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UserLinux Continues Debate Over GUI
An anonymous reader writes "Following up the earlier Slashdot item on this, LinuxWorld is carrying both sides of the discussion as to whether UserLinux GUI should be GNOME only, as Bruce Perens last week decided "by fiat," or include KDE."
If you don't like the distribution, don't use it. Simple as that. Keeping the OS simple and maintainable as a laudable goal, and I would find it difficult to argue with them just because my personal choice GUI wasn't included (though neither Gnome or KDE are *my* personal choice :-)).
The beauty of open source is that anyone can do this -- if you really disagree with their choice on which GUI to include, make your own distribution and include just KDE with it.
Then it should include both so USERs can choose.
I sense another Holy War incoming over this. In all honesty, while having a single interface to deal with would be easier, I don't feel the GNOME ca claim to be it. Nor can KDE, but shortening the field by including only one in this project is a bit anti-competitive, and OSS has allways thrived on the competition between similar projects.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
I really don't get it. UserLinux seems targeted towards a very specific goal that KDE cannot meet because of the Qt widget set. That's that, right? What is the big deal? Why does it matter to KDE ppl anyway? Why is it so important a matter that it has required months of discussion to no end except bitching and fantasy conceptions of what KDE will someday be?
please dont start the KDE vs Gnome war... KDE and Gnome should both do everything they can to get better while sharing between them as much as it's possible without removing their individuality. . I would prefer to have not one but two great desktop environments to choose from.
One reason may be the 1,200 USD per developer to develope closed source apps for KDE.
Gnome doesn't have such a charge.
Why do people always have to argue that you should use this or that? The beauty of it all is that you can choose, if you do not like a distribution that ships with only Gnome then don't use it. If it's based on debian you might just as well install debian and KDE (if that's what you like) or grab a source-dpkg or a dpkg and install KDE on UserLinux afterwards. I realize that many see the need for a common environment with less choice. Mostly to make it easier to move from some other OS to GNU/Linux. But those who want KDE in UserLinux are probably competent enough to get it on their own or use another distribution, they probably won't have a problem choosing between Gnome and KDE. :)
Arguing can be interesting and sometimes good, but this just seems like a pointless discussion to me.
apt-get install kde.
For those users stuck inside the default gui and without knowledge of the command line (the real target audience of "UserLinux"), I am sure there will be a front-end installer to add new packages. Just include alternate guis as optional packages to be added at the users' descretion. Why stop at KDE? You could include any number add-in optional packages that are not "default". Anyway..., multiple packages that all do the same thing (like guis) will simply increase the complexity, bloat, and confusion for the target audience. Select one good one, and they can add others if they so desire.
This whole debate sounds to me like what the BSDers call "bikeshedding". Arguing ad nauseam over minor details like colors because the deep-down architectural stuff is beyond intelligent discussion for most folks.
Back on topic. I have to say it is really sad to see KDE left out (and I say this as a long time gnome user). KDE is definitely the more mature and enterprise ready project. But then I can see Bruce's point of view. It doesn't make sense to support both, and Qt's licensing could easily put off commercial/proprietary developers.
Had the KDE and GNOME teams not thumbed their noses at each other for so long, and actually worked on interoperability issues (remember all the bitching when Redhat released bluecurve), all this could have been avoided. I mean, in that case it wouldn't have been difficult to support both.
Still, its very early in the game and there's miles to go, and both projects can compete if they work with a unified vision. Its encouraging to see that they're doing just that. The KDE proposal, for example, was big on integration (GTK, OO.o, mozilla).
Also, nobody is stopping a KDE/debian enterprise collaboration, which seems to be on the cards. On the whole the commercial interest from the big vendors has helped greatly. So while the userlinux decision is definitely a sad thing, the future looks bright.
Uhh.., looks like this is my 500th post! Excuse me while I go out and get a breath of fresh air :)
If someone wants to recomplile their own version of UserLinux, can't they? Why not start a spinoff project - call it UserLinux - K Edition or whatever? This was done with Knoppix (Gnoppix).
Seriously, what's the big dealio? It's all open source!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The Linux that gains acceptance will be wrapped around one way of doing things. This is how business works. The beautiful thing about this is that a major corpororate/development workstation distribution can rise that major software developers can target and business can point to as their distribution of choice due to it's uniformity. There will always be the ability to roll your own and as long as people like Mr Volkerding want to keep alternate distributions going we will have other choices too.
