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List:       kde-freeqt
Subject:    Re: [freeqt] Harmony Revival
From:       Wolfgang Thaller <wolfgang.thaller () gmx ! net>
Date:       1999-03-25 19:16:25
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Carl Thompson wrote:
>However, some members of the KDE team have said on the list recently that
>KDE would not switch from QT even if a free compatible alternative existed.
>To me, that is much more of a concern than Troll Tech.

If it's really compatible, KDE doesn't really need to be changed. And after
all, KDE is free software. And perhaps not everyone who believes that some
commercial software and shareware has the right to exist (please don't
flame me...) has already switched to GNOME (I surely will if Harmony
fails). If Harmony is fully Qt compatible, KDE won't need to be forked;
there will be just a few changes to the makefiles and maybe a few diffs
here and there. I think many Linux distributors (especially RedHat) would
prefer KDE/Harmony to KDE/Qt. So if it's not too much of an effort to port
a Qt app to Harmony, KDE will work with Harmony, even if half of the KDE
developers would prefer Qt or a GPLed library.
The only thing they could do then is to switch the KDE core libraries to
GPL, which would reduce the KDE community to a small group of "religious"
free-software hackers. By then, GNOME would be at least as good as KDE is
now, so switching would be no real problem...
Anyway, if KDE continues to be the most important desktop environment for
Linux, there will be commercial applications by companies who can afford
Qt. And Troll Tech would be the only company to profit from all the hard
work done by the whole KDE team. And by the way, equivalent commercial
programs for GNOME would be cheaper; another incentive for non-hackers to
switch to GNOME.

jedi wrote:
>	The lower legal standards in civil cases and the high
>	probability that Troll will be able to by better
>	counsel make this especially problematic should they
>	decide to sue.
(BTW: where's the verb in that sentence? Just asking - I got your point.)
Doesn't the FSF have some lawyers? I know that they prefer the GPL over the
LGPL and that they are perhaps happy with Qt therefore, but legal action
against Harmony is still an action directed against the free software
community...

By the way, does anyone have any estimates on how far away Harmony is from
completion? To me, it looked as if most of the foundation was there. There
are some bugs that appear easy to fix once you really try to (while I
looked at the Harmony source code in the last few days, I already fixed to
small ones that were right in my way - unfortunately, there's no repository
to commit them to). Most widgets are missing, and no widget is really
finished - what else?
****************************************************************
         Wolfgang Thaller

    mailto:wolfgang.thaller@gmx.net
    http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/imawww/thaller/wolfgang/
****************************************************************

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