served as
     evidence of progress for the Linux movement. But it also hinted at
     internal tensions that have been building within GNU.
     
     That is because while Gnome is the most ambitious effort yet to put
     a simplified face on Linux, it is by no means the only effort.
     There are already several user interfaces available for Linux, and
     there has been growing concern that incompatibilities between them
     could handicap an operating system known for its integrity.
     
     Neither Windows nor the Macintosh operating system is as stable as
     Linux, but they are attractive to software developers because each
     offers a single set of rules that programmers follow when writing
     code. That is possible because the graphical interfaces are built
     in to those operating systems. Forcing programmers to write
     different code for each Linux interface would undermine efforts to
     attract third-party development for it.
     
     For that reason, it was notable that today's announcement received
     the blessing of Richard Stallman, the iconoclastic founder of the
     GNU movement and a Cambridge, Mass., programmer.
     
     Stallman told reporters that the free software movement had now
     achieved much of what he set out to do in the 1970's, when he began
     trying to liberate software programs from proprietary control.
     
     "Fifteen years ago they said this was impossible," he said. "They
     said this was too large a task."
          
   Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company


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