On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Hetz Ben-Hamo wrote: > > I suspect the chances of any of us actually moving RMS (is that what > > the M stands for Mr? ;) are slim to none. He is a man of strong > > convictions. I'm sure he would have reminded you that when Gnome > > started, KDE was not free, among other things. > > I have emailed him few weeks before Trolltech has announced that Trolltech > are switching from QPL to dual license (GPL. & QPL) - if he would have treated > this mail, we probably wouldn't have GNOME today, and we wouldn't have 2 > teams working on desktop enviroments..
A couple of more details: KDE started in 1996, in order to provide a better linux desktop. At the time, CDE was probably the best thing around. They chose to use QT because it was free/b and almost free/s . I figure that they dismissed the idea of actually selling anything related to KDE at the time... One of KDE's authors has been before the author of another great software: LyX. Again, it was based on an "almost free" toolkit (XForms) and this has hurt LyX in the long run, even though it is a great program (end of the story: XForms has become LGPL: the authors realized noone will buy it when there are better alternatives) KDE's authors were certainly pragmatists. But many in the linux community did not like this. Partly because of ideaological reasons (which are clear enough, and I'll spear them here) and partially for practical reasons: QT HAS A MONOPOLY - What if I want to apply a patch QT doesn't like? (I'm not allowed!) - What if QT doesn't want to support it anymore? - What if QT suddenly doesn't like SuSE? It is in a position to deny them of KDE and give their competitors an unfair atvantage I suspect that this is why RedHat chose not to include KDE (until it was forced by the community). Anyway, what do linux people do when they are faced with a non-free software? reimplement There has been at least one effort to re-implement QT. It did not get much help from KDE's folks. Therefore I must assume that they didn't feel bad about this license. Other people decided to build their own, competing, project: GNOME: Gnu Network Object Model Environment (or something simlar). As its name sugests, they have implemented there a number of novel buzzword concepts ;-) (e.g: network transparancy). RedHat needed a solid desktop for their distro, so they have actively supported gnome, by assigning developers to work on it, and by including it in their distro even before it was ready. SuSE, Mandrake (the distro that now calls itself "pure GPL") and others had no problem with shipping KDE. Actually the demand of people has forced even RedHat to add KDE into its distro. Debian was maybe the only distro that didn't have KDE for licensing reasons. Gnome has been the field test of a number of nice concepts. It has grown to something fairly different from KDE. By the time QT have changed their license to something more acceptable (2000? 2001?) gnome has become something completely independent. There is no point in merging the two. But if some KDE zealots mention "duplication of efforts" as a reason for not developing anything other than KDE, this sounds very ironic: for 4 (5?) years KDE developers were dependent on a non-free library for a major functionality of their desktop. They did about zero effots to work around this *major* problem (I stress again: both idealogocal and practical problem). It is by pure luck that QT has changed its license. It is also by pure luck that QT has not collapased or anything in the interim. If one of the above would have happened, the work of the KDE project would have been lost. Some of the developers would have abandoned it. Some might have joined Miguel and Redhat in the project-that-starts-with-g . This would have been a major duplicated work! > > After all - if 99% of the entire Linux community can agree to use XFree86, why > do we need 2 desktop enviroments? it's just confuses ISVs, it's a nightmare to > interoperate between them.. Only one XFree for historical reasons. Only two major bloated desktops: for historical reasons -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
