Re:Not _JUST_ GPL. LGPL still prefered
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 1
/*
Its a risky, but perhaps rewarding move for Troll. On the bad side (from their view) the GPL base would permit a better, seperately
maintained
variant with GPL code they cannot add to their commercial option - it wouldn't be all their code at that point.
*/
Absolutely true. They'll run into the same problem the Harmony project ran into: how do you incorporate changes without being sued? They'll have to have someone write e spec for the coders.
I was referring to *everything* about both projets, from a usability sense.
The desktop, the embedding of data in documents, etc. *should* be defined as Xdnd is defined; that is, not toolkit-centric. Yes, I realize what a mess this area was before KDE & GNOME came along, but you must admit it makes sense, to a point.
Miguel made a good point recently that UNIX/X software "does it all wrong" when a projet supplies its own print services, file services, etc (which in a sense GNOME did this too.) If Miguel & Crew had been so concerned about not reinventing the wheel, they should have concentrated on Lesstif and Display Ghostscript instead of making GTK into The New Motif(TM). God bless 'em, they've done a great job, but it's a bit ridiculous that much of the work done on both projects is simply duplication & reimplementation of existing services on other toolkits.
This is just a bit of FUD designed to create good publicity.
The reason GNOME got started is that Miguel, in his typical lack of diplomacy:^) essentially told the KDE team that they should use another toolkit. When they took a rather less-than-enthusiastic stance to this, he started the GNOME project, and based it mostly on GNU software.
When you get right down to it, KDE has been getting bad publicity lately. It's true; Qt is a *commercial* toolkit. It was also AFAIK the best choice at the time. Debian, being comprised mostly of people with no legal knowledge (not that I have any) have taken an ambiguity in the GPL and ran with it, stating that distributing KDE is illegal.
The KDE team, of course, believes in what they're doing and would like to continue the project, and they need some decent publicity for it to be "worth it." So what do they do?
Write some FUD.
It's kind of like stating "The workers of the Soviet Union will rise against you." Workers? Please. KDE is to some extent controlled by Troll Tech now, since some of the core KDE people work for Troll Tech. They're not as free as they imply. I'm sure they're still doing it because it's fun, but it's a lie to state that they're more free than GNOME.
More open than GNOME? Try subscribing to a mailing list and suggest that Konqueror should use Gecko as its HTML renderer and just see what happens. You'll wish you hadn't.
I like both projects and I'm glad to see that the KDE team can still say, after 3 years, that they have fun doing it. But, guys, there's no need to lie to stay ahead. Just let the market decide.
Absolutely true, which is why both KDE and GNOME specs are completely bogus.
I mean, both specs offer *complete* solutions, based on toolkits, rather than creating open standards. Sure, the standards *are* open, but are made less so by being tied to specific toolkits.
I don't code in KDE at all, and haven't messed around enough with GNOME to be able to write a spec. If anyone cares to do so, hey, more power to ya.:^)
>has offices in redmond, israel, england, and more...
^^^^^
Hello?
The original story stated that Mainsoft was based in Israel. By the way people bitch about stories being re-run (I don't know about most of them) I just figured all the whiny, bitchy posters would be aware of why it was called Israel. I was wrong.
Even if it were true that Linux had no desktop market share (I'm sure that's why companies like Wal-Mart carry RH & Mandrake, when they don't carry MacOS) here's what's wrong with that analysis (no market share, hence no need):
That analysis offers no research proof that no customers want Linux.
Where's any research pointing out that customers don't want a Linux port? (I do! I do!) Hell, who's to say this wouldn't outsell the Mac port? (Probably not hard to do.:^)
Plus, not every company in the world started something because there was a demand. Sometimes it's left to advertising and marketing to *create* a need (it sounds cheesy, I know).
Um, maybe because
1.) Mozilla isn't X11R6-specific?
2.) Not everyone uses KDE and GNOME?
3.) You should get the stick out of your ass?
