1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
4 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
5 <title>The Story of the GNOME project</title>
7 <body bgcolor=white text=black>
9 <h1>The Story of the GNOME project</h1>
11 An incomplete recollection of some of the events in the story of the
12 GNOME project. Maybe one day I will finish it.
14 <h2>The early days</h2>
16 GNOME was the result of various attempts from a group of friends that
17 wanted to improve free software. I list here some of the ideas
18 and projects that eventually lead to the creation of the GNOME
21 You might also find the <a href="helix-history.html">Story of Ximian</a>
25 <h3>The foundations for the GNOME project</h3>
27 In 1996 my friend <a href="http://people.redhat.com/sopwith">Elliot
28 Lee</a> was working at <a href="http://www.redhat.com">Red
29 Hat</a> for a summer as the webmaster. We shared a lot of common interests
30 related to the future of <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free software</a>. We both
31 contributed to various efforts to bring free software forward. After the
32 introduction of Windows 95, it was clear that the free software universe
33 was lacking a number of technologies and that we were lagging behind in
34 various areas. I did some work into a free implementation of the Java
35 Awt (back in those days Java was still seen as the solution for the lack
36 of software in Unix systems).<br>
38 At the time I was working with Ralf Baechle in the <a
39 href="http://lwww.linux.sgi.com">Linux/SGI</a> port
40 that was partially funded by SGI. From time to time I would devote a
41 few hours to other free software efforts that would help close the gap between
42 proprietary offerings and Linux. My friend Ariel Faigon at SGI had once
43 raised the issues of the future of free software and the lack of desktop
44 applications and the lack of an OLE-like model.<br>
46 Elliot and I tried to organize various efforts to address some of the consistency
49 issues in Linux. Our first attempt was the libapp effort, which was a set
52 of library functions that would be used to access common resources used
55 by applications (configuration management, keeping track of recently used
58 files, mime handling and so on). But we never quite did finish this project.
61 At this time the idea of producing a complete system like GNOME was out
64 of the question and we were aiming for the easy tasks first.<br>
66 At the Atlanta Linux Showcase a year before I had met Todd who was interested
69 in producing a full desktop based on Scheme. This project only produced
72 screenshots and we never got too far.<br>
74 In 1996 I recruited two students from the recently created Computer Science
75 degree in the <a href="http://www.fciencias.unam.mx">Facultad de
76 Ciencias</a> at UNAM. Those
77 two students were Arturo Espinosa and <a href="http://primates.helixcode.com/~federico">Federico Mena</a>.
78 They were working on assorted free software projects, and in projects
79 around my favorite language at the time Scheme. They worked with me in
80 free software and in fun projects at the <a href="http://www.nuclecu.unam.mx">Instituto
81 de Ciencias Nucleares</a> at the <a href="http://www.unam.mx">Universidad Nacional
82 Autonoma de Mexico</a>. There we also worked on the <a href="http://www.linux.org.mx">Mexican
83 Linux Users Group</a>.<br>
85 In the Summer of 1997 my friend Randy Chapman invited me to interview at
86 the Microsoft Internet Explorer for Solaris on the SPARC (because of my
87 background in the Linux/SPARC port). I went to interview to Microsoft
88 that summer and met both Randy Chapman and <a
89 href="http://www.nat.org">Nat Friedman</a> for
90 the first time in person. We had known for a long time from the LinuxNet
93 At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very interested
94 in it inmediately. Upon my return to Mexico Federico and I started to
95 design a GUI control infrastructure for Unix that we code named `GNOME'.
96 He was working as the maintainer of the <a
97 href="http://www.gimp.org">GIMP</a> back
98 then and our efforts were targeted towards its adoption on Tk at the time.
