On Tuesday 21 December 2004 12:24, nf wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 14:12, Jason Keirstead wrote:
> > Why does it always seem like people want to make KDE use Gnome
> > technologies (often not as far developed as their KDE counterparts) in
> > order to improve compatability?
>
> I think there are mainly three reasons - and none of them is about
> quality or C++.
>
> 1) KDE libs are based on Qt and Qt is under GPL and not LGPL. A lot of
> people think that's not a good choice for a basic library to be used by
> everyone. I know you will tell me that there are workarounds for that,
> but still ... for lots of people this is important. Not all "Open
> Source" licenses are GPL compatible. And for some reason ALL other basic
> libraries are LGPL (or even more libaral) licensed. Qt is really the
> only basic library which is strictly under GPL. (Kernel and glibc are
> GPL but have linking exceptions.)

   Sorry, you're arguing that the choice of one -free- license vs another 
-free- license is more important than any other factor.  This is rediculous.  
Don't try to start up a license war here.

> 2) Qt is one big block including GUI stuff (i have heard that is going
> to be changed - QtCore - and that's definitely good news)

  It is true, so this argument is irrelevant.

> 3) Gnome libraries are modular from design. They almost seem to be
> designed with having the "common" usage in mind. Usually there is no GUI
> stuff inside them. KDE libraries traditionally seem to be more designed
> to serve a single desktop and come as one big block - the core for the
> KDE desktop. The frontend of KIO has GUI stuff inside for instance.
> Gnome-VFS doesn't.

   To put this a different way, KDE libraries are designed to write consistent 
and powerful GUI applications quickly and easily.  KDE takes full advantage 
of component based design, and integration across applications and 
components.  You, on the other hand, wish to remove this from KDE so that 
applications that don't use KDE libraries will be able to share code in some 
sort of loose way?  I'm choosing to ignore the idea of GUI code in the 
libraries being a problem because we're creating a desktop platform, and 
really, CLI tools are great (and I use primarily CLI tools day-to-day), but 
come on, it's not really that relevant to our end goals.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/