(Note to the humor-impaired: that last one was a joke, not intended entirely as an insult. Please go ahead and ruin my karma rating; it's already pretty low, because I express my opinion.)
I do this sort of thing with Glade and Python (thanks to Libglade.) Only instead of writing the XML by hand, I just click, click, click my way to an interface.
Re:I'm not developing apps for KDE or GNOME.
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
I hate to write a "me too," but you make some excellent points.
I've felt that, even though I'm using Helix Gnome right now (and, hey, it even has a panel applet that allows KSCD to dock!) that both projects took the wrong approach.
What's The Right Approach(TM)? X11R6 is pure chaos. So many toolkits; so few standards. Either project could have simply defined some simple standards (remember OffiX DND?) and been mostly done with it--but no. We had to have a standard desktop--or, make that two. And our apps will work properly *only* when our destop is running. Sorry, them's the breaks.
Ugh--what we needed was a standardized DND protocol, a standardized network-transparency protocol, and a more-or-less standard for look-n-feel.
Yeah, your approach is a good one. That's the approach Star Office took with KDE--install menu options, make it work with the system, but don't touch the libs. It might be kinda fun to hack together a standard for working with the two desktops while not using libraries from either.
The issue is licensing, and I don't mean that hot air the Debian team has blown out their collective asses. I mean the steep price of licensing of QT if one uses it as a commercial project.
And, quite frankly, I believe that the QPL is a violation of the GPL, but not for the reason that Debian is willing to risk a libel suit for. Quite frankly (although IANAL) the GPL allows for charging for distribution of software, as long as the source is free (as in speech). And what constitutes as a charge? If I come up with a great new distro, and base a bunch of GUI config programs on QT, and the only practical use of the software is to modify my funky config files, *and* I distribute the software on CD for a fee, do I have to fork over $1500 *before* I can even hope to distribute? Am I in legal hot water because I'm not providing the program absolutely, totally for free? Probably not, but GTK avoids that.
FYI, IBM and SUN are *international* companies (the first letter of IBM stands for International).
Yours has to be the *stupidest* argument of all time. Why did you bother? First you argue it's primarily because Gnome is American, then you argue that it's financial? Oh, and what about the fact that the project founder is from Mexico City (i.e. not American)?
Try watching "CBS Evening News" sometime. It's amazing just how biased this program is. Did Dan Rather get his education from a Cracker Jack box? It's usually a little more subtle than just, "President Clinton was blasted by the evil Republicans for his perfectly innocent, supposed extramarital relations," but it's darn close. I remember eight years ago when Clinton ran against Bush; CBS EN ran a segment on Bush's golf game every time the man went to play golf. Oog. Their recent coverage of Napster was, shall we say, embarrasingly biased.
Before you comment, Dan is not just the anchor; he's also the news director.
And, finally, the point, proving that if this is marked as -1, Offtopic, the moderator's an asshole. The point is is that most if not all journalists let bias slip in. Sometimes is extremely obvious, such as in this case. Sometimes it's more subtle. But for all the high-and-mighty talk of the journalistic establishment of not allowing personal bias to affect coverage, it's just talk. A reporter's personal feelings will *always* be a factor. Period.
I use software from both...but I use the Gnome desktop (session manager + Sawfish + Panel + GMC) because:
1.) Gnome's Panel menu reads the KDE Menu structure (without an external script)
2.) I have KSCD docked on my Gnome dock...there's an applet now that can dock KDE dockable apps! (not true of KDE2...wonder if they did it on purpose?:^)
In short, when it came to the desktop "war," the Gnome folks were more mature about it. The willingness of the Gnome team to work with KDE (and not just state, "it's so sad, they're wasting their time") and the issue of multiple programming language/scripting support. I am a loser and write apps using Python and Libglade (although, since I'm still learning, nothing's been released yet...I'm working on a simple print media-oriented layout tool...although it may never materialise...)