99 This project was the seed for what later became the <a
100 href="http://developer.ximian.com/tech/bonobo.html">Bonobo</a> component
101 architecture (sixteen months would pass before I started working on Bonobo).<br>
103 At this point the <a href="http://www.kde.org">Kool Desktop
104 Environment project</a> (KDE)
105 was showing a lot of promise: a team of programmers started an effort
106 to bring Unix to the desktop using the C++ based GUI toolkit. I mailed
107 my friend Erik Troan suggesting him to include that code into the Red
108 Hat distribution and I mailed Richard Stallman to let him know that this
109 interesting project existed. KDE was licensed under the terms of the
110 GNU GPL. I got a reply back from both Erik and Richard pointing out that
111 KDE dependency on Qt resulted in a piece of non-free software. Qt did
112 not end users the right to modify, redistribute nor distribute modifed
113 copies of the code and violated the terms of the GNU GPL. <br>
115 Being a free software entusiast, I contacted Troll Tech, the authors of Qt
118 to propose an alternate licensing scheme for Qt that would still allow them
121 to build a company while empowering users but got no reply. The Troll Tech
124 FAQ at the time also contained significant errors regarding the GPL and
127 ignored dual-licensing schemes. After a time out period, we decided to
130 do something about this problem. Also discouraging was the fact that the
133 KDE developers were not interested in resolving those issues as pointed
136 out in their FAQ document and their mailing list policies. <br>
138 We evaluated writing a free Qt replacement, but reimplementing an API would
139 most likely result in less efficient software and would have taken too
140 long to implement. GNUstep, Wine and LessTif were other projects that
141 had attempted to reimplement a proprietary API and just had a limited
142 success after a long development history. <br>
144 Various friends from the #linux channel in the LinuxNet network were also
145 in part responsible for the launch of the project. <br>
146 <h3>GNOME is born</h3>
147 <b>Update:</b>We did try for a few days to work on the GNUstep
149 Francisco Bustamente (bit), Federico and I would be working
151 whole thing to work, but it was too big, too slow, too
152 buggy, too incomplete
153 and there was little organization in the team.
154 After repeated attempts to
155 work on it, we eventually gave up.
159 So I started the GNOME project at that point in August 1997. The draft for
162 the announcement was sent to various friends of mine which included Richard
165 Stallman, Marc Ewing, Elliot Lee, Erik Troan, Spencer Kimball and Peter
168 Mathis. When the project was ready Federico and I sent the announcement
171 of the creation of the GNOME projects to a few mailing lists: The GIMP mailing
174 list, the Guile mailing list, the GNU project announcement mailing list
177 and comp.os.linux.announce.<br>
179 Federico and I started developing the GNOME libraries on our spare time.
182 He was still mostly working on the GIMP and I was still mostly working on
185 the X11 IRIX emulation code for Linux on the SGI/Indy. We setup the makefiles
188 to mimic the Gtk+ setup. <br>
190 Various early contributions from the people on the mailing list had a long
192 lasting effect: CORBA was going to be our foundation for the component architecture,
194 and DocBook would be used to write the documentation of GNOME. Initially,
196 we looked into Xerox's ILU, but the license of it was not free, so we had
198 to research other options: we tried MICO for some time, but it was too large
200 and too slow for most developers and users. Then we looked at Flick's optimizing
202 compiler and finally Dick and Elliot would start work on it. <br>
204 At this point a friend of ours registered gnome.org and offered to host the
206 CVS server for GNOME. <br>
208 By november that year GNOME had reached enough momentum that both Federico
211 and I dropped other projects and devoted ourselves completely to work on
214 GNOME. We did port the GtkXmHTML engine over the december vacations and
217 I started to read Slashdot.<br>
219 We had a meeting in the early days of December with Marc Ewing and DrMike
221 at the Red Hat offices. To make this meeting I had to skip the U2 concert
223 in Mexico City for their Pop tour. I remember that they were transmitting
225 the concert live on satelite TV, but Erik took me dancing.<br>
227 Marc was creating the <a href="http://www.labs.redhat.com">Red Hat
228 Advanced Development Labs</a> which
229 would be the first funded team of developers that would work towards improving
230 GNOME. RHAD Labs was created in Jannuary of 1998. Marc and DrMike worked
231 on the GNOME help browser; Raster worked on Gdk_Imlib, Enlightenment
