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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: Change ?
From:       Martin Konold <konold () alpha ! tat ! physik ! uni-tuebingen ! de>
Date:       1998-03-10 12:59:25
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On Tue, 10 Mar 1998, Joel Dillon wrote:

>   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)

According to my personal experience these "stick-in-the-muds who hate C++"
do mostly produce nice console apps and kernel hacks but NOT userfriendly
GUI software.

> 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. 

Well what about Caldera? What about the MANY third parties putting
KDE as ADDED VALUE on their RedHat and Debian CD's.

If Redhat does simply deny the need for KDE their customers will vanish
other vendors will take RH's market share. IMHO this is a good thing about
Linux. (Do you remember what happened to SLS?)

 What do you think is the reason for RH to get involved in the GNOME
project themself? IMHO it is mainly that they do know that increasing
future sales will be in the desktop market. By trying to alienate KDE
they somewhat got trapped and therefor had to find a solution. The
upcoming GNOME project seems to be a possible solution for them. (I
personally do doubt that simply because the Linux Users are asking for a
_stable_ and userfriendly desktop YESTERDAY)

Simply look how far GNOME has gone till today and compare the progress to
the first half year of KDE. (A fully functional KDE was already shown at
the Linux Kongress in Wuerzburg 1997)

> 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

Having EVERY #$%$#%-OS lookalike enthusiast hacking the basic toolkit will
definetely hurt a unified desktop. I AM HAPPY that the code is controlled
by very capable hackers but not by advocates (incl. me ;-).

> on and off about getting Qt GPL'd or something and unsurprisingly

A GPL'd Qt would alienate all commercial developers. We do want commercial
apps for the upcoming desktop too!

> 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,

Have a look at XDND. This is an upcoming VERY nice standard. RH also took
part in the definition cycle.

> as another the end user isn't going to care if it's in C++/KDE or
> C/Gnome.

But these end users do ask: Why do I need two libs on my hdd even if they
provide the same functionality. End users do NOT care about the licensing
fee which has to be paid by commercial developers.

Yours,
-- martin

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