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List:       userlinux-discuss
Subject:    Re: [Discuss] ISV's and Licensing
From:       Juanjo Alvarez <juanjux10 () terra ! es>
Date:       2003-12-12 8:44:58
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I've been reading all this flame-thread about the GUIs and after reading
about three or four explanations from Bruce about why banning Qt/Kde I'm
more than sure than the decision was taked from the beginning.

The arguments about supporting one or two desktops or developing the
product quickly are pure crap because you just are not going to double
the number of developers contributing to the UserLinux Gnome Desktop
just by removing Qt/KDE from it, believe me, most core KDE developers
are not suddendly going to start coding for Gnome, in fact if you ban
KDE you are going to anger and to lost a lot of developers that would
not only program for the KDE part of the distro, but also to other
subsystems. If people wants to work on KDE even as a second hidden
alternative let them do it!  You just can't say "if people wants KDE
they can grab it from Debian servers" because not even you can believe
that a desktop the size of KDE (in number of packages) and compiled for
a specific debian version will work without a problem on the UserLinux
collection of packages (without changing the installed packages so much
that it is not the supported UserLinux anymore but a subversion of
Debian). If the KDE desktop is ready by the time a 1.0 UserLinux version
will be released (I'm sure it would) include it (even as a hidden
option), if not then don't but don't remove KDE from the beggining for
no good reason at all.

Supporting KDE _and_ Gnome should not be any problem! Just in the city I
live (Madrid) there are some very small Linux support companies and they
don't have any problem supporting both, why it must be a problem for a
UserLinux oriented company?  It's not like we're speaking of suporting
"PeterFreakingUnknownDesktop" IT IS KDE!

The integration arguments sound logical for not using by default KDE
applications on a default Gnome desktop, but not for banning the libs.
For god sake, every desktop has some applications that doesn't integrate
very well, for a lot of time Java programs didn't integrate on the
general Windows look and feel and almost nobody protested, WinAMP and
other zillion skinable programs integrate like an octopus in a garage
and I still have to hear someone protesting. It is nice to use one
desktop applications by default but banning about 50% (or more) of all
Linux applications for no good reason at all is plain stupid. Just look
at how pathethic the message about the CD writer software is: "Oh well
all CD writer programs we have suck we can write a new program, improve
the one that sucks...".  K3b anybody? Oh yes, I forgot "Nero Burning
rom" (the most used CDWriting program on windows) integrates sooo well
with the Windows interface.


More soon than later, a lot of your clients will see a KDE desktop or
some KDE application (on SuSE, Mandrake, etc) and will ask we (the
developers) why that is not included in UserLinux when it is on every
other Mom&Pop Linux distribution. Then you can tell them to upgrade to
Debian and lose all UserLinux support, or to pay a third provider that
will support them if they do. They will then tell you that his
Novell/SuSE friend has the same support even with KDE wihout paying
more.


Well, I could continue my rant a lot more but I've to go to work ;) I
only want to say that choosing a default desktop is wise, choosing not
to include the other desktop is very questionable but not even including
the other desktop libraries is veeeeeeeery stupid. I hope common sense
return to the "UserLinux cabal" and do what every other Linux
distribution out there is doing and what all clients switching from
other linux distributions will take for granted. If not, I fear I'll
have to explain the next client that ask me about "this liniz thing" to
don't use UserLinux because of all this (why should them if they can use
free as in beer and speech Mandrake without any of those problems?) 

I will try to help this distribution anyway because the project is
extremely interesting but I'm pretty sure that if this thing continue
like now the first thing a lot of people will do after UserLinux 1.0 is
to fork the project adding Qt, KDE and applications to it. That will be
BAD because after some time when the two distros began to look very
different the problem will be not to support two desktops but to support
two entire distributions (or to halve their market).  But I would follow
that fork like probably 50% of all the developers. 


And excuse me for my crapy english, but not for my rant ;).

Cheers,
    Juanjo
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