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Deep Inside the K Desktop Environment
Lemmingue writes "Ars Technica published a very good article about the KDE architecture. It's a essential read for anyone wondering how Konqueror can open documents in the same window or just understand the license issues regarding the Qt use.
The article describes most of the technologies behind the KDE (Qt, KParts) and how the project is organized.
The article is full of links, screenshots and diagrams."
What's with the headline? "Deep Inside the K Desktop Environment" isn't nearly as intriguing as "Deep Inside [pr0n_star]"...
Laws are for people with no friends.
Jukebox and music manager -- JuK ??
Multiprotocol instant messaging -- Kopete
PIM and groupware solution -- Kontact
Konqueror ?
Why? Why? Why?
I think that the article dodged around a number of the license problems with Qt.
Among other things:
* Qt is GPLed, and as such, prevents FOSS developers from using any OSS licenses that are not compatible with the GPL. Ironically enough, XFree86's license is not compatible with the GPL, and hence XFree86 could not include a Qt configuration utility.
* Ideological issues. Many developers and users move to Linux to avoid being under the control of a single company -- Qt is an attempt to change all that.
* TrollTech makes their money by hurting Linux. TrollTech has established themselves in a position where they can collect a tax on a vast number of developers *if* Qt becomes accepted as the standard Linux widget set. There is no such tax to develop non-GPL-compatible software for Windows -- I can get a copy of mingw or cygwin and, without paying a cent, sit down and write a closed-source application or an GPL-incompatible license for Windows. In that respect, Windows is more free than Linux is. Try telling a shareware author that instead of being able to write software freely, as he could for years on Windows and MacOS, that on *Linux* he must pay an up-front fee of $1500 *per* person that has contributed a line of code to the project for every piece of GUI software he writes. Wait and see his reaction. Even Stallman, the strongest GPL advocate in existence, does not expect everyone on a platform to be forced to use the GPL -- glibc is LGPLed, and the GPL does not attempt to force everyone on a *platform* to use the GPL. Readline (which is GPL) is not a valid comparison -- there are alternatives to readline. To maintain consistenct behavior in a GUI environment, *everyone* must use the same GUI widget set.
* TrollTech has seized a phenomenal amount of power over the future of Linux. If they want to, they can increase fees on Qt to whatever they desire (fees based on expected return of a product using Qt, for instance), they can place whatever demands on companies licensing the non-GPL Qt that they'd like (as long as they continue to offer the non-free Qt under some terms, the KDE agreement protections do not kick in. For whoever thinks that companies will never turn harmful, I give the example of Caldera becoming SCO). The omission of anything guaranteeing user and developer security is, IMHO, unlikely to be purely innocent -- this is a document that was carefully gone over by lawyers. TrollTech has firmly ensconced themselves in a position to exploit the entire future GUI environment on Linux. Remember that Linus Torvalds and many other people license their software specifically under the GPLv2, because they do not trust the FSF not to abuse their position and revise the GPL in such a way to allow wielding a body of IP that has never had an equal. In a similar way, many of us do not trust TrollTech, an organization founded for the sole purpose to make money (unlike the more ideologically-oriented FSF) not to take the simple step of revising their terms of sale on the QPL to exploit a phenomenal body of IP. Time upon time in the past, when a company has a knife to the throat of other companies in the software development community and times turn harsh or stockholders want a bigger return, that knife is used. I'd rather not go through a massive, bloody situation on Linux. GTK is just too good of an alternative, and it's too easy to avoid the entire mess.
* It is not feasible to do C Qt programs. This is a technical issue rather than a legal one. Even Microsoft did Win32 and then built MFC on top of it, allowing folks to use C if they want to. Qt imposes C++ no matter what one does (or a high-level language like Python calling C++). This breaks a long-standing *IX tradition of not *requiring* anyone to use anything but C, if a developer so desires. GTK+, on the other hand, has a C API and a standard set of C++ bindings built on top, a more conventionally accepted approach.
I'd like to reiterate that there are a lot of people that like KDE that m
May we never see th