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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: Change ?
From:       Joel Dillon <emily () cornholio ! new ! ox ! ac ! uk>
Date:       1998-03-10 10:10:20
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> It is my opinion that QT and Troll Tech will go a long way, in that they
> offer their product on a Free basis to the "Not For Profit" community, and
> at a fairly decent price for the "For Profit" people. It's just a matter
> of breaking through the barrier, once its accepted as a standard, I don't
> see that there will be much stopping it.... 

  Gtk and gnome. Gtk can do what Qt does, and since it's in C it's more
acceptable to those stick-in-the-muds who hate C++ - even if it is (imho)
still technically inferior. And gnome is beginning to progress - it's not
nearly as big as KDE yet, but if things go on as they are it will be, and
that'll mean a split in the Linux community over the best GUI, in which
KDE will probably come off worst. I mean, Redhat, Debian and Slackware are
all behind Gnome - Debian's donating cash to them and Redhat's Advanced
Development Labs are helping with the coding - whereas as far as I'm aware
Suse is the only big distribution backing KDE and that's not widely
available in America and the UK. 
  To simply sit around and say KDE will become standard even though
Qt's source code is still controlled by Trolltech is the best way to
further this split. And talking to Trolltech about freeing the Qt
sourcecode is very likely pointless (note that the objection of Redhat
et al to the Qt license is mainly that the sourcecode effectively can't
be modified). After all, people have been talking to them for months
on and off about getting Qt GPL'd or something and unsurprisingly
they've refused; it's their livelihood after all. The only real solution
is a free clone of Qt, and even that won't guarantee there won't be
a GUI split. What it does guarantee is that KDE and Gnome can be
made as compatible as possible (understanding each other's drag and drop,
configurable to look like each other, understanding each other's themes
and so on). After all, if an app looks and behaves in the same way
as another the end user isn't going to care if it's in C++/KDE or
C/Gnome.

	Jo

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