here's an alternative for all those who like the idea of KDE, but don't like
the fact that it's based on a non-free GUI toolkit.
this one's based on the Gimp's GTK, which *is* free.
enjoy
---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Miguel de Icaza <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
>Subject: The GNOME Desktop project
>Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 13:43:42 GMT
>Organization: none
>Lines: 103
>Approved: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Lars Wirzenius)
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The GNOME Desktop project
(GNU Network Object Model Environment)
http://bananoid.nuclecu.unam.mx/gnome
* Goals
We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly
applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based
entirely on free software:
- We want the applications to have a common look and feel, and
to share as many visual elements and UI concepts as possible.
- We want to use the GTK toolkit as our toolkit for writing
the applications.
The GTK toolkit (http://www.cs.umn.edu/~amundson/gtk and
http://levien.com/~slow/gtk/) is the toolkit written by
Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball, Josh MacDonald, for the GNU
Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) project
(http://scam.xcf.berkeley.edu/~gimp).
- We want to encourage people to contribute code and to test
the code, so that the software will compile out of the box
by using GNU's tools for automatic source configuration.
- We plan to export the GTK API through a procedural database
(which will in fact be an object database) to allow easy
integration with scripting languages and modules written in
other languages.
- We plan to use GTK/Scheme bindings for coding small
utilities and applications. When these bindings are more
mature, it should be possible to write complete applications
in Scheme.
* Some common questions regarding the project
Why don't you just use/contribute to KDE?
KDE is a nice project; they have good hackers working on it and
they have done a very good job. Unfortunately, they selected the
non-free Qt toolkit as the foundation for the project, which poses
legal problems for those desiring to redistribute the software.
Why not write a free Qt replacement instead?
The KDE project -in its current form- has about 89,000 lines of
code, on the other hand, the source code for the Qt library has
about 91,000 lines.
Qt also forces the programmer to write his code in C++ or Python.
Gtk can be used in C, Scheme, Python, C++, Objective-C and Perl.
Also, we believe that KDE has some design problems (they have lots
of good ideas though) that we plan to fix.
Under what license does the GNOME fall?
As most GNU software, GNOME application code will be released
under the GNU GPL. GNOME specific libraries will be released
under the terms of the GNU LGPL.
Will you rewrite everything from scratch?
No. We will try to reuse the existing code for GNU programs as
much as possible, while adhering to the guidelines of the project.
Putting nice and consistent user interfaces over all-time
favorites will be one of the projects.
We plan on reusing code from KDE as well.
* Joining the GNOME mailing list:
We have created a mailing list for people interested in discussing
the development of this project. To subscribe, use this command:
echo 'subscribe gnome' | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] .
Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
