Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 11th Jul 2005 17:32 UTC
The head of Open Source Development Labs, Stuart Cohen, has added weight to rumours of greater collaboration between Microsoft and the open source community. He said: "I would not be surprised to see them participate in software that runs on top of Linux in the future."
Thread beginning with comment 3774
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2005-06-29
I've been reading these comments, and I don't think there's been much talk about the, hardly arguable, point made in the second article:
KDE uses QT.
QT is only gpl compatible if you don't sell your code.
Proprietary apps therefore have to pay to be KDE applications.
Gnome on the other hand uses the lgpl gtk.
Gtk is available for anyone to freely link against, even if they won't show you their code and want your soul in exchange for using their program.
I think there's also a technical reason people aren't going to want to develop proprietary KDE apps for about another 3 years:
KDElibs requires kde init to run. That means, that when you want to go run a kde application from your favourite window manager you have to wait 1-5 minutes for it to start: That makes Mozilla seem like it pops open!
Of course, this problem will be solved by hardware, but it's not there yet. On my, honestly aged but still common, 1.5GHz athlon it takes a good minute to start a KDE application the first time: This is forever.
Now as a proprietary developer developing for Linux/BSD you realize that you've got a small market share to start. Then when you cut it to a third by making it ugly for non-kde users to use you've lost even more share.
On the other hand. Gnome libraries, if you use them all and not just gtk, aren't so cumbersome to load! Starting many gnome applications from KDE is very quick!
And we all know: Linux/BSD users tend to be picky.
At this point I'd hate to see kde leave qt. I don't think KDE is any worse for the proprietary camp using gtk: KDE should be happy that gtk loads to memory pretty quickly. They should also be happy that people are trying to write look'n'feel emulators. Maybe they should start a group that tries and ports every major kde look to gtk and package them together. You can't get it even close to the same, but it's better than the user trying to mix and match.
Then of course, there's always that ok/cancel button argument. Good thing Gnome HIG seems to prefer the Close button and instant application: It may be entirely different, but at least it's obviously entirely different.