Reasoning Behind The KDE League

Nerds writes: "Chris Schlaeger wrote a letter to explain to the KDE community at large why the KDE League was created. He explains why trying to compete with GNOME is a waste of time and mentions that Red Hat and VA Linux are still considering joining the League."

Comments

KDE motivation... seems odd.

[ajs]

The KDE League mission statement:

"To establish KDE as a desktop standard for PCs, workstations, and mobile devices, to promote software development for KDE and to promote the use of KDE by enterprises and individuals."

The goals of the GNOME Foundation according to foundation.gnome.org:

the Foundation will coordinate releases of GNOME and determine which projects are part of GNOME. The Foundation will act as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may produce educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about GNOME software. In addition, it may sponsor GNOME-related technical conferences, represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others, help create technical standards for the project and promote the use and development of GNOME software.

Do you see the difference between these two organizations? KDE has, as far as I can tell, always focused on taking over as the one standard desktop. Why? Why are they so non-inclusive?

KDE can claim 70% of the desktops (where do they get this figure anyway), in the end they're yet another desktop, and people are welcome to use it.

For me, until there are bindings for Perl (their Web site claims there are, but only Qt is supported, and it's 6 months old) or C, I'll stay away from developing for it. To the rest of you who choose KDE: good for you! At least we've moved beyond the day of Motif/CDE and other such crap. KDE is much more of a modern desktop which earns my respect if not use.

Perceptions of OSS infighting

[Markar]

A ZDNet comentary critiques the GNOME Foundation and KDE League, and compares it to the infighting among brands of UNIXes. The commentary postulates that forking of DEs will occur, and further fork OSS OSes.

The Windows community and Tech press don't seem to get it, choice is good. Microsoft has dominated so completely, for so long, that people have forgotton that, choice is good and drives competition. Just my $0.02 FWIW.

A Very Good Writeup

[RickHunter]

A very good writeup indeed. It seems to address all the major issues in a very balanced fashion. I'm not a KDE user myself (I can't stand some of the interface elements), but I think that publicity will be good for the project. Especially since KDE (from what I've used of it) seems similar enough to Windows to attract Windows users but doesn't replicate too many of the little things that makes Windows so irritating to use (yes, almost every Windows user I've talked to has found something, and often many things, about the interface to be almost painful). Hopefully, the KDE League and the GNOME Foundation will be able to work together on promotion and such, to inform people that the world outside of Windows has options other than the command-line.

The one disturbing thing I found about the letter was the paragraph where he talks about not competing with GNOME. I don't know if its just me, but it seemed like he was saying that they weren't trying to compete with GNOME only because there weren't many GNOME users, and that if there were more, they'd do everything possible to steal them away. As I said, its probably just me, but that paragraph still sounds somewhat odd.

Anyway, that's really a small detail. Good move on the part of the KDE guys, and hopefully this will alert people to the number of interface options available to Linux (and other Unix-style OSes, of course). And more options are always good.

-RickHunter