Just what is wrong with this approach? KDE decided to write KHTML instead of using Gecko, whilst GNOME is now going to use Gecko as their primary HTML layout engine in the DE. Which is better? I'd say Gecko is much more standards compliant than KHTML, even with the latest patches. The point is that for really huge projects like a HTML layout engine, you need huge resources. A lot of KDE developers work on KHTML when if they'd used Gecko, they could be working on far more interesting things.
Also, surely it's better than free software projects share code. So many people are put off GNU/Linux & BSD by the fact there are 500 different text editors and not one of them works properly (except vi
In conclusion, you're a troll. Have a nice day.
if you really disagree with their choice on which GUI to include, make your own distribution and include just KDE with it.
What's better, you can just apt-get kde on UserLinux.
Gnome will be the default, supported option. It's sensible to pick only one to "officially support", and let the hackers use the other to their heart's content.
Gnome is the better "supported" option because it doesn't require royalties for closed source development. This matters in countries where you can buy 3 developer months for single license of Qt (and for 3 developers, you need 3 licenses).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
And its not like there aren't any now. Mozilla uses gtk (though not exclusively) and netscape which is based on mozilla is closed source. This wouldn't have been possible if gtk were GPL. Similarly for openoffice and staroffice.
Thirdly, big companies like Adobe can pay for Qt. But userlinux is targeting much smaller enterprises as well, and its doubtful if they can.
Fourth, there's the issue of control. What insurance do you have against Qt jacking up the price of a developer license?
No, I didn't fail English at school, I haven't taken it yet, and am predicted an A actually. But whether or not I failed English at school and am still there or not is irrelevant. You are phrasing this like if Gnome is included in UserLinux, KDE won't exist anymore. KDE isn't the OS - just the face of it. There are still a multitude of other distros out there. The whole discussion point here is about which one is going to be used in a certain pre-packaged solution. It is perfectly acceptable for one or the other to get the job on this distro since they are finding one for a specific purpose. It's all apples and oranges. I don't suppose it would be anti-competitive if a rally team chose a Mclaren over a Benz would it?
Bruce Perens is making a GNOME-only linux distro. There's no reason for you to try to stop him. It isn't like there aren't 9000 other distros to choose from. Heck, it isn't even like there aren't ten to thirty other linux standardization movements similar to what Perens is doing.
Perens is convinced that in order to do what he wants this distro to do, he needs to choose one desktop environment and focus to it. He's also convinced that GNOME was the right choice for this. You know what? If he's wrong, all that will happen is that his distro will fail. Life will go on, and only Bruce Perens will have lost any time from it. In the meantime, if you like, you can go and make a KDE-only linux distro of your own, and it will succeed or fail or whatever.
I think Perens has an interesting little experiment going on here. If he's wrong, he's wrong, and if he's right, you know what? Once he has something good, you can take what he did, fork it, and add/insert KDE. Huzzah. In the meantime, who cares?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
How about another major Gtk vs Qt advantage. Go look at the GNU Win CD or The Open CD and count the Qt/KDE apps. Or let me save you the time and do it for you. Zero. Think that just might matter to Enterprise customers working in a diverse environment?
The pisser with the Qt license is that a project must decide before writing the first line of code which license they plan to release under and you can't change your mind later. You can't dual license either. And if you opt for free you can never port to an unfree system.
The KDE camp still refuse to admit they made an unholy alliance with the devil and will forever be damned for it. The GNOME camp saved the Free Software world by realizing the danger and running balls to the wall to quickly organize themselves and catch up close enough to KDE/Qt to prevent it from ever becoming a defacto standard.
Democrat delenda est
Nuts. Choices like that cost money. If a business lets their employees choose either KDE or Gnome, then that business has to spend money supporting both KDE and Gnome. Why would a sensible business do that?
Business users, regardless of the operating system and regardless of the "desktop environment", typically use a very few applications, day in and day out. The rest of their "desktop" sits there, unused.
A smart business will lock down the desktops of their employees as much as possible, providing access to only the applications emloyees are authorized to use.
All this adolescent whimpering about "choice" is silly and completely beside the point.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
[Reads article.. geez, the things I admit to doing around here...]
Yep, I don't see any holy war material either, even tho I like KDE and detest Gnome. What Bruce says boils down to "All right, I'm tired of arguing about this, it's time to pick ONE (because this here project is partly about a focused direction instead of including everything plus a dozen kitchen sinks), and this here SDK is what I prefer for those there reasons. So we'll go with the desktop that matches this here SDK."
