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KDE Developer on the GNOME Foundation
The following was written by Slashdot Reader and KDE Core Team Member, Kurt Granroth
One developers Opinion of Sun + GNOMERecently, Sun and HP (but mostly Sun) announced that they will be using Gnome as their default desktop. As a member of the KDE Core Team and as a US press-rep, announcement, I have been asked more then a few times what KDE thinks of this. I have also been asked if KDE user should be worried about the future of KDE now. I've given a rough idea of what "KDE thinks" to those journalists.. but the answer must be pretty generic since KDE is too distributed and diverse to permit me to speak for everybody.
But the wishy-washy answer that I am forced to give doesn't mean that I don't have strong *personal* opinions on the matter -- I do. So I'd like to take this time to offer a few of them for your enjoyment.
I look at the Sun announcement and I try to imagine how it can effect the KDE project. Let's look at the absolute *worst* case situation (from our point of view). Say Sun and HP contribute a significant amount of top-notch programmers towards the Gnome project and as a result, they overtake us. Perhaps for the first time, Gnome is better designed, easier to program for, easier to use, and more stable then KDE. Meanwhile, with the momentum gained by it being the "commercial Unix standard", more and more vendors use Gnome in porting their apps without giving KDE a second thought. Maybe as a result, even "Joe Hacker" in his dorm room might not want to work with KDE.
That's the "worst" case. But say, even if that *did* become true (doubtful, see below), it still wouldn't take away from the fact that KDE is very well designed, incredibly easy to program for, intuitively easy to use and rock solid stable. We have managed to attract hundreds of developers and millions of users to KDE and we will continue to attract the numbers after words. Remember, even if Gnome does become a great desktop, that doesn't mean that KDE will stop being a great desktop. Put another way, KDE will always be around and it will always be a worthwhile desktop to use and platform to develop on.
But let's back-pedal just a bit. I personally find the above scenario *incredibly* unlikely. It has never been shown that throwing more developers on the project will guarantee that the project will succeed, and you can show that it often makes no difference at all. Sun may have a lot of developers, but it remains to be seen if it will matter.
I have reason to be skeptical. Let's not forget just how the backers of the Open Group/Motif and CDE were. That's right -- Sun and HP. Two large companies with all their resources thrown at this that couldn't compete with *either* Gnome or KDE. The Sun website talks glowingly of all the really cool things they will do with Gnome... but those with a memory (and a web browser pointed towards the Open Group's website) will remember that Sun said pretty much the same thing for Motif/CDE.. and look where that went.
No, Sun's developer resources don't worry me in the slightest. We have already shown that we can take them on and win convincingly. I don't see that they will magically change anytime soon.
I do worry a *little* bit more about the PR aspects of this, though. There will be a temptation among the less-dedicated journalists to say that now that Sun and HP and RedHat all favor Gnome, then it must be a standard for Unices. After all, everybody knows that Linux *is* RedHat, right? I am already seeing mentions of this and as people jump on the bandwagon, we'll likely see it even more.
This may have nothing to do with any kind of reality, though. Already, for every new Solaris or HP workstation, there are likely several computers running Linux. Looking at the demographics of all the Linux distributions worldwide, we see that KDE focused distributions are still the norm. All in all, there are likely a LOT more workstations running KDE then there are running something else.
This somehow brings me to the another question that has been frequently asked: Will KDE ever have a corporate-backed "foundation" deciding it's future? While I'm not arrogant enough to think I can guarantee what the future will hold, I am still reasonably secure in saying that pigs will probably fly first. A board like that flies square in the face of everything that the KDE project stands for.
KDE is, has been, and always be governed and managed by those *developers* that actually do the work on it. Working code is what matter, not your market capitalization. Commercial entities may sponsor development on various aspects of KDE, but they will never be allowed to decide what KDE will become. KDE is a desktop "by the people and for the people" and if we were to prostitute ourselves to big-money for the chance of being a media-recognized standard, we would be stomping on all the people that have supported, developed, and used KDE throughout the years. We can honestly say to all developers that if you contribute good code to KDE, we will welcome it and assure you that it will never be subject to the whims and fancies of a company under the gun from shareholders. Your code will be judged purely on it's merits. More to the point, your contribution will make a difference -- it will *matter*.
