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.
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Trolltech's GPL does more than stop commercial developers. It also stops the BSD/MPL class of license too - ie. the ones that say open source/commerical, I don't care.
The kernel's GPL is fine because it has the linking exception which more or less turns it into the LGPL. Trolltech on the other hand does not allow the linking exception and thus will become an equivalent to a "Microsoft tax" on every non-GPL Linux developer.
Non-GPL developers are a fact of life, banks are never going to GPL their internal applications. People with GPL blinders on always seem to forget about internal apps. In the overall market 90% or more of developers write internal apps. (No one is going to buy the GPL it and don't distribute it arguement either).
For Linux to have broad acceptance we can't have a tax on a majority of the potential development community. Having the tax just turns Trolltech into another form of monopoly. So either QT has to change it's license or we get an alternative like Gnome.
Bottom line it is the Qt GPL that is the splitting desktop.