Perfectly reasonable as a project decision, even if I personally disagree with the choice it led to.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
>And if you opt for free you can never port to an unfree system.
Laughable. This is the case for every GPL code. Don't use Linux then.
There are just as many non-compliant apps for Windows as there are for open source systems. You ought to see some of the crap people put up with in free utilities and things.
More reasons why the licensing argument is bogus
It's a different thing to voluntarily choose a commercial toolkit, and be forced to pick one because it is the only way to get the LAF right for the desktop platform.
Besides, shouldn't the community benefit from some form of recompense from proprietary developers using our Free systems? Yes, we should and with Qt, we do.
Community wouldn't benefit. Trolltech would.
I think it's simply better to use some of the money that the companies will save by Peren's choice of GTK and use it to improve GTK. This money will be well spent and the fruits will benefit the companies and the developer community as a whole, instead of paying for development of something they have to purchase again and again.
Choosing Qt will make the companies bitches of Trolltech for all eternity.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Its an interesting point - GNOME was originally started because Qt, which KDE was based on, wasn't "free software". But now it seems KDE is more "free software" than GNOME is.
Remember part of the point of free software is not just that its free to use, but free to modify and use the code for new programs. The only "drawback" being that if you base your software on free software, you are required to make your modification free software too.
Perens says in the article that his decision is not because of one being technically superior, but because you can make proprietary GNOME software for free, but if you make KDE software it has to be either GPL or you pay a lot of money to the makers of Qt.
The reason for this, I assume, and I haven't got the time to check it out, is because GNOME libraries are mostly LGPL, whereas the core Qt library for KDE is GPL only. The "Lesser" LGPL license lets you make proprietary software by screwing over free software developers and using their libraries without giving anything back to the community that provided the entire platform you are developing on. Even GNU says you should not license you're free software libraries LGPL.
The irony is that, as you point out, GNOME was supposed to be a "free" alternative to KDE, with all the GNU zealots following behind it for that reason. But now it seems the GNOME developers are getting fucked by the "open source" crew that were originally blamed for the travesty of KDE using a non-free development kit.
If UserLinux was an end user-oriented distribution, it surely had to pick KDE instead of Gnome, since KDE is the more integrated and stable GUI and is less messy in the architecture underneath (while Gnome/GTK has the lead in 3rd-party applications and, since recently, UI polish).
But for a "Free Enterprise Linux", there must not be any hidden costs for enterprise software development. This demands that libraries and SDKs should, where possible, be LGPL- or BSD-licensed, and not GPLed with for-pay-exceptions (like in Qt and MySQL).
Of course, the question remains if, due to its proprietary-friendly licensing and relatively conservative (=stable) design process, FreeBSD wouldn't be the better "Enterprise Linux" anyway. After all, the GPLed Linux kernel could be ditched in favor of a BSD kernel with almost the same arguments the UserLinux project now ditched the GPLed KDE libraries in favor of the LPGLed Gnome libraries.
But since Linux is all the hype even where it doesn't make too much sense (like in PDAs, for which Minix would be much better suited), it's good that the "UserLinux" project attempts to prevent that commercial distributors do the same horrible mistakes with Linux and their "enterprise" distributions the proprietary Unix vendors made in the 1990s.
-F
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
why is "choice" good. I am serious here. For me, and my coworkers, all non geeks, having a single OS/office , eg windows 2000/XP and office 2000/xp is great - a guy emails me a complex doc, and it opens without problems, all of the support staff everywhere know this system, I have never run across an unsupported peripheral piece of hardware (dont flame me - i am a typical user and this is my experience). It is really not clear to me that I, personnally, gain anything by having choice. True, I gain "freedom" to have my desktop do something else, but I loose "freedom" of interaction with others, the freedom have most of the IT people able to help me, the freedom to have plug and play (true, ms is not 100% great, but I will wager it will always be better then a fragmetned open source movement). I guess "choice" of "freedom" from the evil MS empire is just not that important to me. I turn off my computer at the end of the day, go home, and don't worry about it. It is just not that big a deal. And as for the "ethical" issues, as long as there are starving children in the world, worrying about the gates monopoly is way way down on the list As for the cost, if you factor in what I am paid, and how we work, and the cost of support and all that, at least for my company (we have a high proportion of high paid engineeers and scientists) the cost differential (only the diff is important right ?) is just not that important.
