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UserLinux May Go Without KDE
Anonymous BillyGoat writes "For the past few days, there has been considerable debate at the UserLinux mailing list about the (proposed) non-inclusion of KDE in the distro. The KDE developers have written a proposal opposing the decision to go with GNOME as the sole UserLinux GUI, while Bruce Perens has posted a response."
user mode linux != userlinux. HTH, HAND.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Newsforge still has a copy of the response that Bruce Perens posted before replacing it with is on www.userlinux.com/GUI.html now..
Get it here
GNOME was chosen because it allows the development and distribution of proprietary applications WITHOUT purchasing a license from Trolltech.
It isn't about if one is better than the other. He doesn't touch that argument with a 10 foot pole.
Read BP's white paper for his wording on it.
as far as i know, the QT developer license is only if you want to use QT in non open sourced, commercial ways. however, i havn't read the actual licensing, only read "reviews" of it so you might want to read it yourself.
Why hasn't anyone made an OSS implementation of Qt?
It's GPLed right now, and thus is already OSS. (Now, because it's under the GPL and not the LGPL, *commercial* development with Qt requires a commercial license, and that's a big chunk of the reasoning on why I'm not putting in the time to learn it -- but it certainly is open source).
Trolltech is an independent company, not controlled by Canopy. Canopy group owns 5.7% of TrollTech's shares, while Trolltech's employees and founders own 69.7%. This myth of Canopy controlling Trolltech is entirely untrue (but remarkably persistent, thanks to anti-KDE trolls). Read kdemyths.urbanlizard.com and be enlightened.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
If you want to do commercial development with Qt, you have to pay a one time fee.
Bruce objected to that and is putting together a distribution that has NO payment requirements for commercial development.
That's his approach, that's his goal.
Whether he will succeed or not, only time will tell.
Wrong. He is applying rule of economics and business to his decision. Businesses can develop and distribute proprietary applications in Gnome w/o paying any license fee! With KDE, they cannot! In order to develop/distribute proprietary software, they need to pay a $1300 license fee to TrollTech.
Which option is more business friendly?
Just because the Canopy Group and SCO invested in Trolltech, doesn't mean that Trolltech is part of the Canopy Group.
Alltogether, Canopy Group owns a grand total of 5.7% of Trolltech. They have practically no say in the operations of Trolltech.
People really need to stop dragging Trolltech's name through the mud with this pointless argument.
(Note:: I am not a Trolltech/QT/KDE fanboy. In fact I don't use any desktop environment. My WMs of choice are Enlightenment and BlackBox.)
End of line..
Qt's got two licences - the first being the GPL, which most people use, is the good old make-it-GPL-and-you're-fine route. You can't distribute a closed-source program that uses Qt, however, unless you use the QPL, whereby you pay money to TrollTech and they give you the right to use Qt in your closed-source app, plus loads of documentation, developer support, etc.
If anything, it's a better situation than the GPL-only Linux kernel - if you want to write a binary-only driver for Linux, you can be on really shaky ground, and there's no option of a second, proprietary-friendly licence to go to.
I gather MySQL is dual-licensed in a similar way to Qt, and I haven't seen huge flame-wars about its licensing...
Remember, whatever choices we make apply only to what we choose to support as a group. Our choices don't cause the alternatives to be removed from Debian, they don't constrain what a service provider can support to their own customers...
IOW, if you want to use KDE, go ahead and use it, no one is stopping you. If they were making changes that made it impossible for KDE to run properly, then there may be a good basis for petition. Not having KDE included in distro XYZ in no way invalidates all the great work they've done to date. (I'm a happy KDE user)
Also the white paper suggests supporting MySQL as the database, Python as interpretive language, and Mozilla as the browser. I dont see postgreSQL, PERL, and Thunderbird development teams getting thier panties in a wad.
Gee, trolling about Trolltech. How novel. Okay, before any more people swallow this bait:
Two seconds of googling would show that this is not the case. Look at Trolltech's investors. For crying out loud, Borland owns a bigger stake in Trolltech than Canopy Group, and nearly 2/3 of the stock is owned by employees:
Even if every outside investor (including Borland :-) were merely a shell corporation controlled by Canopy, they'd still have nowhere near the votes to influency anything at Trolltech.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
KDE and GNOME are now mature enough that they can both do the job very well, and are sufficiently configurable that a company can meld them to their preferred look and feel. At work GNOME is the default, at home I've tended to use KDE. I used to prefer KDE, but now I am pretty agnostic about the desktops. Nothing clunky like CDE, please!