232 and the Gtk+ themes engine. Later that year Owen, Jonathan, Dave and
233 Federico would join. <br>
235 <h2><a name="summit"></a>The GNOME summit</h2>
236 GNOME 0.13, 0.20 or 0.30 had been released and we were demoing it at the
237 Linux Expo that was being hosted at Duke University. This is also the first
238 time I did a presentation on the GNOME project (which turned out ok, despite
239 the problems I had with my laptop on stage). <br>
241 This was also the first time that I saw Nat Friedman after having met him
242 at Microsoft, and it was a lot of fun. He was working on a more extensible
243 dingus architecture for various terminal programs. The dingus-click feature
244 would eventually make it into GNOME terminal and prove to be a necessary
245 feature for everything that pretended to be a terminal emulator. <br>
247 Marc Ewing and Michael Fullbright organized the GNOME summit: the first meeting
249 where various GNOME developers would get together. This was organized the
251 day after the Third Linux Expo held at Duke University. Various GNOME hackers
253 were going to the conference, and various of us got together to discuss
255 the various directions that the project would take. <br>
257 Various hackers were present: Chris Lahey, Larry Ewing, Adrian Likins, Raster,
259 Tim Gerla, Jonathan Bladford, Rosanna Yuen, Matthew Wilson, Federico Mena,
261 Marc Ewing, Michael Fullbright, Mark Chricton, Jay Painter, Alan Cox. Notable
263 appearances include David Miller (which went there to get a GNOME shirt)
265 and Telsa Gwynne (which later would become involved in the documentation
267 effort). Elliot Lee would arrive later that day<br>
269 With the exception of Jay, all of them are still involved with GNOME hacking
272 <h3><a name="poundgimp"></a>#gimp</h3>
273 Various of the hackers involved in GIMP and Gtk+ used to hang around in the
274 #gimp channel on irc.mint.net. A lot of very clueful people used to come
275 by the channel and offer their input and their help in various matters.
276 Many of the people who came to #gimp would become GNOME contributors.
277 #gimp was also a good forum for discussing GNOME, as it did not drew the
278 attention too much to the project from the people who were not interested
279 in the success of the project.<br>
281 It remained in that way until most of the discussion in #gimp was related
282 to GNOME, at that point Zach created a new #gnome channel, and most of the
283 GNOME discussion took place in the new channel. <br>
284 <h3><a name="gnomelogo"></a>The GNOME Logo</h3>
285 Tuomas Kuosmanen (Tigert) was one of our friends that used to go by #gimp.
286 Tuomas being a GIMP user himself he did various logos, the GIMP mascot (Wilber)
287 and he also had done some small icons that were very nice looking. We started
288 to use Tuomas' icons in GNOME, and he would draw icons for us for the various
289 GNOME applications, and also for the various "Stock" icons (an idea I had
290 that Eckehard implemented to add some consistency to the look of applications).<br>
292 When we were looking for an icon for the GNOME panel, we went to Tuomas site,
293 and we picked one of the icons he had drawn that had no association to anything
294 yet, a gradient-filled foot in a square. This was the foot that was used
295 for the menu for a long time.<br>
297 The foot turned out to be problematic, as someone spotted a similar looking
298 logo, and both DrMike and Rasterman were worried about possible problems
299 caused because our GNOME foot looked to similar to the other logo. <br>
301 The Red Hat labs decided to sponsor a logo competition for GNOME a few months
302 later, and the prize was a digitizing tablet. There is one drawback to
303 the logo contest: it was run by the GIMP people, and hence one of the requirements
304 was to make the logo using the GIMP. This means that we did not get any
305 vector-based logos for the project. There were many good submissions, many
306 of them very good.<br>
308 We chose to use a new version of the foot done by Tuomas himself. The big
309 difference is that the new foot looked like a "G" instead (the other one
310 was a right foot, this would be a left foot, G-shaped). The logo was quite
311 nice, and we are still using it today.<br>
312 <h3><a name="gnomecal"></a>GnomeCal</h3>
313 Craig Small had been working on a calendar application for GNOME, but his
314 time constraints did not allow him to continue the work. And given the
315 state of complexity of gnome development, he had not done a lot of progress
316 on it. I went to Tijuana to provide Solaris consulting to a northern phone
317 company called Telnor. At Telnor I saw a recent version of CDE (At the
318 university machines, we did not have either a recent version of Solaris,
319 nor the disk space required to run CDE) and it had a nice calendar application.
