Slashdot Mirror
Sun Announces Linux Deal With Chinese Government
Infonaut writes "Scott McNealy announced today at Comdex that Sun Microsystems has made a deal with China for a million desktop Linux deployments under the new $50/seat licensing plan for Sun's desktop software, which includes its Star Office 7.0 productivity program. Whether this will translate into renewed profits for Sun remains to be seen, but according to McNealy, it represents 'the No. 1 Linux desktop play on the planet'."
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this is that KDE has lost its main commercial support.
Let us take a look at some of the reasons why this is so:
GNOME has always been the commerical desktop of choice. It has long been focussed on getting the basics right and building from there... as opposed to the KDE Project, which is entirely aimed at pleasing the slashdot peanut gallery with pointless eye-candy. KDE features are thrown into the mix with little or no regard for usability, or even good taste. The end result is disasterous, as can be seen by anyone unforunate enough to be forced into using it.
KDE is extremely expensive to develop for, unless you intend to produce GPL software. TrollTech, the owners of KDE and Qt, license the X11 version of their Qt toolkit under the GPL. This forces anyone wanting to develop software built on top of it (including KDE), to be (L)GPL licensed -- or pay TrollTech $3000 for every developer you have working on the application to purchase a commercial license.
TrollTech is also vulnerable to takeover by companies hostile to Free software and good corporate lawyers who can blow holes in the laughable FreeQt agreements.
Qt's/KDE lack of accessiblity. Accessiblity is vital feature for a modern desktop. A desktop cannot be sold to the U.S. government unless it supports the features necessary for disabled users to make full use of it. The lack of said feature effectively cuts it off from the biggest software purchaser of all. GNOME has spent the last 18 months and more doing the ground-work and developing/polishing the accessiblity of the GNOME desktop (thanks to the fine work of Sun engineers). KDE has spent the time making *fake* translucent menus to help make impressive screenshots. Over the next few months you can expect increasing numbers of near-orgasmic announcements of weak accessiblity support from the KDE project, as the full extent of their folly and just how far they are behind GNOME finally becomes obvious to them. The end result will be, as with all KDE features, half-assed and broken -- designed only to function as a marketing feature tick-box filler.
Novell is already engaged in training its engineers in development using GTK/GNOME -- not Qt/KDE.
Nat Friedman (co-founder of Ximian), recently made a post to slashdot [slashdot.org] explaining the take-over and future directions. Much has been made of Novell's claims that it will continue to "support" KDE, but this is merely as legacy software. As Nat's post makes clear, the future of Novell is GNOME and the push for a single dominant desktop.
Many desperate and ignorant (ie. most of them) KDE advocates are clinging to the idea that Novell will run KDE with Ximian/GNOME's superior software like Evolution. Little do they realise that running Evolution is running GNOME without the panel apps. Evolution is deeply integrated into GNOME... running a KDE desktop with Evolution is the height of stupidity and only adds to the extraordinary bloat and sloth assocated with KDE. Why would a company maintain, develop and test two different code bases? They wouldn't... hence the reason why KDE is dead at SUSE.
Finally, and most damning of all, TrollTech is partly owned by the lawyers at SCO! Yes, the very same viper-pit that is currently trying to smash and grab Linux and other GPL software is the company behind the curtain at TrollTech and the KDE Project!