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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No, that's the wrong way around.
KDE split the desktop IMHO. Fact is, they ignored the reality of the political situation. By using Qt, they caused horrible flamewars which split the community clean down the middle.
Because really, the shared licensing of the code is what we all have in common. It's the ideological glue that keeps this whole ship sailing. By ignoring that, by pretending using non-free code was OK and ignoring those who pleaded with them to switch to a free toolkit, or write their own they made the creation of GNOME inevitable, because the freedom of the code is what started the creation of the movement and is the whole reason for its existance.
If Ettrich had his head screwed on back then, he'd have realised that no matter how much he liked Qt, the cost of using it was too high. In fact, we're still counting the cost of that bad decision years later, we're still picking up the pieces.
So really, you have it totally the wrong way around. If KDE had used a free toolkit from day one, GNOME probably wouldn't exist. Now, there would still be other desktops, and standards would still be needed (rox, enlightenment etc). But to say, "this situation would be solved if GNOME hadn't been started" is extremely stupid, because its creation was an inevitable consequence of bad decisions on the part of the early KDE team.