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KDE's Official Position on the GNOME Foundation
infodragon was among the many folks to submit the fact that KDE has an Official Position with regards to the recently announced Gnome Foundation and all the ruckus that followed. As usual, the opinions of the folks most directly involved are much more rational and realistic then the crazed fan hordes (and the following reactionary pieces in the mainstream media) that think there is some sort of war going on instead of healthy competition. Quote: "Q: "How much does creation of GNOME Foundation affect KDE development?"
A: "As much as the birth of the last baby polar bear at the Quebec City Zoo" (i.e., not at all) "
(...)We will never want KDE to extinguish GNOME, or the opposite to happen. We want all the advantages of BOTH of those wonderful environments, and to keep alive the potential for even more. And we want this for all free major components. With this spirit, let's all take Free Software even further and higher without being distracted by yesterday's money makers who don't understand what freedom is about.
Would be worth a post on Slashdot by the way!
When people say that Linux is so great because of user choice, they are right. But choice should not cause the Linux world to splinter into two. I see no reason why everyone (and every distro) shouldn't have both installed by default, with a pull-down menu on the login screen. Let's move towards sharing desktops, themes, menus, etc. between the two, so when I switch from KDE to Gnome on a whim, I can still access all my menus and desktop icons. Some work is being done towards this already.
Choice is good, but it has to be easy. The main reason I don't like GNOME is because of the "choice" of window managers. If I log in cold to gnome, I have no window manager, and if I pick one, configurations and look-and-feel aren't coordinated. You can't expect users to figure out that desktop images are controlled by the window manager but screensavers are controlled by the desktop environment, or whatever. Let them default to E or whatever, and, just like KDE, I can change if it I am so inclined.
Let's show folks who are new to Linux that when they start using Linux, they'll have a choice of what their desktop looks like. Let's not tell them that, before they start using Linux, they have to pick KDE or GNOME and make a life-long commitment to be on one "side" or the other.
To start off, the KDE response is that the Gnome foundation doesn't matter to KDE. What a crock! Aything that helps free software gain in popularity will help KDE.
Think about this, people hear the Gnome announcement and want to check out Gnome. The (arguably) easiest way to check out Gnome is to install Linux. If the person wanting to experience Gnom chooses Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake or any other of the dozens of Linux distributions that make KDE the default desktop environment, more users will be introduced to KDE.
Also, provided that Gnome and KDE get component compatibility going between Kparts and Bonobo, then every Gnome component that can be embedded or hosted becomes a tool in the KDE toolkit. More tools, more power....
I also think that there is a bit of misunderstanding on the part of the KDE folks on just what the Gnome foundation is.
This is no different than the Gnome foundation. The only difference is one of scale, Sun's 'fifty developers' will have a unified voice on the board of the Gnome foundation in the Sun person on the board. The same is true for Eazel, Helix-Code, or any of the independant developers that have joined the Gnome foundation
This train of reasoning implies to me the opposite of what the KDE folks intend it to mean.
therefore
I don't get it.
There are also some poorly supported assertions of fact.
This quote shows an incomplete understanding of market dynamics. There are several overlapping categories of workstations to consider.
Given that there is a good deal of overlap between one and two, the real questions to ask are
I'm not a Gnome only kind of guy. I think that both KDE and Gnome are very good environments. However, I do think that the official KDE position is a bit short-sighted. The Gnome foundation could very well benefit KDE. To say that the foundation is totally irrelevant is to misunderstand the way things work in the real world. For KDE to ignore the Gnome foundation would be to repeat the mistake of Unix vendors ignoring Windows NT in the early nineties.
KDE has some pretty valid claims to technical superiority. However KDE has serious political flaws that doom it. The first is the dependence on a proprietary toolkit, Qt. That is the most serious one in my opinion. That is what scared most of the corporations off. They didn't want a repeat of the CDE scenario where they tried to make a common standard off of prioprietary licenced products. The fact is that the GNOME Foundation isn't a rehash of the CDE fiasco no matter how much some KDE people try to make it out to be as one.
A lesser one is the use of KParts rather than CORBA. Perhaps the consortium might have overlooked that but the fact is that everyone has a lot invested in CORBA these days. GNOME is more buzzword complaint than KDE and that's another political mark in its favor.
And so because GNOME was more politically acceptable and technically good enough for these companies to choose to endorse GNOME. The KDE people can harp on technical superiority, but the computer industry is littered with technically superior products that ended up niche players. Linux has for a very long time been technically inferior to every other form of Unix but the fact that it is politically superior has enabled it to last and have its technical failings addresed. Microsoft won because it was politically more adept than technically. The fact is in the long run you have to look at the political angles.
And there is the fact that if GNOME becomes too corporate, developers can vote with their keyboards and fork GNOME. Or can go back to KDE (or more likely start over with something new). Personally, I don't see the GNOME Foundation as being too far off from the Apache Foundation, and I have yet to see a single KDE developer use IBM's ruining of Apache as an example of why GNOME is doomed (hint, there's a reason for that). GNOME is GPL'd all the way down to the toolkits it depends on and that gives it a certain freedom KDE ultimately lacks.