322 When I came back, I proposed to Federico to write a calendar application
323 in 10 days (because Federico would never show up on weekends to the ICN
324 at UNAM to work on GNOME ;-). The first day we looked at OpenWindows calendar,
325 that day we read all the relevant standard documents that were required
326 to implement the calendar, and started hacking. Ten days later we did meet
327 our deadline and we had implemented GnomeCal (Arturo would help us on the
328 last two days to implement the year view of the calendar). This calendar
329 application had a pretty nice internal architecture and looked pretty nice
330 compared to anything out there. The user interface was also pretty good
331 for those days early in the GNOME history, and it was definetly comparable
332 to the features in proprietary small calendar applications. Little did
333 we know about Outloook back then.<br>
335 At that time, it seemed like a good idea to implement the calendar server
336 support, but we did not have the time to do it. Now, the funny thing is
337 that nobody ever implemented the ugly spec that was available back then.
338 Even today, the CAP protocol is not wildely implemented, and there is now
339 an effort to create a "thin" version of CAP called CRISP.<br>
341 A few years later we would come back to hack on the calendar, this time it
342 would be integrated into the <a
343 href="http://www.helixcode.com/apps/evolution.php3">Evolution</a> groupware
344 suite and it would be part of the core business of <a href="http://www.helixcode.com">Helix
346 <h3><a name="gnumericcanvas"></a>Gnumeric and the Canvas</h3>
347 I was beginning to become very frustrated when developing applications.
348 I would kept pointing at Tk's beautiful Canvas widget as an example of a
349 genuinely fine piece of code that improved the life of programmers. We
350 were spending countless hours writing repaing handlers, writing event handlers,
351 and redoing the same code over and over again, and getting it buggy over
352 and over again. I convinced Federico to look into the Tk canvas. I felt
353 completely powerless, as I was still not very familiarized with many of
354 the X concepts and was overwhelmed by it. <br>
356 Federico took a few days to study the Tk canvas, and he took a few days to
357 explain this to me. He did a first implementaiton of the Tk canvas that
358 he got running in a couple of months (in time for the Usenix conference,
359 as I remember showing the code to Marc over breakfast, as he was growing
360 impatient about the state of development).<br>
362 The Linux Kongress in Germany happened that year, and Marius Volmer, a then-active
363 gnome hacker raised a number of problems with the canvas implementation:
364 it was not going to be very easy to wrap the canvas for scripting languages,
365 indeed it was going to be very hard to do it. When I came back to Mexico
366 from the Kongress, we discussed the changes required to the Canvas.<br>
368 The new Canvas design was a lot cleaner, and it was fully based on GtkObjects
369 and used GtkArgs instead of the home-grown system that I had suggested before
370 (which was, ahem, very broken). <br>
372 At this time, I started designing and implementing the Gnumeric spreadsheet.
373 Gnumeric would be the first application to implement its own canvas items,
374 and it would be the first application to stress test the canvas. Various
375 changes and improvements to the Canvas were done because of the requirements
376 that Gnumeric had.<br>
378 <h3><a name="fedlabs"></a>Federico joins the Red Hat Labs.</h3>
379 Federico took one year out from college, and moved to North Carolina to work
380 at Red Hat Labs on GNOME. His first task at Red Hat Labs was to improve
381 the GNOME Calendar (GnomeCal). He was supposed to work on groupware features
382 of the calendar, but pressing needs, deadlines and other tasks at Red Hat
383 prevented Federico from finishing this work (which was, btw, extremely complex,
384 given the assorted collection of broken standards. Even today it is a hard
385 task for a single programmer to take on if you want to be standards compliant).<br>
386 <h3><a name="qpl"></a>The QPL</h3>
387 Around November 1998, Troll Tech announced their plans (FIXME: was it november?)
388 to release the upcoming version of Qt (Qt 2.0) under a new license that
389 was going to comply to the Open Source definition. This announcement did
390 actually have two effects: it killed project Harmony (which was a free clone
391 of the Qt API) and weakened the reasons why people would support GNOME instead
392 of waiting for the new Qt library. <br>
393 <h3><a name="099freeze"></a>The 0.99 code freeze.</h3>
394 In November 1998 we started to freeze the code for the GNOME 1.0 release.
395 We broke the freeze a couple of times to accomodate the integration of
396 Raph Levien's work on the GNOME anti-aliased canvas. There were various
397 interest mixed here: in one hand Red Hat was in need of a desktop environment,
398 and in the other hand, various hackers had been working very long hours
399 to make this happen. It would take a lot of discussion to get the Anti-Aliased
400 canvas into the main GNOME distribution. This would delay the release just
402 <h2><a name="gnome10"></a>GNOME 1.0</h2>
403 GNOME 1.0 was released in March 1999. It was announced to the world during
406 the Linux World Expo in San Jose, California. This version marked the freeze
409 of the GNOME 1.0 API. This release contained several bugs. The first version
412 of GNOME to ship in a Linux distribution was a derivative of GNOME 1.0 that
415 included various improvements over the plain 1.0.<br>
417 GNOME had been difficult to build and keep up to date, which led to the little
418 testing in 1.0 and gave GNOME 1.0 a bad reputation due to its instability.