And pointing out that the FSF prefers the GPL is hardly a good argument for why one should choose a GPL'd toolkit for a distro intended for enterpise users... The FSF is hardly a bastion of support for corporations.
It's actually pretty simple. Both GNOME and KDE are quite good and equally comparable as far as features and usability. Sometimes one may be better in one area and worse in the other, but they pretty much stack up well against each other.
The difference is that KDE uses QT which is GPL and GNOME uses GTK which is LGPL. The LGPL is more friendly towards proprietary software which is something that the target audience of UserLinux(corporations) will want.
So UserLinix has chosen GNOME.
It's not the desktop at issue, it's the library licensing.
According to the article he mentions that UserLinux is intended to be based upon Debian. The reason why is extremely important to understand:
We are looking at what is best described as an evolutionary process of development. This follows a more organic than Project Management path.
In the beginning there was Minix and it was expensive and not free but it worked well enough. Following this was the development of a free replacement called Linux.
Some time after that came Applixware, an Office Products Suite. It was expensive but it worked. Following this was StarOffice and now OpenOffice.
Given these two, we have evolved the software industry to such a point that there is now a very adequate if not excellent free software which can provide us with:
- A base Operating System: Linux
- A very suitable browser: Mozilla
- A very suitable Office environment: OpenOffice
But before each of these could exist, there was a non-free proprietary variant. Not always the case: Xfree, Postgresql, vi, emacs, and so on. But they do exist.The point that is so important here to understand and except is that Open Source, Free, non-Proprietary software is getting really good all the time.
Distributions themselves are following the same path. SuSE and RedHat cost money, but Debian and it's variants are getting better and gaining a larger percentage of users who consider these to be "good enough" to use every day.
In order to effectively provide a "good enough" solution to the Businesses, Open Source communities have to provide all of their free software as easily as possible. But it is extremely important to make it possible for someone to develop a proprietary software solution to fill in the niches that Debian is missing today so that Free Software, as a whole, can move into an ever increasing circle of "good enough" for users.
If there are any barriers of any kind to that entrance it will hurt the overall effectiveness of this process. Any questions or concerns, current or future, about the licensing of software development under Qt, MySQL or anything else, will only make it less attractive to a developer to invest in making a product for UnitedLinux only to have it completely fucked up by a bunch of whining lawyers.
Personally, I'm rather surprised that he didn't select GNUstep as the desktop of choice. Long term, it might be the best of the three options mentioned.
Errm, pardon me, but who in holy hell are these UserLinux people and who's this Bruce Perens guy?
/. about a topic you admit you know nothing about?
If you don't know that Bruce Perens is a former Debian Project Leader and the primary author for the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (which was reworked into the OSI's Open Source Definition, a group he co-founded), or that UserLinux is his attempt to provide an DFSG-compliant reference distribution to high-priced Enterprise Linux solutions that can be developed and extended by Linux vendors, then why should I care who you are or why you felt the need to mindlessly babble on
I'm a GNOME user, but to be honest, I'm not losing any sleep over UserLinux's decision to pick GNOME over KDE because I'm not the target market for the distribution (although the use of GNOME means I may be more likely to look at early builds and see if I can contribute); Bruce has his goals, they're clearly outlined on the UserLinux site, and if can't come to some kind of accomodation with that, you're welcome to not contribute to the project.
Jay (=
Companies don't want to support multiple versions of Linux. Thus a single version is going to be what drives Linux in business.
There will be at least RHEL, SUSE, and now UL.
So much for Open Source ideals.
I don't see any conflict with OSS ideals. You are not forced to use UL, it's all Open Source, you can install whatever you want, you can install UL apps on other Linux platforms, etc.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Choice is good mostly because it promotes competition. As a user in a business environment, choice isn't good because you want to unify the experience. So your systems admin should be choosing for you.
But outside that environment you need choices so that you can be gauranteed of getting the best quality.
It's like, why do we need any other car company except for Ford? Well, because if no other car company came into existance we'd probably still be driving around in model T's. Instead we have many car companies each of which is trying to get us to use their product. They do that by being "newer and better" than the other guy.
Competition drives innovation.
get working on building the KDE add-on.
I'm pretty much a gnome-only fellow; gnome 2.4 on this gentoo box and dropline gnome on my slackware laptop. That said, I still need qt and the kde-libs. I rarely use them (well, I really only use them for lyx and k3b as there isn't anything like k3b for gtk) but I still need them.
