There is a controversy in the Linux world. It doesn't have to do with Microsoft, or anything overtly technical. It may seem, to the outsider, the open source equivalent of the question, "Boxers or briefs?" But it's much more serious than that. More here.
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Member since:2005-07-07
Imho, the GPL is a big advantage of Qt over GTK. I prefer a world with Free Software, and if proprietary companies want to make money making non-free software, let them pay. Their money helps trolltech to improve KDE, so at least FOSS benefits from some of the money.
And there is no excessive costs, Qt isn't that expensive for a normal developer.
And how can't KDE beat Gnome? Gnome still can barely hold its ground against KDE 3.5.x, 2 years old KDE technology...
And we're as independent from TT as Gnome is from Novell, Sun and/or Red Hat. I actually believe for sure these three companies have a lot, if not too much to say about what happens in Gnome. Remember who started the big 'cleanup' of gnome, driving away many users?
There is the Free Qt Foundation, which protects KDE/Qt from abuse/bad stuff from TT, and even then - it's GPL, we can fork it anytime. Meanwhile, TT is working better and more closely with us lately, so things are going the good way, not badly.
Member since:2006-01-18
Member since:2005-09-27
Member since:2007-02-17
Member since:2005-11-12
Member since:2005-07-06
The author of that blog is to optimistic for KDE, it doesn't see the two main problems, the GPL license and the expensive cost for comercial developers.
The GPL license isn't a problem for KDE, just as it isn't a problem for the Linux kernel. What the Linux kernel and the GPL has given us, certainly, is more open sourced drivers shipped with the kernel itself.
As for commercial developers, well, most have consistently demonstrated around here that they have no idea what commercial developers buy in their day-to-day work. Even if developers were suddenly to start using GTK tomorrow, they would still buy libraries and tools from proprietary tools companies - and GTK's license allows that - paving the way for all kinds of extensions and lock-in. Either you have an open source desktop, or you don't, and you need to keep its integrity.
It's exceptionally sad that people have regurgitated the whole licensing 'zero cost' thing over the years as some sort of advantage, and it smacks of the days of Unix desktops, OS/2 and Windows when Unix desktop people thought they could tell everyone that their desktop was the standard and that would be good enough.
It's really, really sad that people cannot say that Gnome is better than KDE because of a, b, c features and x, y, z APIs, because that's all they have. Unfortunately for you, the arguments you're coming up with are not what the real world wants to here, and they weren't when Unix desktops were universally rejected in the early nineties because they were crap.
All the hype and words KDE4 is having about beating to dead MS and MAC were present when KDE3 was released, the same soup about new technologies etc. And look at it now, It can't even beat GNOME.
You're going to need an itemised list sweetheart, otherwise that is utterly meaningless and rather sad. You're going to lose on features if you do.
KDE is the first free desktop that will be able to adequately compete with the likes of Vista and OS X in terms of visual effects and quality, as they are built into the toolkit, the window manager and the desktop through various APIs from the ground up. It's a complete infrastructure, and not the unreliable, ad-hoc opt-in mess that exists currently in the form of Compiz, GTK and Cairo.
The solution is simple, be more independent from Trolltech. Period.
GTK development is not independent from what Red Hat wants, and Gnome currently sways in the way Red Hat, Novell and Sun wants it to, so I don't know what you mean there. Novell's contribution to Gnome has currently bogged down with their efforts on Mono, many Gnome developers have actually left, Red Hat is wandering off producing an online desktop and Sun is doing, well, I don't know what. The best stuff is coming from more independent developers.
As for KDE, most KDE developers are not in the employ of Trolltech, and KDE uses Qt because most developers don't want to fanny around debugging their own development tools. KDE benefits an awful lot from Qt and a good relationship with Trolltech. Trying to slow KDE down by asking for that to be severed is pretty weak ;-).
Member since:2005-07-15
>The GPL license isn't a problem for KDE, just as it isn't a problem for the Linux kernel. What the Linux kernel and the GPL has given us, certainly, is more open sourced drivers shipped with the kernel itself.
1. you can't compare a API with a program.
2. Linux is a really bad example. The Linux you get from kernel.org is non-free. It contains binary firmware for special hardware! gNewSense and Debian remove this binary blobs from their version of Linux.
3. If we talk about promoting free driver Linux is again a very bad example. The Linux developers has accepted non-free driver like NVidia and uses/promotes wlan drivers with a non-free hal (e.g. madwifi) while the OpenBSD guys produces a real free driver (e.g. real free atheros driver). If it comes to free driver especially in the network field OpenBSD does a much better job than Linux.
Edited 2007-12-27 15:04
Member since:
2005-09-27
The author of that blog is to optimistic for KDE, it doesn't see the two main problems, the GPL license and the expensive cost for comercial developers.
All the hype and words KDE4 is having about beating to dead MS and MAC were present when KDE3 was released, the same soup about new technologies etc. And look at it now, It can't even beat GNOME.
The solution is simple, be more independent from Trolltech. Period.