Plus some of my aversion to KDE is personal and childish. I was going through the "Hello World" example when I went ahead and subscribed to the developer's list. I replied to an email, and, it's true, most of it was quoted. Mattias(?) saw fit to tell me not to do that. Ironically, he had a setup problem that caused all his messages to get sent twice--possibly causing more of a problem than I was by sending mostly-quote email. I told him so. He kicked me off.
Uh, motherfucker, like IE and Explorer are tightly integrated?
CLUE STICK: they're not really integrated, tied at the hip, whatever. Microsluts have just written the apps to fire each other up when they're needed. If one wanted to go to the trouble, one could *probably* replace most of IE's functionality (and Outlook, for that matter). And someone should, considering the big gaping holes that Microsoft left in their products.
I used to have a crappy card that Creative sold (don't remember the chipset) that the XVGA (640x480x16) wouldn't work on for anything.
*sighs* I wish I were as uninformed as you...some cards just don't have perfect VGA compatibility (which is what 640x480x16 generally is...and that's the server XF86Setup uses)
BTW to the original poster, try xf86config; it may be textmode, but at least it works.
Yeah, funny you mention Mandrake 7...I just upgraded from 7.0 to 7.1, and the damn thing went ahead and autodetected all my hardware, automatically set up my hardware, and cheerfully installed RPMs for me. Trouble is, they ship some screwy-ass X server for folks with Voodo cards (I've got a Voodoo3), and manages to majorly foul up on my machine every time. AND not only did the installer leave my machine in runlevel 5, it also didn't give the option to switch to runlevel 3. And that also leaves the question of just WHY the installer is set up to autoinstall an X server (I suppose they thought, "Gee, maybe we'd be shipping fixes, and the autoinstaller needs to run just in case," but still.
Mandrake is nice, mind you, but it seems to suffer from some of the same problems that Windoze does: it tries to do everything for the user, then doesn't give a good way out in the end (although it's MUCH easier to fix a Linux problem than a Windoze problem, IMHO.:^)
What distribution? What hardware? What the hell are you talking about???
To tell the truth, right now my Win98 distro if FUBAR...something happened to IE5; it was from a source outher than Micro$oft (Earthlink CD, I think.) Unfortunately, for some reason when the software is installed it's somehow marked as not being uninstallable (!) and I've yet to clean out all the crap it puked into the Registry. To top it all off, something happened (dunno what) to the MSHTML.DLL (or whatever the hell it's called) and IE5 segfaults everytime one visits a site. I tried downloading the IE5 installer from windowsupdate.com (which won't work in Communicator...no VBScript support) and the installer won't install over the non-uninstallable software (!!).
Yeah, Windows is easy...provided you get Windows with the hardware, never install software, and just try to keep from drooling on the keyboard.
Erm, idiot, if you don't like the Linux bias, go somewhere else.
I've been reading Slashdot since day one. I found out about Slashdot while looking for AfterStep applets for my Linux box. Yeah, it has a Linux bias. Get over it!
Yeah, but despite current GNOME X11 dependencies, GNOME is actually better poised to be moved to a new display technology (if one ever materializes.)
Why? Licensing.
You thought that was cleared up. Yeah--for the UNIX/X11 version. (let's just never mind that Linux is not a UNIX.) What if some magnificent bastard comes up with some great kernel design, has POSIX-compliance, and has some great new display technology? Uh, let's talk to the Troll Tech lawyers. Oh boy, time for another round of talks.
GNOME? Well, let's see; we need to port GLIB. And we need to port GDK. Remove those X11 deps...and make sure we're not linked to any non-GPL non-essential libs.;^)
See my point? KDE has been legally dodgy from the beginning, mostly out of necessity. It was the best toolkit at the time. They didn't want to take the time to build up GTK/some other toolkit, and they liked QT, so they used it. The GNOME folks have worked on GTK since then, and it rocks.:^) Up until fairly recently, the KDE team couldn't even *touch* QT code if they wanted to without working for Troll Tech.
Moral of the story? Want to undertake an Open Sourced (no apologies to RMS) project? Make sure your libs are licensed well, and in a way you can deal with--or they will come back to haunt you.