Stop arguing some stupid holy war (I like gnome and I'm not moving and I have friends that swear by KDE and aren't moving). If United isn't going to take KDE, someone needs to build a dropline-ese KDE that will bold right on.
Well then, lets put it on the table. This project is not by or for the community. Yet it depends on the contributions of a huge number of developers.
When, oh when will people realize that the future of Linux and Open Source is dependent on corporate adoption? Bruce says it himself - widespread corporate adoption is necessary to combat the sw patent and other (idiotic) legal threats.
If the corps are not with us, they will be on the other side and we will lose.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
But now it seems KDE is more "free software" than GNOME is.
It's more RMS, not more free. GPL is not more free than e.g. LGPL or BSD, it's exactly the opposite.
The "Lesser" LGPL license lets you make proprietary software by screwing over free software developers and using their libraries without giving anything back to the community that provided the entire platform you are developing on.
It's in the interest of a library developer to have as many users as possible, proprietary or not. LGPL is in fact a recommended license for libraries, and GPL libs should be reserved for tasks where nothing else will do.
The idea of a UI toolkit is not to offer anything revolutionary that would warrant GPL - just to offer a standard useful API to do the obvious. If you can only use the API to do GPL applications, well, that sucks.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
...companies like Boeing, Daimler Chrysler, Disney, Fujitsu, General Electric, Hitachi, Honda, HP, IBM, Intel etc. have developed QT based applications. Why not many GTK based applications ?
That's fine, but that's their choice; they can still do that under a Gnome-default UserLinux. But do you think it would be right for UserLinux to encourage a TrollTech "tax" by choosing KDE? I don't.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Quite; note that the specific reason Gnome chose LGPL for it's libraries was to encourage popularity!
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Strawman. The point from the pro-KDE proponents was that it's better for Userlinux to at least also include the KDE libraries and QT. Then the market can decide.
Userlinux is free to choose whatever they want into their distro, it's just that they should not pretend to (strive to) be _the_ Free linux enterprise distribution.
UserLinux doesn't even *exist* yet. That's a far cry from having a monopolist's power to "persuade" 90plus percent of the market to switch over to using Internet Destroyer instead of Netscape more or less overnight (as they upgrade from windose95 to 98 or 2000).
There are no grounds to make an MS - UserLinux comparison. In fact it's ludicrous.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
It's funny that one would exclude the top C++ GUI toolkit for commercial development for the purpose of making the distribution friendly for commercial development.
Bruce says he wants to provide as default enterprise class support for one (1) desktop environment.
In his words: Because these service providers are basing their business upon a commodity product, there are already economic limits upon how profitable they can be. The difference between one and two GUIs may spell profitability or bankruptcy for some of our service providers. In a similar vein, internal support and engineering staff at businesses that employ UserLinux would like to have only one GUI SDK to develop for and maintain.
He also says that anyone is free to install Qt/KDE and the vendors are free to sell support for it if they so choose.
Now, I don't see how he can do fairer than this without compromising the stated aims of the project.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
scripsit SkArcher:
Not really. apt-get install kde will `recheck' it nicely, regardless of whether it's included on the installation media or supported by UL. That's why basing UL on Debian is so important.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
If you haven't seen this before, then you haven't been watching the distributions. Lots of the smaller distributions have only shipped with their favored window manager. (Possibly because the guy that put them together couldn't be bothered with one he didn't use.)
UserLinux is making a bigger splash than most of these...but this doesn't really mean that it will go anywhere. Who's going to adopt it? Why?
Well, nobody who likes KDE will adopt it. Nobody who likes blackbox. Or TWM. Or...
So it will only be adopted by those individuals who already like Gnome. OK. What's the first step towards getting Linux into a corporation? Somebody puts it on his computer to check it out! So from the start they've limited their initial penetration. Now if they do a good enough job, this may get enough good PR that others will check it out. But if they don't like Gnome, they probably won't like this. So they'll go back to SuSE or Mandrake or Debian or...
Basically, then, this is intended to take customers from either MSWindows, or from a distribution that normally runs under Gnome. Like Red Hat.
I'll be surprised if this is a good enough distribution to succeed, but there's nothing wrong with him trying.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
While this advice is for just /. polls it's sound advice for anything here.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
(UserLinux == user_riendly) ? (KDE || GNOME) : all_others;
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Well it seems that although QT is now GPL'd, licensing for the commercial version still has a lot to do with this debate.
Which is appalling. The entire reason that GNOME was started is because Qt wasn't GPLed. Qt was relicensed under the GPL, and Trolltech are now being shunned for doing exactly what everyone asked them to!
