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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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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