End of GNOME I guess it's official. Miguel's announcement to base GNOME on .NET has finished that desktop as a viable strategy. .NET is a mostly closed set of APIs Microsoft is rolling out to extend its Windows platform to non-Windows computers (making them effectively Windows computers in the process). Either Gnome developers will revolt, and the project will fail, or Microsoft will shift the APIs from under the successful project and so cripple it. Read all about it on Slashdot. Miguel posted his response a day later, and it's pretty lame. It ignores how Microsoft will tie .NET infrastructure with .NET applications, and how the functionality he seeks already exists with Java. Despite what Redmond wants people to think, .NET is still very much pie-in-the-sky.

Oh, and the Palm OS is finished too. Their new OS is saddled with technical gee-gaws that cost lots of money to produce, but confer no benefit on the end user, and probably hurt the quality of the experience. Since they can't hand out $400 with each unit (the way Microsoft does with its Pocket PC) their new product will tank in the market. Unable to amortize away the high development costs, the company will fold, probably taking the OS with it. And don't count on Palm putting the new OS on non-PC devices--embedded GNU/Linux is already there.