Go ahead and accuse GNOME of borrowing things - but just remember KDE picked the existing off-the-shelf commercial QT toolkit
I believe the original poster's point was that GNOME just picked up a load of code and threw it together. This is a completely different thing to basing your software around a well-designed toolkit. Simply glomming disparate systems together may get immediate results, but is terrible for long-term prospects. That is one of the reasons why KDE has shot ahead of GNOME in the past couple of years, IMHO.
KDE decided to write KHTML instead of using Gecko, whilst GNOME is now going to use Gecko as their primary HTML layout engine in the DE. Which is better? I'd say Gecko is much more standards compliant than KHTML
Yes, Gecko is more standards compliant. It's also loads more code, far more difficult to understand, needs much more resources, and not _much_ more standards compliant at all. If you look at the difference between the old version of KHTML and the modern day design, you will see an amazing amount of progress. This is not a coincidence.
The point is that for really huge projects like a HTML layout engine, you need huge resources.
A rendering engine isn't a massive amount of work. And the KHTML developers have clearly demonstrated that you don't need huge resources - they are 99% of the way to being a Gecko killer, simply by working smarter, not harder.
KDE has changed their metaphors just as many times as GNOME, too.
Huh? That's not true at all.
Whatever happened to the taskbar stuck to one side of the screen?
The taskbar, by default, has never been stuck to either side of the screen. You've been able to move it there of your own accord since at least KDE 1.0, IIRC.
KControl and Konqueror have had their menus and sections reorganised several times. So what?
So what? GNOME do things like switch out window managers and control panels. If all you can come up with for KDE is rearranging menus and stuff, then you've proved the OP's point.
In fact quite a few do, especially when writing software specifically for Linux. For instance, VMware, Real, Loki, there was some photo website company who support Linux (can't remember their name now) who have a GTK app to upload images and stuff.
Really, having a big list of companies who use Qt is not that useful. The fact is that NO major platform in existence today requires you to pay big bucks to write proprietary software for their platform. Not Windows, not MacOS - Linux should be no different. It'd be a serious competive disadvantage if it did. Yes, Apple and Microsoft charge for developer tools but it's nonetheless possible (and with stuff like .NET these days even easy) to develop for the platform entirely for free, and sell the resultant products as proprietary software.
And yet another reason the so-called licensing issue is bogus? The FSF prefers GPL'd libraries as a matter of principle.
It may have escaped your notice that most people ignore the FSF. The FSF (or really RMS) recommends people refer to Linux as "The GNU system, powered by the Linux kernel" or something like that. Yet nobody does.
That's because while RMS and the FSF have some great ideas (and software), not everything they say makes sense. This is one such thing.
The FSF want libraries to be GPL because they want all software to be GPLd, eventually. In fact, this could be achieved by making glibc GPLd, and in fact at one point RMS did try and do that - the glibc maintainers publically disowned him despite being long time GNU developers (some of the earliest in fact).
Besides, shouldn't the community benefit from some form of recompense from proprietary developers using our Free systems? Yes, we should and with Qt, we do.
This line of reasoning is an extremely poor one IMHO - by this logic don't all free software developers deserve recompense? What about server developers who couldn't care less about widget toolkits? Don't they deserve recompense from proprietary developers too?
I know - why not make most of our libraries GPLd? Oh yes, I know why: because then there'd be no proprietary developers at all.
In fact that's the main argument against Qts licensing - it's a slippery slope. Why should the widget toolkit be special? glibc is perhaps just as important, why not make that GPLd too?
Some community names went around spreading this ridiculous 'licensing problem' with Qt as deliberate FUD. And now we all have to clean up after their mess.
That's an interesting viewpoint. The alternative view is this: if the original KDE developers had paid more heed to the ideology of the FSF (the organization they now claim as allies so willingly) and simply worked on a new widget toolkit (maybe GTK, maybe something else) rather than take a convenient shortcut, there'd be no mess to clean up! We'd have one major desktop environment which would have more people working on it. There would be no licensing flamewars, no KDE vs GNOME trolls. We'd just be getting on with building a great desktop.
It's certainly a powerful lesson for the future - the only thing that makes our platform different is the licensing, the way we let anybody who wants to use it, modify it, and build upon it.
If we don't have that, we might as well just let Apple and Microsoft duke it out.
Im sorry, but this is only half of the problems, yes you have the better license in gnome, but face it.