Ah, hell, it's actually not that simple. In some ways, GNOME is actually more *open.* Yeah, QT is more open now, but what's being virtually ignored still in the KDE camp is the ability to code for the KDE desktop in different languages than C++ (last I heard, the "official" stance was, "C++ is the best choice.") This may not seem like much of an issue since C++ is pretty standard in the commercial world, but this ain't exactly the commercial corporate world here. Some folks just wanna code in Python or Lisp. Mo' power to 'em.
Try out both the KDE2 betas and Helix Gnome; I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by both. There actually is a convergence happening right now, regardless of what the two camps think of each other. And, hey, GNOME may have been a knee-jerk reaction to an offhand comment by Mattias, but it's gotten pretty good and pretty stable (I'm convinced, in case you couldn't tell.:^) The only thing GNOME needs to work on is memory usage. KDE2 has them beat. Oh, and Nautilus. Haven't tried it yet, but hear it's great.:^)
This depends, and, quite frankly, is FUD all over. WINE is not the first API-porting effort in the world, and some previous efforts have been Microsoft-sanctioned (remember the Solaris port of IE?)
>The GPLed kernel changes would benefit everyone. This is a Good Thing. Fork the kernel? Maybe, maybe not.
> The proprietary desktop can't be integrated with the kernel, due to GPL restrictions. This is an Even Better Thing.
I'd love to agree completely, but I can't. I can see your point, but I can see how this wouldn't be a problem. If Microsoft can show that there's a *possibility* of their changes being generic, yet worthwile to use *only* with their binary-only non-GPL software, there's not really a problem. Consider the case of VMWare (unless there's a violation there, and I hope there's not; it's just too handy a tool to give up!:^)
Slashdot Mirror
/*
Its a risky, but perhaps rewarding move for Troll. On the bad side (from their view) the GPL base would permit a better, seperately
maintained
variant with GPL code they cannot add to their commercial option - it wouldn't be all their code at that point.
*/
Absolutely true. They'll run into the same problem the Harmony project ran into: how do you incorporate changes without being sued? They'll have to have someone write e spec for the coders.
I was referring to *everything* about both projets, from a usability sense.
The desktop, the embedding of data in documents, etc. *should* be defined as Xdnd is defined; that is, not toolkit-centric. Yes, I realize what a mess this area was before KDE & GNOME came along, but you must admit it makes sense, to a point.
Miguel made a good point recently that UNIX/X software "does it all wrong" when a projet supplies its own print services, file services, etc (which in a sense GNOME did this too.) If Miguel & Crew had been so concerned about not reinventing the wheel, they should have concentrated on Lesstif and Display Ghostscript instead of making GTK into The New Motif(TM). God bless 'em, they've done a great job, but it's a bit ridiculous that much of the work done on both projects is simply duplication & reimplementation of existing services on other toolkits.
This is just a bit of FUD designed to create good publicity.
:^) essentially told the KDE team that they should use another toolkit. When they took a rather less-than-enthusiastic stance to this, he started the GNOME project, and based it mostly on GNU software.
The reason GNOME got started is that Miguel, in his typical lack of diplomacy
When you get right down to it, KDE has been getting bad publicity lately. It's true; Qt is a *commercial* toolkit. It was also AFAIK the best choice at the time. Debian, being comprised mostly of people with no legal knowledge (not that I have any) have taken an ambiguity in the GPL and ran with it, stating that distributing KDE is illegal.
The KDE team, of course, believes in what they're doing and would like to continue the project, and they need some decent publicity for it to be "worth it." So what do they do?
Write some FUD.
It's kind of like stating "The workers of the Soviet Union will rise against you." Workers? Please. KDE is to some extent controlled by Troll Tech now, since some of the core KDE people work for Troll Tech. They're not as free as they imply. I'm sure they're still doing it because it's fun, but it's a lie to state that they're more free than GNOME.
More open than GNOME? Try subscribing to a mailing list and suggest that Konqueror should use Gecko as its HTML renderer and just see what happens. You'll wish you hadn't.