I do find it ironic, though, that it is *Gnome* taking this step. Could anybody have possibly imagined this when Gnome started? Weren't they the "hacker desktop"? Didn't they have all the "desktop for the people" principles? Hmm... times change, I guess.
But back to KDE and the possibility of a great Gnome. I get the feeling that most of the people that are comparing Gnome and KDE are doing so with current Gnome and KDE 1.1.2 (or less). Even though a version of KDE that *old* still compares favorably, it's a pale shadow to the upcoming KDE 2.0. A comparison between current Gnome and current KDE (in my opinion, of course), shows KDE really shining. I *strongly* urge everybody to check out 2.0 before jumping to any kind of conclusion -- it is a truly kick-ass desktop with by far the best development architecture out there.
So I'll end this longish, partially incoherent ramble with this disclaimer: These are all my personal (largely un-filtered) opinions on these matters. They *may* reflect the views of other KDE developers, but there is no possible way I'm going to be presumptuous enough to claim that they *do*. I may be a little bit pro-KDE in thinking it is superior to Gnome, but I still have the utmost respect for the Gnome developers themselves. I've met a number of hackers -- both "free-agent" ones and HelixCode/Eazel/RedHat paid ones -- and all have demonstrated immense talent and a genuine hacker mentality. Please don't take any of what I said as a attack on *any* person or persons.
This is why I am still a little pissed that they didn't link to the interview I submitted in which Kurt dealt with the whole "Corba Issue". Here is the full quote. This is more valuable than his whole rant above.
Kurt: Yes, we did. The initial development on the KDE 2.0 branch was all done with Corba, using the Mico ORBb.
Liz: What changed that?
Kurt: There were several reasons. We worked on the KDE 2.0 development starting when we were still stabilizing KDE 1.0. We spent months on it but were unhappy with the results. The performance was very bad. That, we knew, was potentially fixable through the use of a different ORB, possible Orbit. In addition, though, the complexity of the code, the complexity of the Corba standard, was such that the code became more and more difficult to work with. Eventually, we only had a small group of seven or eight developers who really understood it and could work with it. That was a huge bottleneck for development. Then one of our developers sat down and developed KParts, an alternative to CORBA, within only a short amount of time. He showed it to us. Not only was it blindingly fast, but the code itself resembled the code we'd already written for KDE 1.0. That made it possible for all of our developers to work with it immediately.
Then we had our KDE developer meeting in Europe. We sat down and looked at the potential cost of dumping CORBA. We would be losing the ability to use remote components, but we didn't know anyone currently using that ability and felt it could be added later if people really wanted it. Interoperability with other CORBA implementations wasn't a major impact; everyone builds their own layer on top of CORBA (like Bonobo) and you really have to be compatible with that, not just CORBA, in order to interoperate. So all we really felt we lost was the buzzword. That isn't important to us as developers, so we moved to KParts.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I have tried GNOME 1.2, and my feeling were it was passable, but not particularly enjoyable. Then again, I am probably used to doing things the KDE way, and not the GNOME way.
FYI: I went Afterstep -> KDE -> GNOME -> KDE.
Here where my complaints about GNOME (probably partly my fault):
* gmc still sucks. It's gotten better, and more stable, however it has locked up my box hard a few times, it's icons are unprofessional and not eye pleasing. The second problem is a matter of taste. Forently, the GNOME team is addressing both of these problems with Natilus.
* panel's app menu is sluggish, no matter how I change the settings. The kpanel app menu is always fast for me. I think 24-bit color PNG mini images used in the menu are mainly to blame for this. I guess a faster machine might help, although I those mini icons, should probably be 8-bit xpm, which is much faster to load.
* panel is still unstable. I think this is due to the design of the way applets load, and the bonobo panel to applet communication bugs.
* I like to see more intergration between the wm and GNOME, and the same with the file manager.
* Also, I would like to see some scriptablity (like KDE has with kwmcom or dcop command line app).
* grdb doesn't work nearly as well as krdb. Mainly because grdb is based on an really old version of it.
