From kde-announce Thu Aug 21 13:42:41 1997 From: Richard Guenther Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 13:42:41 +0000 To: kde-announce Subject: The GNOME Desktop project (fwd) X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-announce&m=88665502614202 Hi! Was soll man dazu sagen... (forwarded von c.o.l.a.) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 17 AUG 1997 13:43:42 GMT From: Miguel de Icaza Newgroups: comp.os.linux.announce Subject: The GNOME Desktop project -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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 majordomo@nuclecu.unam.mx - -- This article has been digitally signed by the moderator, using PGP. http://www.iki.fi/liw/lars-public-key.asc has PGP key for validating signature. Send submissions for comp.os.linux.announce to: linux-announce@news.ornl.gov PLEASE remember a short description of the software and the LOCATION. This group is archived at http://www.iki.fi/liw/linux/cola.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM/cAD4QRll5MupLRAQHwdQQAtN8Ua7ofmGvUBTGk913fHxMsNxKVXrhG eFk+vd3U9zqiDzIWDN87GoYsgv0sVPvlpEW84vPgDbFiLIG/qHVRMrv/lu7P3hzz kOtmVOROvAX8xPAhBVl6ZRBL/WAstV2XiaMBLAEBGfU7gCkooQeomYnZxd/vnTHf sCcn33MD6iE= =lAi5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----