KDE has one of the nicest cleanest APIs out there in existence (probably the best one since BeOS went down) whereas gnome is an awful collection of mediocre C based apis where they tried to put a little bit of OO on top of it making things even harder to code for, apple made the same mistake in the past and microsoft still does, apple already moved away from the OO in C concept to a much saner one microsoft is on its way. Gnome especially ximian also wants to do that but gets into the patent shooting sight of microsoft that way.
Im sorry, but if time constraints are my real problem which it normally is I honestly would consider to pay the high bill to TrollTech for a commercial app and hook myself into KDE instead of going the gnome way and having to pay with a much longer development time.
Technically kde is by far superior to anything from the gnome side. From the UI side like it or hate it but gnome died for me when they took out the splitting and tabbing in nautilus and even removed the html viewing (which you at least can put back in), i prefer a split view instead of digging myself through 200 layered windows to find the right one for the directory I need to access.
Not the situation on the KDE side is ideal, for small developers the unflexible Qt license is a real problem, but things are not rosy on the gnome side either and wont be for a long time.
If this means that all UserLinux-specific scripts ini the distribution will be written in Python, that's fine. If it means that Perl won't even be in the distribution, he's nuts.
There are certain things that pretty much everyone assumes are available on Linux systems, and Perl is one of them.
The business world already was offered Unix systems with one choice for everything (that's how most commercial Unix systems worked), and Linux is kicking their asses, and one of the reasons is that Linux includes all these alternatives.
Picking one GUI for users is one thing, but for things that are used by programs rather than directly by users, a good Linux-for-business distribution should have them all.
If you can, there's something wrong. You can't kill a free software project like that. It only dies if it no longer serves the developers goals.
Personally, I'd rather see them adopt GNUStep than either one - and if enough folk agree with me we might see another project taking that route. I'm sure there will continue to be other distros that choose to support KDE. It's not the end of the world, because free software is not the same world as the one where your expectations were formed.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The license issue is not an issue for any business. I mean come on. We are talking about people who use windows for most of their work. Sure, in theory you can develop on windows without Visual Studio, but how many enterprises actually do? The Qt closed-source license fee is less then the cost of VS.net, and hell It's only about half a days worth of Programmer salary anyway. If you can afford to pay programmers, you can easily afford to buy Qt licenses. Or, you can run GTK apps in KDE. It's not like its difficult.
the cost of Qt is a complete non-issue for enterprise software.
Finally, if you are actually developing your own software, for release you're probably not going to need the same kind of 'hand holding' support packages from these companies.
You really think someone running windows isn't going to avoid KDE because the GPL isn't "free" enough for them, that they need LGPL?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Having worked for a bunch of companies, I can tell you that's not the way things work.
A lot of corporate development is in-house. The Troll Tech license and license fees mattter a great deal for that. They matter not only because of the short-term cost, but they also matter because of the long-term control Troll Tech gets over commercial applications.
In fact, Troll Tech's control is a problem even for "free software folks", because the design and direction of Qt is ultimately driven by Troll Tech's commercial interests. And you can't weasel your way out of that fact by arguing that if Troll Tech starts going down the wrong path, people can just fork the GPL'ed version of Qt because the very reason for choosing Qt is KDE's assertion that no open source project could deliver a toolkit of comparable quality.
In fact, another strike against KDE and Qt is the fact that KDE already screwed up big time once. Far from being the result of a careful plan, the current dual-licensing scheme for Qt is the result of Troll Tech averting disaster by changing their license after KDE went on for a couple of years merrily developing software under an open source license incompatible with the QPL. The impression one gets as an outside is that KDE doesn't know what the hell they are doing with licenses. And it doesn't help either that Troll Tech is clearly responsible for killing the Harmony Project, an attempt to develop a more liberally licensed Qt-compatible license, because it would cut into their sales. Neither of those is a big recommendation for KDE or Qt.
And, in fact, some of those in-house applications later become open source. But the decision to open source is not something companies make at the start of a project--it takes time to deal with lawyers and business people. With Qt, we'd have had to pay Troll Tech for commercial development licenses just so that we could start developing only to have wasted that money later when we get the corporate OK to open source.
So, why is it that, so far, there are more commercial Qt applications than Gtk+ applications? Well, first of all, I'm not sure that's true--where is the data? Secondly, the Qt applications I have seen are usually from companies like Adobe, whose Linux offerings basically suck.