* gdm needs a gui config app
* GNOME feels to unix-ey, and not very Mac-ey or
Window-ey. Part of this is in the design purposely, most of the GNOME creators are UNIX people, who are used to writing UNIX software in motif.
However these problems are relatively minor, they can easily be fixed. There are many excellent GNOME apps that I use everyday in KDE, such as X-Chat, GnomeToaster, gaim, xmms, etc.
While I like GNOME alot, it has many fundimental problems that KDE has addressed. Being able to run GNOME apps almost seemlessly in KDE 2.0, makes KDE very attractive to me, not to menition the numerious other benifits.
PS: I don't give a damn about whatever licensing shit. I just want to use the best. I'll leave licensing up to the lawyers.
in the case of KDE, you just can't build a commercial, non-free KDE application without paying Troll Tech. And *that* is what is makes KDE unacceptable as the ultimate free desktop for Linux and Unix. *Especially* for companies like Sun, who want to be able to make apps for whatever desktop they adopt, and these apps are not necessarily going to be all free. And they want to be able to tell ISVs that they should be coding for GNOME rather than Motif/CDE now, without having to tell them "code for KDE, and pay the Trolls everytime".
In the end, my opinion is that it's KDE's obstination to stick to Qt (and develop closely with it) that has ultimately doomed KDE as the mainstream Linux/Unix desktop. At the time KDE started, using Qt was the only expedient way to build a desktop, relatively quickly. But they chose to follow the Qt APIs very closely, without building layers of abstraction between the toolkit and their apps, and this has continued up to now, when KParts is intimately tied to Qt. Contrast this with GNOME, whose component model (Bonobo) is toolkit independent, and then the components that use it happen to also use GTK calls. Considering Troll Tech's decision (very justifiable for them as a business -- i'm not trying to criticize them) not to make Qt freely available for non-free development, the KDE team should have taken a step back after the 1.0 release, and either work on the failed Harmony project to re-create a LGPL Qt replacement, or switched their efforts to GTK, helped the C++ bindings mature, and ported their stuff on it. If they'd done that, we'd probably only have one desktop environment now, and Miguel de Icaza might well be a KDE hacker. But that didn't happen, and GNOME is now reaping the benefits of its more far-reaching vision, in the form of significant commercial support.
I say, good luck to both teams :)
OK, I'll bite. I installed Mandrake+KDE on my home desktop machine because I promised my wife that Linux would look almost exactly like windows. That's more-or-less what I got with KDE (I have some different themes that I use but she's sticking to plain vanilla KDE look and feel). The only bugs that cause us real trouble are the usual Netscape 4.x problems (hopefully soon to be a thing of the past), and some minor issues with kmail and the KDE biff program. However, if I had to do it all over again, at this point I'd probably install Gnome. Here's why:
Note that these are all my personal opinions and perceptions based on my experiences, not a flame directed at any of the development groups. I appreciate the efforts of the many desktop environment hackers out there and am happy to be able to make use of their efforts at home.
Now, aren't you sorry you asked?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Somewhat to my surprise, I found a lot of non-linux people quite concerned about this.
I use GNOME at home, and I program at work in Borland Delphi. Borland is porting Delphi to Linux (Kylix), and it is to use the Qt toolkit, and have some degree of (optional) KDE intergration.
This was all fine until the GNOME-Foundation announcement came up, and then a thread began in borland.delphi.non-technical (I think) about how Borland might be going the wrong way with Kylix. A lot of windows Delphi programmers who were/are planning to port to Linux were very concerned that their apps would (a)"be left behind" or (b)not run at all
It took a lot of explaining to make them understand how you can use KDE apps in GNOME and vice versa.
I thank you for expressing your views on the matter, and it pleases me that the KDE team are not daunted by publicity and commercial backing of Gnome, indeed - I would be somewhat dissappointed if they were. I think that a major push for Gnome will have the effect of 'raising all ships' for *nix's so KDE could well see a nice boost in developers and users as well.
