> 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
s/HAS/HAD ;) > - What if I want to apply a patch QT doesn't like? (I'm not allowed!) Yes, you are, please read the QPL license. Fact is, that with since KDE 1.0 beta 2, QT was patched by the KDE (small) team. > - What if QT doesn't want to support it anymore? Then it would have become GPL (again, read the license). > - 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 No it's not, and wasn't.. > I suspect that this is why RedHat chose not to include KDE (until it was > forced by the community). Nope. They were including KDE after the license change only (see bero's RPMS for Red Hat 4 days after the license change) > 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. Yup, the free-QT, but it was done with some help from the KDE developers. > 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). Ah yeah. Anyone remembered Red Hat 6.1 with GNOME? :) > 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. Way before it was ready... nothing changed so much actually - feel free to try Red Hat 8.1 beta (phoebe) with their GNOME... > 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. And 1 day after the license change - the whole debian users and their dog did apt-get install kde - I know, I've seen some logs ;) > 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. Yup, you cannot merge them... > 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. Nope, non luck at all. KDE DOES promotes and sell licenses. Trolltech are not Eazel, and they are and were aware of the issues. > 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! Why do you think so? SuSE, Mandrake & slackware were releasing KDE with the QPL'd QT, and TrollTech didn't ask for a single dollar from them. If you follow GNOME & KDE CVS - you'll find that it's the other way around, GNOME copies from KDE, and GNOME itself is MUCH more bloated compared to KDE. Just think about Nautilus - which uses Mozilla (or Gecko) which itself is a bloat (want to compare KHTML's 140k lines to Gecko - don't take my word, ask Apple engineers)... > > 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. Think so? feel free to try XFree 4.3 - and whats going to come in 5.0 ;) Thanks, Hetz ================================================================= 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]