I like both projects and I'm glad to see that the KDE team can still say, after 3 years, that they have fun doing it. But, guys, there's no need to lie to stay ahead. Just let the market decide.
Absolutely true, which is why both KDE and GNOME specs are completely bogus.
:^)
I mean, both specs offer *complete* solutions, based on toolkits, rather than creating open standards. Sure, the standards *are* open, but are made less so by being tied to specific toolkits.
I don't code in KDE at all, and haven't messed around enough with GNOME to be able to write a spec. If anyone cares to do so, hey, more power to ya.
What I had heard is that we're on the threshold of a new ice age...
Ironic, isn't it? "Oh my God, we've had it; it's gonna get so hot, the continental masses will be covered in ice in 10,000 years!!!" Uh-huh. Right.
>has offices in redmond, israel, england, and more...
^^^^^
Hello?
The original story stated that Mainsoft was based in Israel. By the way people bitch about stories being re-run (I don't know about most of them) I just figured all the whiny, bitchy posters would be aware of why it was called Israel. I was wrong.
Even if it were true that Linux had no desktop market share (I'm sure that's why companies like Wal-Mart carry RH & Mandrake, when they don't carry MacOS) here's what's wrong with that analysis (no market share, hence no need):
:^)
:^)
That analysis offers no research proof that no customers want Linux.
Where's any research pointing out that customers don't want a Linux port? (I do! I do!) Hell, who's to say this wouldn't outsell the Mac port? (Probably not hard to do.
Plus, not every company in the world started something because there was a demand. Sometimes it's left to advertising and marketing to *create* a need (it sounds cheesy, I know).
So, yes, I'm agreeing with you.
'Nuff said.
BTW, I had a roommate who would watch an international channel at school just so he would watch DragonballZ...in Japanese.
Trouble was, he didn't speak or understand Japanese.
Fucking lamer.
You'll give them ideas.
Um, maybe because
1.) Mozilla isn't X11R6-specific?
2.) Not everyone uses KDE and GNOME?
3.) You should get the stick out of your ass?
(Note to the humor-impaired: that last one was a joke, not intended entirely as an insult. Please go ahead and ruin my karma rating; it's already pretty low, because I express my opinion.)
Get to hacking, or quit bitching.
I do this sort of thing with Glade and Python (thanks to Libglade.) Only instead of writing the XML by hand, I just click, click, click my way to an interface.
I hate to write a "me too," but you make some excellent points.
I've felt that, even though I'm using Helix Gnome right now (and, hey, it even has a panel applet that allows KSCD to dock!) that both projects took the wrong approach.
What's The Right Approach(TM)? X11R6 is pure chaos. So many toolkits; so few standards. Either project could have simply defined some simple standards (remember OffiX DND?) and been mostly done with it--but no. We had to have a standard desktop--or, make that two. And our apps will work properly *only* when our destop is running. Sorry, them's the breaks.
Ugh--what we needed was a standardized DND protocol, a standardized network-transparency protocol, and a more-or-less standard for look-n-feel.
Yeah, your approach is a good one. That's the approach Star Office took with KDE--install menu options, make it work with the system, but don't touch the libs. It might be kinda fun to hack together a standard for working with the two desktops while not using libraries from either.
Oh brother.
The issue is licensing, and I don't mean that hot air the Debian team has blown out their collective asses. I mean the steep price of licensing of QT if one uses it as a commercial project.
And, quite frankly, I believe that the QPL is a violation of the GPL, but not for the reason that Debian is willing to risk a libel suit for. Quite frankly (although IANAL) the GPL allows for charging for distribution of software, as long as the source is free (as in speech). And what constitutes as a charge? If I come up with a great new distro, and base a bunch of GUI config programs on QT, and the only practical use of the software is to modify my funky config files, *and* I distribute the software on CD for a fee, do I have to fork over $1500 *before* I can even hope to distribute? Am I in legal hot water because I'm not providing the program absolutely, totally for free? Probably not, but GTK avoids that.