I am rather dissappointed in your numerous backhanded slaps that you have made at Gnome - it is true that the 'old tech' that is KDE 1.2 compares quite favorably with Gnome 1.2, and that KDE 2.0 looks like it has a lot of great stuff going for it. However Gnome has some great stuff going for it to - have a look at Evolution, Gnumeric, or Nautilus - these are wonderful tools that KDE has nothing that really compares. And these are all in the early stages, I fully expect them to blow away ANY commercial offerings not long after 1.0.
So again, both teams have a lot going for them and both have different strengths and weaknesses.
It should not be an either/or choice - because neither are a complete solution.
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
It's hard to see how you can have the "utmost respect" for a hacker and yet say his products are, well, second rate, not to mention to come within spitting distance of calling him a sellout and corporate drone.
I have both KDE and Gnome on my computer and regularly switch between them. Although most of the time I work in plain ole IceWM, KDE has regularly remained my favorite desktop. The continual torrent of great new features and improvements each team has made over the last year simply amazes me. My hat is off to them -- as hackers they're in a league way beyond me, and coming from a arrogant old sinner like me that's something of an admission. The fact that both teams are so productive means there's no reason to resent resources the other one scores -- its hard to make really big improvements when you're already doing a great job.
The idea that the Gnome foundation somehow hurts KDE is rubbish. I know Kurt says he believes this too, but I wonder if he may not entirely believe it; at the very least he sounds like he has a little case of sour grapes. No matter. When KDE2 comes out, the KDE team will have all the vindication they need.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't think that Sun is worried at all. For all of Linux's positives, it doesn't even begin to compete with Solaris on the type of big boxen that Sun likes to sell. Sure, Sun still sells workstations, but its been quite a while since the public has thought of Sun as a work station company. Sun's core business is big honking servers. When Linux begins to deal well with 64 CPU servers with Gigs and Gigs of ram, then Sun misght start to get worried (and Beowulf class clusters only count for a very limited domain of problems).
And even then, when Linux becomes the equal or superior to Solaris in every aspect, Sun will still not have anything to worry about because Linux will run on Sun's hardware, from whence the bulk of Sun's income comes from.
What Sun and HP are likely after is someone to do free work for them. Right now, its likely that both Sun and HP are spending a good deal on supporting and maintianing CDE. Moving to Gnome frees up a lot of resources people wise, time wise and money wise.
Further, if they sanction and support Gnome on their proprietary Unixes, all of a sudden it becomes much easier to run thousands of (currently) Linux only apps on HP/UX or Solaris. This is a wise move that could conceivably increase marketshare for workstations which are profitable for Sun, even if no longer their core business.
Just my two cents.... Eat them for what their worth.
Yes, perhaps just a link to the article would have sufficed...instead of embedding it in Slashdot giving the feel that it may be Slashdot sponsored. I would expect that we have a feature on the opinion of *GNOME* on this issue coming up soon?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I am ashamed that Slashdot printed this article.
This developer not only dissed the quality of Gnome but also their principles. Then believes that a quick backpedal at the end "I think some of them are cool hackers" will make up for this. This is unconscionable, CmdrTaco, I know flamewars drive page views but causing enmity between KDE and Gnome by printing this obviously flamebait article will only hurt Open Source.
This is truly sad.
The Queue Principle
Funny, when I first started looking at them, I thought KDE looked like a Win-Wannabee, and GNOME was trying to be the OO UI that OS/2 had. Over time and some GNOME usage, I've become disillusioned with it, too. This is especially as one reads more and more if Icaza "wanting to do Windows, only the right way".
Well, I believe a share of Windows problems are architectural, not a matter of implementation. You simply can't come up with a clean implementation of a broken architecture.
The last straw finally came in the past few weeks, in two parts. First, I've been looking to get my wife off of AOL, and went searching for IMAP cllients for her to select from. One of them required a non-GNOME library, but I could only find a GNOME update of it in RPM form. That required a few more GNOME updates, and so on. Eventually I would have had to download an update tens of megabytes of stuff just to test a stupid GUI MUA. I gave up. Later I found a "non-GNOME encumbered" version of the library, and discovered I didn't like the MUA, anyway. At about that time, Icaza comes out with his "make Unix suck less" rant. IMHO it looks like a wishlist to come up with a middleware layer on Unix roughly akin to Win32. In other words, he wants to take the problems I just had, institutionalize them, and make them even worse.
