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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) "
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.
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.