FYI, IBM and SUN are *international* companies (the first letter of IBM stands for International).
Yours has to be the *stupidest* argument of all time. Why did you bother? First you argue it's primarily because Gnome is American, then you argue that it's financial? Oh, and what about the fact that the project founder is from Mexico City (i.e. not American)?
Damn, I hate stupid people.
Try watching "CBS Evening News" sometime. It's amazing just how biased this program is. Did Dan Rather get his education from a Cracker Jack box? It's usually a little more subtle than just, "President Clinton was blasted by the evil Republicans for his perfectly innocent, supposed extramarital relations," but it's darn close. I remember eight years ago when Clinton ran against Bush; CBS EN ran a segment on Bush's golf game every time the man went to play golf. Oog. Their recent coverage of Napster was, shall we say, embarrasingly biased.
Before you comment, Dan is not just the anchor; he's also the news director.
And, finally, the point, proving that if this is marked as -1, Offtopic, the moderator's an asshole. The point is is that most if not all journalists let bias slip in. Sometimes is extremely obvious, such as in this case. Sometimes it's more subtle. But for all the high-and-mighty talk of the journalistic establishment of not allowing personal bias to affect coverage, it's just talk. A reporter's personal feelings will *always* be a factor. Period.
I use software from both...but I use the Gnome desktop (session manager + Sawfish + Panel + GMC) because:
:^)
1.) Gnome's Panel menu reads the KDE Menu structure (without an external script)
2.) I have KSCD docked on my Gnome dock...there's an applet now that can dock KDE dockable apps! (not true of KDE2...wonder if they did it on purpose?
In short, when it came to the desktop "war," the Gnome folks were more mature about it. The willingness of the Gnome team to work with KDE (and not just state, "it's so sad, they're wasting their time") and the issue of multiple programming language/scripting support. I am a loser and write apps using Python and Libglade (although, since I'm still learning, nothing's been released yet...I'm working on a simple print media-oriented layout tool...although it may never materialise...)
Plus some of my aversion to KDE is personal and childish. I was going through the "Hello World" example when I went ahead and subscribed to the developer's list. I replied to an email, and, it's true, most of it was quoted. Mattias(?) saw fit to tell me not to do that. Ironically, he had a setup problem that caused all his messages to get sent twice--possibly causing more of a problem than I was by sending mostly-quote email. I told him so. He kicked me off.
What an asshole. Hello, GNOME!
Uh, motherfucker, like IE and Explorer are tightly integrated?
CLUE STICK: they're not really integrated, tied at the hip, whatever. Microsluts have just written the apps to fire each other up when they're needed. If one wanted to go to the trouble, one could *probably* replace most of IE's functionality (and Outlook, for that matter). And someone should, considering the big gaping holes that Microsoft left in their products.
I used to have a crappy card that Creative sold (don't remember the chipset) that the XVGA (640x480x16) wouldn't work on for anything.
*sighs* I wish I were as uninformed as you...some cards just don't have perfect VGA compatibility (which is what 640x480x16 generally is...and that's the server XF86Setup uses)
BTW to the original poster, try xf86config; it may be textmode, but at least it works.
Yeah, funny you mention Mandrake 7...I just upgraded from 7.0 to 7.1, and the damn thing went ahead and autodetected all my hardware, automatically set up my hardware, and cheerfully installed RPMs for me. Trouble is, they ship some screwy-ass X server for folks with Voodo cards (I've got a Voodoo3), and manages to majorly foul up on my machine every time. AND not only did the installer leave my machine in runlevel 5, it also didn't give the option to switch to runlevel 3. And that also leaves the question of just WHY the installer is set up to autoinstall an X server (I suppose they thought, "Gee, maybe we'd be shipping fixes, and the autoinstaller needs to run just in case," but still.
:^)
Mandrake is nice, mind you, but it seems to suffer from some of the same problems that Windoze does: it tries to do everything for the user, then doesn't give a good way out in the end (although it's MUCH easier to fix a Linux problem than a Windoze problem, IMHO.