I agree that shared code has been a bit of a problem in Unix. But IMHO, the lib*.so.* system works, we just need to use it better. I don't want to see the API turn into a monolithic mess, especially one that has to be installed in the form of two dozen inseparable components, and that's just for the run time.
I will probably continue to have GNOME and KDE libs on my system, just for access to their applications. But at present, I run neither desktop. They're both too win-like and too bloated for my taste. I just wish I had the WPS for Linux. Well, at least DFM is alive, again.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What I see here is that this kind of debate is generating some stupid competition in which you have the technologicaly-happy (KDE) and the ethically-happy (Gnome).
IMHO, KDE is smoother and more complete than Gnome. Like it or not.
But now, if we just let people choose ONE solution instead of us then we might encounter a problem similar than the Windows one we just start to solve by bringing variety to the desktop market.
So ? What is the best UI ?
This is the one you'll take time to choose, not the one (whether goods or bad) that somebody will have decided that YOU will install on your Personal Computer.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Where is the press release from Kde about being voted "best desktop" or whatever at this week's Linux World Expo? It's true. Kde is the most popular desktop among Linux professionals - the people who attended the show. These are not newbies needing a smooth transition from Windows by any means. Of course among the newbies Kde is at least as popular.
The only substantative thing in Kurt's piece I would disagree with is making a hasty comparison between the current Kde 2 betas and the current Gnome, which is 1.21 + updates. Kde 2 is very near completion. They could probably take a snapshot of the current work, check for showstoppers, and put a 2.0 label on it right now. However, Kde 2 is very, very ambitious. Kde really is using a component model for *everything* now, not just talking about doing so. Some modules which aren't ready have been tentatively moved out of the base packages to get the release out, and Kde 2 probably won't be as stable as the current Kde 1.12 until verions 2.1 or beyond. The changes are extensive to *everything*. It's a complete rewrite, and some Kde 1.x users will not like some of the changes at first but I feel that most of these are improvement which will grow on them. Also, there will not be as many Kde 2 applications written by third party developers like myself at first. We are waiting on a stable release of the base packages for that. Even though the core team has tried to avoid source incopatible changes through the beta period, doing so may be considered unrealistic for such an ambitious project. I look forward to the stable release mostly so I can jump in and start coding appications using the new framework and the new Kdeveloper IDE, which is very, very nice.
I have always been drawn to Kde because it is the original effort to modernize the unix desktop, and what has followed in more of a pale imitation. I feel that even non-technical users can sense this also. After getting somewhat involved in the development process myself through submitting bug reports and monitoring the lists, as well as working on some Kde code, my intuition about Kde has been amply confirmed. The project truly is a labor of love regardless of some commercial backing (mostly to pay the salaries of full-time developers). There is no slick PR machine and even the concept of that is foreign to how those involved in the development of Kde think. What better proof than the above - an attempt at PR by someone who is not very practiced at it, or maybe not even capable of such a mentality.
The best kind of PR Kde can engage in is simply to publish the facts about numerous awards for best this and best that, and the real figures on usage. These figures may be much higher than most of you who read Slashdot may think. I'm sure that they will remain just as high or even reach higher percentages regardless of efforts by a commercial consortium to define what the "standard" desktop for unix might be. Let the users define the standards.
The problem is simply this: there is no standard binary formats for C++ object files, even on the same platform. So, code compiled in g++ will not link with code compiled in Sun C++ will not link with... While there is a draft standard for object format, no one is following it yet, and probably everyone won't for years.
This makes KDE unacceptable to a UNIX vendor, because half of their customers buy C++ (at great expense) and the other half use g++. Which half will the support? GNOME, based in C, doesn't have this problem. So it gets tapped even though (IMNSHO) KDE is the better desktop.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Based on my personal (and possibly naive) readings of the GPL and QPL,
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I can distribute Qt source code, without problems.
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I can distribute KDE source code, without problems.
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I can distribute Qt binaries, if I provide source as well.
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I can distribute KDE binaries, if I provide source as well.
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I can not distribute KDE binaries along with Qt binaries, if the one links to the other, unless I provide both under the terms of the GPL (which is plainly impossible, as I do not have rights to license Qt under the GPL).