419 This release already included a very basic CORBA support in the Panel,
420 and a pretty good object activation system (not the best one, but definetly
421 passable. This would be replaced for GNOME 1.4 with OAF).<br>
423 We fixed as many bugs as possible that people were reporting, and we released
424 new packages constantly (it has always been a tradition to release packages
425 with bug fixes as soon as possible). Red Hat shipped version 5.0 of their
426 operating system with GNOME 1.0.xx, which contains a load of bug fixes but
427 was still very unstable. They also included in this release KDE. <br>
428 <h2><a name="octobergnome"></a>October GNOME (1.0.55)</h2>
429 This release was cordinated by Elliot Lee at Red Hat. The purpose of this
430 release was to fix all the reported bugs that people had been running
431 into. By this time the new <a
432 href="http://bugs.gnome.org">GNOME bug tracking system</a> had
433 been in use for some time, and this helped developers track down problems
434 and fix them for the release. This release of GNOME was pretty solid
435 and got distributed by various Linux vendors. <br>
437 Elliot's work towards making a robust distribution of GNOME paid of, and
440 this version was deployed wildly. October GNOME was released in October
443 1999. The release number 1.0.55 corresponded to the major version of the
446 core gnome packages and libraries. The version name and the actual number
449 obey to the fact that we were trying to avoid a version number competition
452 with the KDE project as it could have been perceived as version number inflation.
455 So 1.0.55 was the tag chosen, and the "October GNOME" keyword was used to
458 refer to this release.<br>
459 <h2><a name="earlyindustry"></a>The GNOME early industry</h2>
460 In October 1999, two GNOME-based companies were incorporated in the United
461 States: <a href="http://www.eazel.com">Eazel</a> and <a href="http://www.helixcode.com">Helix Code</a>.
462 Both companies have been working ever since in various infrastructural
463 parts of GNOME as well as working on various components of the GNOME desktop.