What distribution? What hardware? What the hell are you talking about???
To tell the truth, right now my Win98 distro if FUBAR...something happened to IE5; it was from a source outher than Micro$oft (Earthlink CD, I think.) Unfortunately, for some reason when the software is installed it's somehow marked as not being uninstallable (!) and I've yet to clean out all the crap it puked into the Registry. To top it all off, something happened (dunno what) to the MSHTML.DLL (or whatever the hell it's called) and IE5 segfaults everytime one visits a site. I tried downloading the IE5 installer from windowsupdate.com (which won't work in Communicator...no VBScript support) and the installer won't install over the non-uninstallable software (!!).
Yeah, Windows is easy...provided you get Windows with the hardware, never install software, and just try to keep from drooling on the keyboard.
Erm, idiot, if you don't like the Linux bias, go somewhere else.
I've been reading Slashdot since day one. I found out about Slashdot while looking for AfterStep applets for my Linux box. Yeah, it has a Linux bias. Get over it!
Yeah, but despite current GNOME X11 dependencies, GNOME is actually better poised to be moved to a new display technology (if one ever materializes.)
;^)
:^) Up until fairly recently, the KDE team couldn't even *touch* QT code if they wanted to without working for Troll Tech.
Why? Licensing.
You thought that was cleared up. Yeah--for the UNIX/X11 version. (let's just never mind that Linux is not a UNIX.) What if some magnificent bastard comes up with some great kernel design, has POSIX-compliance, and has some great new display technology? Uh, let's talk to the Troll Tech lawyers. Oh boy, time for another round of talks.
GNOME? Well, let's see; we need to port GLIB. And we need to port GDK. Remove those X11 deps...and make sure we're not linked to any non-GPL non-essential libs.
See my point? KDE has been legally dodgy from the beginning, mostly out of necessity. It was the best toolkit at the time. They didn't want to take the time to build up GTK/some other toolkit, and they liked QT, so they used it. The GNOME folks have worked on GTK since then, and it rocks.
Moral of the story? Want to undertake an Open Sourced (no apologies to RMS) project? Make sure your libs are licensed well, and in a way you can deal with--or they will come back to haunt you.
Ah, hell, it's actually not that simple. In some ways, GNOME is actually more *open.* Yeah, QT is more open now, but what's being virtually ignored still in the KDE camp is the ability to code for the KDE desktop in different languages than C++ (last I heard, the "official" stance was, "C++ is the best choice.") This may not seem like much of an issue since C++ is pretty standard in the commercial world, but this ain't exactly the commercial corporate world here. Some folks just wanna code in Python or Lisp. Mo' power to 'em.
:^) The only thing GNOME needs to work on is memory usage. KDE2 has them beat. Oh, and Nautilus. Haven't tried it yet, but hear it's great. :^)
Try out both the KDE2 betas and Helix Gnome; I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by both. There actually is a convergence happening right now, regardless of what the two camps think of each other. And, hey, GNOME may have been a knee-jerk reaction to an offhand comment by Mattias, but it's gotten pretty good and pretty stable (I'm convinced, in case you couldn't tell.
This depends, and, quite frankly, is FUD all over. WINE is not the first API-porting effort in the world, and some previous efforts have been Microsoft-sanctioned (remember the Solaris port of IE?)
>The GPLed kernel changes would benefit everyone. This is a Good Thing. Fork the kernel? Maybe, maybe not.
:^)
> The proprietary desktop can't be integrated with the kernel, due to GPL restrictions. This is an Even Better Thing.
I'd love to agree completely, but I can't. I can see your point, but I can see how this wouldn't be a problem. If Microsoft can show that there's a *possibility* of their changes being generic, yet worthwile to use *only* with their binary-only non-GPL software, there's not really a problem. Consider the case of VMWare (unless there's a violation there, and I hope there's not; it's just too handy a tool to give up!