(The above analysis may make it seem as if I have something against KDE. I assure you that any such impression is purely a product of the reader's imagination. I think KDE is excellent software and that it is useful regardless of binary licensing issues, since the source code is a valuable asset and may unquestionably be compiled, copied and modified under the terms of the GPL. Also, the authors of KDE are free to release KDE binaries along with Qt since the GPL license terms do not apply to them.)Common responses which I have gotten back from the KDE people include:
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Qt is not a part of KDE, so when giving KDE to other people you don't have to provide Qt under the GPL terms that would be required if they were one work.
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The fact that KDE was so obviously designed to work with Qt confers to the general public an implied license to ignore the GPL source-providing requirement of KDE with regard to Qt.
Let's not discuss the merit of these points (since that would lead to a licensing flamewar). These responses certainly represent a valid point of view. But are big companies going to buy it? Lawyers at big companies are very careful and don't want to get caught doing anything illegal. I simply cannot see companies such as Sun, IBM, and HP embracing KDE on a large scale as long as the legality of distributing KDE with Qt is unclear.For now, commercial support of KDE really does seem to be limited to newer companies such as Red Hat, Caldera, MandrakeSoft, etc. who maybe aren't as worried about the licensing issue. Not that this is a bad thing--as Granroth says, large corporate backing certainly didn't help CDE/Motif get anywhere.
He said "clipboard", not "drag-and-drop".
The problem is, I suspect, that Qt doesn't acknowledge the existence of the "clipboard" selection in X (which is documented in the ICCCM, even if they didn't bother assigning an XA_ atom to it); instead, it uses only the primary selection.
This has two disadvantages:
I suspect the first problem could be fixed by having the QClipboard code in Qt for X assert ownership of both the primary and clipboard selections, and having it supply the contents of the primary selection only if the clipboard selection isn't set (for backwards compatibility with applications using older versions of Qt).
The second problem would be harder to fix, as you'd have to:
Corporate Backing does not insure a great program. Or success of a program. OS/2 was great, but unsupported. Sun/HP have gone this route before, why did they suddenly choose Gnome? Cheap?
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1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!
Please, please keep this in mind when replying.
You can disagree with Kurt's views, but don't take it out on KDE as a whole. As active member on the kde and kde-devel mailinglist I can tell you that this is not at all the general thought, there are plenty of developers who rather look at their own efforts than paying a lot of attention to GNOME, especially with the nearby release of KDE 2.0 and a heavy debugging rage among the developers.
Let's keep this discussion informative, insightful and interesting. There are obviously hard feelings between the KDE and GNOME teams but let's not degrade ourselves to such nonsense.
While he has some good points, it seems he is struggling to keep his rage in check while writing this :)
:)
Personally, I like both and use GNOME at work, and KDE at home. I would have liked to have seen a little more positive supporting of KDE and showing off of KDE's strengths as evidence that they aren't worried instead of backhanded accusations of GNOME whoring itself out to the highest bidder. I kind of reminds me of whenever a punk band gets signed to a record lable, all the other punk bands jump over themselves attempting to cast them as "sellouts"
The thing to remeber is that this is open source. SUN and HP do NOT control GNOME, the devlopers do, and if for some reason the devlopers give in to all that money and become corporate puppets and screw up GNOME, it simply forks and continues like nothing happend. We've seen this before people.
However, the point that throwing money and devlopers at a project does not mean it will suddenly improve is well taken, and nobody should assume the GNOME foundation will succede simply based of this this reasoning.
Finkployd
Konqueror still boasts several features which I don't see in Nautilus, and likewise vice versa. But I don't need a filemanager that plays my MP3s when I hover over them- I'd rather have one that embeds an MP3 player when I click on them instead. KDE2 is making some great strides forward for UNIX desktops in general, not just Linux. Besides, Helix in particular seems to be pretty unfriendly to even some versions of Linux. How do they expect to take over the UNIX desktop market if they don't even have a working Slackware installer? Things like this boggle the mind...
Why aren't both Gnome and KDE getting interoperability right so that Gnome vs KDE stops being a monolithic decision and becomes a matter of personal choice?