What is needed is that whichever desktop be robust - e.g. the clipboard always works.
GNOME does have an advantage in some decent industry backing. That could be converted into extra coding effort, or quality assurance. That final polish could make a lot of difference, and if GNOME is the way to go to get that polish, then go with GNOME.
Some KDE apps are nice, though - I wouldn't want to lose those - e.g. kdebug, k3b, which I love
kcontrol is integrated and pretty much all-encompassing, while GNOME is constantly shifting from CORBA over XML to a binary registry and back. GNOME has become so bad that they actually added a regedit style "config editor" and apparently really expect users to use it to configure applications. Hint: This is the kind of nightmare people want to get rid of when they switch from Windows to Linux.
.gconf directory if you have any applications that use it. You'll find nothing but XML files.
This statement is incorrect. Much (all?) of Gnome's configuration data is handled by GConf. GConf is a registry, but all the data is stored in XML. Just look at your
The "registry editor" you're referring to is gconf-editor. Gconf-editor is not intended to be used by end users. It's quite similar to the windows registry editor (though it does seem to be better layed-out than that). I've personally only had to use it to make very geek-oriented adjustments, such as binding keys to launch terminals and skip songs in XMMS.
There's very little conceptual difference between storing config information in a bunch of "dot-files" off your home directory and storing them in a directory hierarchy containing XML files off the ~/.gconf directory.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Non-GPL'd Qt development requires payments to Trolltech. Qt has the same license as Gnome under Linux.
Trolltech has licensed Qt under the GPL for Linux, which is the same license as Gnome. They will also sell you another license if you don't like the GPL and want to write apps that link to Qt using some other more restrictive license.
As far as I know, Gnome is only licensed under the GPL. Unless I'm mistaken, that means to me that with Gnome, you have one choice of license, whereas with Qt, you can opt to purchase a non-GPL license.
Both editors have been around forever, have a steep learning curve, and are supposed to be extraordinarily productivity-enhancing for those who invest the effort to master them. As with many other sets of competing projects (Linux/BSD, GNOME/KDE, OSX/Windows), they are both probably better classified as religions rather than software products, and are excellent material for flamewars.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
What I can't understand is that the development effort is *much* bigger for Gnome than for KDE. GUI toolkits is about the only place where, according to my experience, the OO overhead is justified. For me, the C vs. C++ debate ends when one considers Qt vs. Gtk.
It's the most complex text editor ever written, used mainly by programmers to edit code and a million or so other things besides. Some programmers love it, others hate it, preferring the much more lightweight (but with its own UI issues) vi text editor, or alternatives like nedit. The jargon file's entry on EMACS gives some explanation, see also vi, and holy wars. If the above links are still too opaque, and you need more details on EMACS itself rather than the culture wars, see the Wikipedia entry on Emacs.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Sorry to have to say it, but from the UserLinux people's point of view KDE isn't made here, so it's not their first choice. Neither cost nor freedom matter one fig to business. To think that they do is pure self deception.
KDE folks: Get over it, if you can't join them, beat them; and kome up with a really KooLinux.
It's more than possible by taking an appropriate subset of the Gentoo distribution and adding basic accounting functions ready to go. Now write an ebuild file and install with:-
emerge KooLinux
Now that would be a piece of cake. Granted it'll be time consuming to make, but it's far from rocket science, yet very VERY Kool.
Don't believe me? Ask Richard Stallman.
Not that there are that many ISVs anyway, but I guess that some people want to change it. But all that has been discussed to death already.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
What I should've said was
or better yet
Well, if you want to see things like Photoshop running natively on Linux, Adobe will have to use a toolkit that can do multiple document interfaces, and that rules out GTK.
Neither the UNIX or MacOS versions of Photoshop use MDI. Why would a Linux version need it?
The cost of a license for commercial development is not a valid argument. If a company develops an application for sale, the cost of a license is a fraction of the overall cost to develop, market, and maintain a product. As far as development kits go, the decision on which dev kit that gets chosen is based on quality, which will drive the cost of development in the long run, and company politics.
This is really just a, "We don't like KDE, so we've decided that nobody who uses our distro will use it."
No. You're wrong.
Bruce Perens said, repeatedly, that he feels that GNOME and KDE are exactly equal in features, and that there is no real technical superiority of either over the other. If the licenses were identical too, he would have had to flip a coin, he said.
And he took some pains to point out that he has recommended Qt as a solution for some of his clients, and that his publishing company just publised a book on KDE.
