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List:       kde
Subject:    Re: GNOME Desktop Project
From:       Alex Kremer <kresa () cs ! huji ! ac ! il>
Date:       1997-08-19 15:19:20
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On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Bernd Johannes Wuebben wrote:
> 
> I really don't want to rant on about this, but I must repeat, that in my
> opinion it would have been much better if Miguel and his followers would have
> contacted us and talked to us. But let's forget about this for the moment. 
> 
> What is much more important is that: Unity is an advantage that counts!
> 
> Thus it is my believe that having two desktop projects is going to
> hurt Linux more than it will help. It dilutes resources and will most likely
> create competing standards. Trying to work together or at least trying
> to talk about that would be the first step in my view, not announcing
> a new project out of the blue. 
> 
> We have alreadyenought competition such as Windows NT. ( you might not 
> agree ..) The Linux world would be much better advised to work together
> as a TEAM rather then against each other. 
> 
> Bernd
> wuebben@kde.org


Right to the point.

I admire the work KDE people did. Both KDE and gnome pojects mean that the
Linux community has finally reached the stage of writting a solid desktop
enviroment for simple users. Imagine what would have happened if
X windows standard included a widget set API. Today nither Bill Gates nor
Jobs could approach "user-friendliness" of UNIX/Linux. Instead what has
happened. There was no standard widget set, no standard API for writting
a desktop environment GUI. So where are we now. World domination? Don't
make me laugh! We are at the beginning. If we do it wrong now, we'll
never get there (or even close).

Go ahead and split the eforts into two groups. That means different
APIs, different IPC, different L&F, different everything.

Now, what am I as a potential free or comercial developer supposed to
do? Invest even a $100000 either as my time or true investment (commercial
app). Do you think a potential office suite developer can take that
chance. It will go for M$ crapware for 2 reasons:

        1. large part of the existing market
        2. standard (no metter how stupid) API

The first will never change if the Linux community is not able to ensure
the second one!

I used to be proud of using Linux and free software, because I thought it 
was made by smart people for smart people. I was ready to start investing
serious part of my time to help the efort. What do you think this flame
means. It means we are stupid and unable to make one serious decision.   

When put into this perspective it is completely imaterial if Qt is
not GPL or/and gtk is not mature. A free replacement for Qt can be
written (it was done for Motif and OpenGL), gtk can be improved.

What is STUPID is writing millions of lines incompatible with each other,
not only because it is a waste of time, but because that is the major
reason UNIX is losing to NT, and if we go long with this stupid 
division and flame each other for the rest of the decade we are going
to lose big time.
 
DO NOT make this mistake. It is better to stop further development for
a month and decide what to do, than divide the Linux developers.

Linux is ready to take off as a desktop environment, but it will
never become what we want it to become if we allow this division!!!

So, please, PLEASE, we can flame each other for some time, but we
have to proceed with unified aproach, even it that means rewritting
large parts of KDE, or setling for (non GPLed) Qt, and writing FreeQt, or
what ever else solution we come up with.

BTW this kind of problems are what makes dictators and propriatary
software possible. They can make this decisions from above
and no one can argue. The democracy is usually too slow. 

kreso

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