March 4, 1999

New Program Is Introduced to Ease Use of Linux System

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Move Is Challenge to Proprietary Software

By JOHN MARKOFF

AN 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.

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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.

Neither Windows nor the Macintosh operating system is as stable as Linux.

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."