And it isn't even true that "nobody who uses [UserLinux] will use it." Since UserLinux is just Debian with a specific set of packages, there is no reason at all why you couldn't set up a KDE desktop on your UserLinux system. And you know what? If you did that, Bruce Perens wouldn't care.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Specifications don't mean anything if they're not enforced. I can make a specification that says I get to have root on your system, but unless everybody gives me root, it doesn't mean anything. Given the distributed nature of open source development, and that anybody can start their own project to reinvent the wheel any time they want, just writing a specification isn't enough. You have to write the specification, get people to support it (or do it yourself), and then choose to only distribute those applications that support the specifications in your distribution. Choosing KDE over GNOME is implicitly saying that the specification is to use KDE's guidelines and development practices rather than GNOME's. That doesn't mean that KDE does have a coherent style guide, but if they don't now they really should.
I'm sure they're going to go a step further than just choosing KDE over GNOME, and only ship one office suite, one gui text editor, one calculator, etc. If you want a different desktop environment, office suite, text editor, etc, then go ahead and install something else. However, you're no longer the target demographic for UserLinux. Use a more appropriate distribution like Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.
> If TrollTech chose to make Qt non-free, then all previous revisions will still be available under the GPL.
Additionally, the last free version of Qt would become BSD licensed. As per KDE FreeQt foundation guidelines.
The GPL promotes Free software development, because you are only allowed to create Free applications with it.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
You seem to miss the point.
Qt is available under GPL or under a proprietary licesne. This means a closed-source software developer must either give away his source or pay Troll Tech a license fee.
GTK+ is LGPL. Thus, a closed-source software developer can use it for free and without releasing his source.
GTK+/Gnome is therefore being picked because it is less ideologically pure than Qt/KDE, not more so.
"KDE is a great Desktop Environment, and no one is doign a thing to get it removed from Debian"
Really? I'm sure everyone forgot the nearly two year period that KDE wasn't included in Debian.
June 1998 - KDE removed from Debian. Thousands of unofficial apt sources crop up.
September 2000 - KDE readded to Debian. People rejoice.
What grudge? Look at the article, there are many Debian developers who are supporting this effort. Debian has no grudge against KDE. in fact, Debian ships one of the best KDE distros out there. To say that there is a grudge between the 2 projects is just ridiculous.
The conflicts are coming from Bruce Peren's vision of having a completely gratis operating system that coporations can then add value to and resell.
The problem is that QT cannot be resold with closed source applications without royalties.
The answer for Bruce is to use GNOME only and exclude KDE. Never mind that you can still develop KDE applications using the GTK+ gratis toolkit (provided you would want to use a toolkit that is as primitive as GTK+)
The answer for the rest of us is: "Qt has tons of commercial programs using it because of its cross platform design and top notch API... GTK doesn't. KDE has a larger user base.... GNOME doesn't. KDE uses OO toolkit to achieve its integration... GNOME is stuck in the stone age. KDE had all the problems GNOME is currently working on figured out 2 years ago... GNOME still doesn't. And KDE is a worldwide project... GNOME is a US Centric project."
The facts are that KDE coporate and enterprise desktops have been deployed and in production usage for years in massive quantities, and GNOME is just barely starting out. GNOME itself was created just because RMS didn't like the QPL license, and he was afraid KDE would take over the Linux desktop and stick us all with Qt royalties. Now that Qt is GPL, bruce perens is complaing that it is "too GPL"... Give me a BREAK!
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
Yeesh, have you ever used anything other than a Windows PC? Only the windows version of Photoshop uses an MDI interface.
You might just as easily say that only the Mac version doesn't use an MDI interface. Wow, look at how non-informative saying either is.
Except that that'd be more correct since Photoshop was designed with MDI in mind, then adapted to fit the Mac idea of what's "usable." Also, even the non-MDI Mac interface of Photoshop isn't as bad as the GIMP. At least when you bring Photoshop to the front on a Mac you bring the entire application to the front, which is actually useful, as opposed to just bringing the tool palette to the front and having to raise all the other windows individually.
You do not need to pay royalties. This has been pointed out to Bruce already but Bruce seems to continue to deliberately confuse a one-time license fee with royalties.
Another small hint that Bruce might not be completely forthcoming about his real interests wrt. UserLinux. Ask Bruce about the companies that sponsor his plan.
Again, this isn't to take anything away from Qt -- its tools are pretty good, and its documentation is excellent. However, Gtk+ is very good too.