"We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software." Those were the opening lines of Miguel De Icaza's email announcing the GNU Network Object Model Environment, better known as GNOME, exactly (in my timezone) ten years ago, on 15th August 1997. They have come a long way from this, to this.
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Member since:2005-07-07
yeah, time has proven it was a silly reason - Qt is now more free (GPL) than GTK (Lesser GPL). and it is still ahead of GTK...
Yet, Gnome did the free desktop a lot of good, leading the way in usability (not to everybody's happiness, but still) and through competition ensuring the Free desktop is better than it would have been without Gnome. So congrats on these 10 years...
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-08
"Qt is now more free (GPL) than GTK (Lesser GPL)"
QT is licensed under a double license: not only pure GPL but also a commercial, proprietary license. If you want to write commercial proprietary applications with QT, GPL is not enough but you have to buy a commercial license from Trolltech. That could restrict commercial development of QT-based proprietary apps (mobile apps, games etc.).
From Wikipedia QT article:
"Proprietary commercial development requires the commercial license, and, unlike some open source software libraries, Qt is not licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and does not include a GPL linking exception."
Member since:2005-08-26
Member since:
2006-01-20
I think it's very nice that Miguel's announcement was immediately followed by the first Gnome vs. KDE flame in history:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/1997-August/msg00144.html
"IMHO this is a knee-jerk reaction to a nonexistent problem.
Best of luck doing this with GTK... it has a long ways to catch up with
Qt."
:D