Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 13th Mar 2003 17:43 UTC
A KDE developer tipped me off to a recent thread discussed in the kde-core-devel mailing list regarding interoperability between KDE and Gnome. OSNews featured an interview with the usability experts from Gnome and KDE a few days ago and we expected that the spirit of co-operation would continue to get stronger every day. Luckily this is true regarding most of these developers, but not for all of them are sharing it. Here is a commentary on the issue followed by a summary of the long thread.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
I think your point is very, very important to any Linux company expecting to make inroads into the commercial desktop operating system market. Developers of commercial desktop applications won't be too thrilled to have to shell out significant sums of money to TrollTech in order to develop and sell commercial KDE based applications on the Linux platform. GNOME is LGPL so it allows this particular use so is more 'commercial software friendly'.
Naturally none of the free software developers or hacker community really give a shit about this issue, because they only care about free software or open source software so commercial software for Linux is of no consequence for them (and hence a common later between KDE and GNOME also). And theirin lies the problem. Linux is at a cross roads right now with the tug of commercial developers pulling it one way and the tug of the original free software and open source developers tugging it the other way. The two ways are simply not compatible, and IMHO is the primary reason why Linux cannot succeed in the desktop space.