I want to drag a block of text from kword into an openoffice spreadsheet, and embed that openoffice spreadsheet in the afforementioned kword document while running either desktop (Maybe I feel gnomic one day and troll-techy the next), and have the system stay stable.
Actually I don't, because I'd have to be even more insane than I am to want to do that, but I want to be able to, dammit!
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
This article seems to imply that Sun, HP, etc. will be controlling the foundation; however, the only decision-making body in the foundation is a board of 9-15 contributors elected by the membership. As of now, over 2/3 of the members are not employed by a "GNOME company." Also, no company is allowed to have a majority on the board. Since 2/3 of the membership consists of volunteers, there's little danger of corporate control.
(Of course, the board won't be telling people what to hack on anyway, since that wouldn't be very productive, as anyone who's in a free software project knows. It's just a way to organize our efforts and enhance communication within the project and with outsiders such as companies.)
Companies that join the foundation join an "advisory board" with no decision-making powers. The advisory board also has nonprofit members such as the FSF.
I think it was also misleading to mention only Red Hat among the Linux distributions; at least TurboLinux and Debian are also shipping GNOME as the default (or only in Debian's case) desktop.
In any case, there's no cause for FUD; it's exciting to see large formerly-all-proprietary companies contributing to free software alongside traditional open source supporters. That's the way I look at it anyway. All the code is GPL, it's not like we can lose anything; they can't steal our code.
That seemed like a pretty reasonable exchange, nothing too harsh, and everyone acted like adults.
People, that's just not going to work at all.
I mean, civilized debate is nice these days, but it's just not going to pull in the pageviews and generate the advertising money. What we need is something more like:
National Enquirer: "David Talbot, the 'D' in KDE, to join new GNDOME initiative!"
Weekly World News:"9 out of 10 alien anal probe devices run KDE!"
Jerry Springer:"My wife is cheating on me with a GNOME developer"
Then, and only then, will Slashdot get the attention and pageviews it deserves!
-Denor
I just prefer VT100 :)
The spectre of the failed CDE desktop has been bounced around a lot in the wake of the Gnome foundation announcement. The reasons for its appearance are obvious - commercial Unices have dipped their hands into the waters of a standard desktop before and then messed around with the concept without really going anywhere with it. I have access to CDE on the AIX systems I work with, and while it has some plus points, I opted to use FVWM instead as being a more customizable interface.
But why should we be tarring Gnome with the same brush as CDE? The motivations are different - Gnome has arrived as an already competent desktop object model. It is not perfect, not is it complete, but it covers enough now that it is fully capable of most tasks. It has been written by people who wanted a GPL'd desktop model and decided that the licensing issues with Qt were sufficient motivation to not develop KDE instead. And why do these commercial Unix vendors suddenly care about Gnome? Because it is eclipsing their own offerings in available scope and applications written for it. It makes perfect sense from their perspective that they should go with the flow and convert, support and maintain a widely used desktop system. I don't suddenly see this 'Big Brother Unix' appearing on the shoulder of Gnome and controlling its destiny. Rather I suspect that we will see bug fixes initially as these vendors get their paws on Gnome, followed by patches and new bonobo objects, new applications under the GPL or otherwise, and greater integration of Gnome into their own offerings.
All those who think that these commercial offerings will subvert Gnome into some corporate whipping boy have forgotten the Linux philosphy - choice. If we don't like it, we don't have to take it or use it. And that applies to piecemeal offerings and patches equally as to whole applications.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Those who don't understand the Free Software ideal (as very distinct from Open Source) are doomed to say really stupid things about it. It seems really obvious to me that a person who would make the quote above doesn't understand the principles that he's complaining about. Complaints about QT were not about corporate involvement (as the above quote seems to suggest is the big sin among the FSF crowd) but about lack of programming freedom.
Part of the FSF ethic is that anyone is free to hack on the programs, and that "everyone" includes big corporations. To tell Sun and HP that they mayn't become involved is actually more contrary to the spirit of the GPL than accepting big corporate money. The problems come when people try to place restraints on the code. Given that everything is going to be kept open by the GPL, I don't see this as being a big problem.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.