464 Eazel was founded by Andy Hertzfeld, Bart Decrem and Mike Boich. Helix
465 Code was founded by Nat Friedmand and me. You can read <a href="helix-history.html">the
466 history of Helix Code</a>.<br>
468 Eazel's main focus is the file manager and file-manager oriented services;
471 Helix Code ships a pre-packaged version of GNOME called Helix GNOME and
474 is focused on people oriented services within Evolution.<br>
476 Bertrand founded <a href="http://www.henzai.com">Henzai</a> in the second quarter of
477 2000. His company is focused on GNOME for PDA devices. <br>
479 Gnumatic was incorporated in the year 2000 to work on financial software.
482 Led by Linas Veptas, Gnumatic produces GnuCash, the personal finance software
486 <h2><a name="guadec"></a>GUADEC</h2>
487 Mathieu Lacage organized the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference
488 (<a href="http://www.guadec.enst.fr">GUADEC</a>) in Paris France on March 2000. GUADEC
489 was initially a small conference to be delivered to the students of <a href="http://www.enst.fr">France
490 Telecom</a> in Paris by Havoc, Federico and me. I discussed with Mathieu
491 the possibility of getting funding for making GUADEC a larger GNOME conference
492 that planned. When he agreed, I started to raise funds from various free
493 software companies in the US and Germany. Mathieu did the same with companies
494 and sponsors in France. In the end we managed to get enough money to fly
495 around fourty of the core GNOME developers to France for fours days. <br>
497 The GUADEC conference was a success: it helped the various GNOME developers
500 to get to know each other; The high bandwidth communication that was made
503 possible between developers, contributors, translators and documentation
506 contributors at the conference really pushed GNOME forward: a global vision
509 of the project could be explained to more people and many things got in
512 sync at this point.<br>
514 The two GNOME-based companies <a href="http://www.eazel.com">Eazel</a>
515 and <a href="http://www.helixcode.com">Helix
516 Code</a> were represented in the conference. We did miss Elliot Lee though,
517 he could not make it. <br>
519 This conference would be the foundation for the success of the Bongo GNOME
521 release later in the year. <br>
522 <a href="docs/Guadec-thank-letter.txt"><br>
523 This letter</a> was sent to the to various sponsors of GUADEC.<br>
524 <h2><a name="bongognome"></a>Bongo GNOME (1.2)</h2>
525 The GNOME 1.2 was mostly a user interface polishing, update and improvement
529 In Jannuary 2000 <a href="http://primates.helixcode.com/~jacob">Jacob
530 Berkman</a> started to include
531 into gnome-core a number of user interface improvements that had been suggested
532 by the <a href="http://developer.gnome.org/ui-hitsquad">GNOME UI</a> team and from various ideas that
533 he, George and various other hackers contributed to the system. This release
534 would also include memprof (mem buddy) for the first time and will feature
535 applications built using the Glade GUI designer (and of course included
536 Glade and Libglade for this purpose). <br>
538 Bongo GNOME was released in May 2000 after a one month delay. This release
541 was originally supposed to be called "April GNOME". Delays in the release
544 pushed the name to "May GNOME", but people felt that in a few years we would
547 run out of months and it would be hard to tell which version came before
550 which version. Hence we decided to tag the release name Bongo GNOME and
553 all packages adopted the 1.2 convention for version numbers.<br>
555 This release of GNOME is still fully binary compatible with GNOME 1.0 as
558 shipped they year before: every application written against the GNOME 1.0
561 API would run unmodified in GNOME 1.2. The Foobar menu also appeared on
564 this release, and the input from the User Interface team could be seen all
567 around the desktop.<br>
569 Helix Code provided pre-build tested packages for GNOME 1.2 for seven Linux-based
572 distributions on Intel and PowerPC as well as a Solaris port. This was known
575 as the Helix GNOME distribution.<br>
576 <h2><a name="foundation"></a>The GNOME Foundation</h2>
577 The GNOME foundation was announced in August 2000 at the Linux World Expo
580 in San Jose California. FIXME, URL to the announcement.<br>
582 There was an extensive coverage on the news.<br>
584 Various companies joined together to continue the development of the GNOME
587 user environment and GNOME-based technologies. After the foundation was
590 announced, a number of initiatives from the founding members was announced:<br>
592 <li>Sun Microsystems adopts GNOME technologies for their user environment
594 in the Solaris OS.</li>
595 <li>Hewlett-Packard adopts GNOME for their user environment in the HP-UX
597 operating system.</li>
598 <li>Sun will port their recently OpenSourced StarOffice suite to the Gtk+
600 toolkit and will integrate with the GNOME <a href="software.html#bonobo">Bonobo component
602 architecture</a>.</li>
603 <li>IBM contributed the SashXB rapid development environment to GNOME.</li>
604 <li>GNOME would adopt and integrate Mozilla as part of its desktop strategy.</li>
605 <li>The GNOME project would adopt OpenOffice technologies.</li>
608 These announcements were just part of a bigger picture: Eazel's file manager
611 to appear in GNOME 1.4; Helix Code's Evolution groupware suite to appear
614 in GNOME 1.4. Together with the support of Gnumatic, VA-Linux and TurboLinux.<br>
616 Sun's commitment to GNOME is very widespread at this point: their teams are
619 working around various technologies in GNOME. Nautilus and Evolution were
622 demoed at Linux World Expo embedding StarOffice components. <br>
624 <h2><a name="accesslab"></a>Sun creates the GNOME Accesability Lab</h2>
626 In September 2000, Sun announced the creation of an accesability lab
627 that would help improve GNOME to be used by people with
630 <h2><a name="gnome14"></a>GNOME 1.4</h2>
632 The GNOME 1.4 release engineers are <a
633 href="http://primates.helixcode.com/~jacob">Jacob</a> and <a
634 href="http://www.advogato.org/person/mjs">Maciej</a>. This release
635 will include for the first time the Bonobo component system as
636 part of GNOME and will contain the new file manager <a
637 href="http://nautilus.eazel.com">Nautilus</a> and the <a
638 href="http://www.helixcode.com/apps/evolution.php3">Evolution</a>