But, in any case, until maybe last year, Gtk+ really was behind Qt (after all, it started later as well), but it has now caught up. But before then, there were already plenty of commercial projects in toolkits like Tcl/Tk and wxWindows, both of which have even more liberal licenses than Gtk+.
In my own experience, Qt's license is deeply harmful to Qt's acceptance for commercial projects: many commercial developers just don't want that sort of dependence on a software vendor, let alone a little company from Norway, even if the money didn't matter. But the money does matter. And Qt's license is also harmful to Qt's use for open source projects.
This isn't high school. People will use KDE as long as KDE is the best solution for them.
Rather than worrying about losing popularity, try focusing on making KDE the best it can be.
Like I pointed out, installing KDE on UserLinux should be a single command.
apt-get install kde
As for the developers, I don't see what you're worried about. They are the ones making KDE into what they want it to be. Why would they abandon their project?
And the commercial support? Well, only time will tell for that. But the commercial support is usually pretty easy to predict. Give them the best environment for their products and they'll move to it.
If you cannot make KDE a better choice for end users, developers and commercial interests, then why not let those groups make their OWN CHOICE about what to use, develop and develop for?
Open Source is not about lock-in.
GPL is supposed to protect the users, by forcing the developers to release source code. The RESTRICTIONS on the GPL are intended to have a good effect in promoting free software.
The GPL is LESS FREE than the LGPL, which in turn is LESS FREE than the BSD license. Less free because of more restrictions. The restrictions have a good effect for users so they are usually good.
UserLinux wants maximum freedom for DEVELOPERS, so the platform will be rich with apps and thus attractive to users. Users can still insist on 100% free (GPL) software, no change there. But users who want to be able to choose either proprietary software or GPL can do that.
I am both a user and a developer so I can see the advantages of GPL, LGPL and BSD from both sides. Perens is doing the right thing here IMHO.
And you are just an idiot for claiming that the GNOME developers are somehow getting f***ed because of LGPL libraries in GNOME. Is QPL better than LGPL because you can pay $2000 for a dev kit instead of just $0? Yeah right that makes a lot of sense.
But you can write GPL software for either one if you want, for $0 in each case.
So, let me get this straight - he wants to discourage the use of GPL'd code in UserLinux in order to have businesses create proprietary applications that can not in turn be included into UserLinux because they will not be free?
Sounds like an interesting one-sided ecosystem.
If he took this commercial-friendly argument to its logical conclusion he would dump the GPL'd Linux from UserLinux in favour of BSD. But then it would not be much of a UserLinux, would it?
The basic argument is that a GUI toolkit may be a very unimportant part of the application - applications companies would simply not GPL because their apps do damn smart, trade secret stuff and they'd want it closed. And yet, these programs will need a GUI - even if it's just a bunch of plain objects (buttons, checkboxes, radioboxes, text labels etc.) Don't think of a yet another mp3 player, think projects where 98% of the work is non-GUI.
As such, they don't have a problem with contributing to Gnome, or to the Linux kernel - that's just improving their toolbox. What they want to keep out and proprietary is their own code, interfacing with the toolkit. If you want a similar example, take OS X. They've been voluntarily contributing back to the underlying system, and those using Gnome (and must do so according to the LGPL) are unlikely to have any problem with doing that either.
That being said, I don't think the QT licence is that bad and expensive for a large company. As long as those licenced for QT get to develop with it a lot. It's for the small companies where the QT guy is also the "everything else" guy, that it gets real expensive. And I'd really not want to try a start-up of some small-time shareware using QT. Maybe, if there is a proprietary culture, the devs will go to QT because "Why should these companies profit from MY work?" As of yet though, I don't really see many proprietary Gnome-based apps, so no one is getting an itch from it. But it'll come if the big money starts flowing...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Gnome is the better "supported" option because it doesn't require royalties for closed source development. This matters in countries where you can buy 3 developer months for single license of Qt (and for 3 developers, you need 3 licenses).
If that is so, how come there aren't any commercial GTK-apps?
Having a real company behind Qt that can provide support and such, is actually an advantage for KDE. Qt is also much nicer to program with, is cross-platform, etc. Sure you have to pay for it, but it's only a small fraction of the cost of a whole project, and it saves manpower because it's such a nice tool to work with.
And then there's the moral issue: because GTK is LGPL, it's practically preventing the use of the GPL for commercial programs. Isn't free software what many have been fighting for? Why not choose a toolkit that has a cost-advantage when used in a GPL-manner then?