[begin flame]
The fact is that the complaints about corporate control and how the KDE people are more pure and dedicated to the ideals of open source reek a little of hypocracy and a convenient ignoring of certain facts in KDE's history. The history of KDE is linked to the history of Qt because of the dependency and who remembers the Harmony project, the one time people tried to break KDE completely free of depending on TrollTech. The fact is that TrollTech has a few KDE developers working from it and while they've been mucking with the QPL, the fact is that they did their best to break a GPL'd version of Qt would would have lost their control over KDE entirely.
If Harmony had succeeded, KDE might well have been picked. But the fact is that people let themselves be seduced by TrollTech and compromised their open source principles instead of taking the hard path to being independent of them by getting Harmony to work and now the GNOME Foundation has showed them that politically they went down a proprietary dead end. To say that KDE is free and independent is to ignore it is rooted in something controlled by a single company.
[end flame]
My personal prediction is that in the long run KDE is going to be a niche player. TrollTech's greed and desire for control has doomed Qt and KDE in the long run, much as the other Unixes are doomed in the long run compared to Linux. Whatever lead KDE has now in support will slowly start to erode under official endorsement of GNOME for more major *nix variants than KDE does. Whatever technical superiorities KDE has currently will be eroded as more developers are piled on to GNOME, or they will become irrelevent as GNOME is good enough for most people. And it will get the lion's share of the development from various companies and develop a broader range of applications than KDE.
The quality of "slickness", call it ease-of-use, integration, homogenization, themability, or whatever, used to be the responsibility of the distro.
/. need crossposting now? Anyways, don't mod me down for flamebait. Helix is walking a bad path but KDE's got Mandrake pumping new tools into it on every release. Just as guilty.)
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
RedHat started whomping on other distros because of the value-add in the form of slickness. Mandrake started trumping RedHat when they went beyond just repackaging RedHat's stuff and did even more value adding, in the form of added slickness (Drak tools). Slickness now touches every aspect of the OS; installation, configuration, and the general look and feel.
Now, the slickness of Helix Gnome and KDE are going to be available to each distro. The problem with this is, no one will want to come up with their own slickness. We're losing choices and getting slickness that may not be appropriate shoved down our throats by the competition of distros! Whereas before, the choice was "RPM, DEB, or TAR.GZ", now it's "Who's slickness are we going to use?" Lord knows, they gotta have some slickness, 'cause every other distro has it. And they soon won't be able to give the user a choice because each slickness package has its own tools, its own way of doing things with the rest of the system, and they soon won't cooperate well.
Gnome & KDE used to be simple (compared to current) ways to get apps to cooperate (cut-n-paste, drag-n-drop, file management). Now they're controlling the whole system, to the point where getting anything done from the command line is harder because the tools do things in toolish ways (pun intended!). The configuration files are getting less text-editable. More and more apps depend on the presence of a slickness package.
And you know what, none of it makes my life any easier. I just have to learn new ways to perform the same tasks because now they're all graphical and the configuration files are getting more machine-edit-only as time goes on.
I may not know what to do about it, but I KNOW something's got to be done. Microsoftism is creeping in, along with corporate bucks and media hype. It's not quite time for a down-with-slickness campaign, but it's time to start thinking about where all this slickness is leading us.
(This post probably belongs under the Helix story more than it belongs under the KDE story, but it applys to both. Does
The real Threed's
--Threed
If they really believed that the wouldn't have to bother with an "official response" to the GNOME Foundation, now would they? In general this response makes some very good points, but the false bravado in the intro is a little silly.
Mindshare does matter. They obviously know that because they talk a lot about their own mindshare in their response. So basically we're supposed to believe that their mindshare will influence the GNOME Foundation, ("Any attempt to proclaim 'we are THE standard' without our involvement is just silly") but GNOME's won't have any affect on them.
To me the bottom line is that the Sun and HP's decision to adopt GNOME have proven the whole premise behind GNOME development - the need for a truely free desktop. Because of the licensing issues it's very unlikely that Sun and HP would have ever adopted KDE as their default desktop.
You don't really get it. The magic in CORBA and KParts isn't that they allow apps to communicate, hell, you've add that ever since signals. What's cool is it allows you to build applications in terms of other applications. It allows programmers to create apps that are mainly sets of components lashed together with glue code. UNIX modularity at it's finest.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The recent announcement regarding GNOME's Momma giving her stuff away all over town has resulted in a deluge of requests to the KDE Core Team asking what our "position" is. Well this is it: right on top of GNOME's Momma.
But these days, that doesn't seem enough. So read on.
GNOME's momma so corporate-controlled, she need to ask Sun's permission to type `make'
GNOME's momma so hard to develop for, it be like writing IA64 machine code on punch cards
GNOME's momma so hard to use, we had to roll her over and hit it from behind
GNOME's momma so fat, when she back up she go "beep beep"
GNOME's momma so stupid, she don't even know that the industry has settled on object oriented languages as a de facto standard for implementation of graphical user interfaces
Summary
In summary, GNOME's momma ain't shit, GNOME ain't shit. We can kick GNOME's pussy ass any day of the week. Bring it on GNOME. We ain't scared.