KDE Developer on the GNOME Foundation

The ongoing debate between KDE and GNOME has calmed down a lot in the last year as each system became stable and usable. Recent announcements regarding the Gnome Foundation has caused some tension (ranging from words to DNS hijaacking). Kurt Granroth, a KDE Core Team Member, and the KDE US Press Rep has submitted his opinions on the subject, are in some cases very good points, and in other cases extremely inflammatory, but in both cases, worth reading.

The following was written by Slashdot Reader and KDE Core Team Member, Kurt Granroth

One developers Opinion of Sun + GNOME

Recently, 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.

Comments

Go For it Kurt ...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a sometimes Kde developer but not a core developer and all times Kde well-wisher, I'm rather dismayed by Kurt's speil. It comes across as rough and overly emotional, but then maybe such theraphy is needed. I liked his interview featured in this week's Linux Weekly News (lwn) a whole lot better. It was prettified, of course, by lwn editors, but still captured a wry sense of humor Kurt is capable of better than this does. However, like the gallery in the golf movie "Tin Cup", all I can say is, go for it Kurt, if it makes you feel better. Ten years from now nobody will remember who won the corporate endorsement PR sweepstakes, but they will remember the remarkable effort Kde developers have made, setting records where it counts.

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 Real Reasons...

[Amphigory]

I suspect that the real reason that *n[ui]x vendors are attracted to GNOME is that it is in C.

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.

--

Let the licensing flamewars begin...

[David Jao]

The subject line above is a joke. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if KDE will ever win corporate backing from any large software company with lawyers, given the immense uncertainty hanging over the GPL-compatibility of Qt.

Based on my personal (and possibly naive) readings of the GPL and QPL,

• I can distribute Qt source code, without problems.
• I can distribute KDE source code, without problems.
• I can distribute Qt binaries, if I provide source as well.
• I can distribute KDE binaries, if I provide source as well.
• 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Re:XDND protocol

[Guy Harris]

KDE2 and Gnome are DnD compatible (more or less).

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:

1. other toolkits that think the clipboard is, as per the ICCCM, implemented by the clipboard attachment don't see stuff cut or copied to the Qt clipboard on a paste, and don't cut or copy stuff to the Qt clipboard on a cut or copy;
2. merely selecting something, at least in, for example, the Qt multi-line text editing box, causes it to be copied to the clipboard (the claim I saw in the code was something about X users expecting this, but I'm curious if only X users who confuse cut-and-paste with middle-mouse-button paste-current-selection would expect that; the middle button is not the UNIX/X cut-and-paste mechanism, it's a mechanism over and above cut/copy/paste), which, I suspect, makes it a pain if you want to replace one blob of text by another by selecting the blob to be copied, copying it to the clipboard, selecting the blob to be replaced, and doing a paste (which worked just fine copying from, say, UNIX Netscape, a Motif application, to Ethereal, a GTK+ application, when I tried it just now) - I'll have to check when I get home (where I have KDE applications available) to see if that works.

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:

1. provide some Qt API to set the primary selection - and, in the Windows version, somehow either make that work with some Windows mechanism or implement it internally to Qt, as I infer from the code that Qt for Windows ("infer" because I don't have source to Qt for Windows - I don't think they make that available) that, at least when the Motif look-and-feel is specified, they try to provide middle-mouse-button paste-current-selection if your mouse has 3 buttons;
2. change code (in Qt, KDE, and elsewhere) to use that API for changes to the current selection and for middle-mouse-button paste-current-selection, and only use QClipboard for genuine cuts, copies, and pastes.

One Good Point.

[Kid Zero]

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?
-----------------------------
1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!

Please keep in mind..

[Rob Kaper]

KDE is too distributed and diverse to permit me to speak for everybody

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.

No clever subject, I'm too lazy today

[finkployd]

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

Well said...

[nitehorse]

What I'd like to know is why the GNOME project is making such a big deal out of the things like Bonobo. Bonobo is a great technology - IN THEORY. I'm posting this from Nautilus right now, and I can say that honestly, even if it had ALL of the features that they claim it will, I would still use KDE2.

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...

Standardisation

[GavK]

I understand the views, I just disagree with it being an issue.

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!

Corrections

[Havoc Pennington]

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.

What we really need....

[Denor]

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!

me ?

[vapour]

I just prefer VT100 :)

Motif/CDE is a poor analogy ...

[tjwhaynes]

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

Ahh. Ignorance is Bliss

[rgmoore]

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.

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.