Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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..."
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?
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?
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
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.
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
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
...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.
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.
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.
It matters to the KDE folk, because we ( a group of some twenty enthusiast KDE and Debian developers ) were intending to work together with UL on making UserLinux a KDE based enterprise distro that would easily beat other available offers.
So to be clear on this, your intention wasn't some marvelous egalitarian distribution with equal showing for Gnome and KDE that so many people here are going on about, your hope was to base it on KDE instead? You agree with the basic idea of Bruce picking one desktop environment or the other, you just understandably wish that he'd picked your one. Have I got that right?
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.