"I think technically, KDE is a good desktop, and it is popular in Europe. But no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license"
Certainly KDE has the lead in DEs, but lets not forget the behaviour of Trolltech and the licensing of the Qt library, they did it once, and I've not doubt in my mind that if it wasn't for GNOME they'll be charging everybody for the use of Qt. It's plain and simple they could change the licensing of Qt4 or Qt5. They are not trustable, unless they license the Qt library ONLY with the GPL and do it for the foreseable future, if this doesn't happen I'm glad to have GNOME. I believe GNOME is the counterweight that refrains Qt became totally proprietary software. Good news for us.
One more point, the healthy competition of KDE and GNOME is in the spirit of free software, the best code will prevail, I like and use both, but as I've said before due to these small details, I use more GNOME, and I think it has improved a lot, I hope that it gets better.
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"I think technically, KDE is a good desktop, and it is popular in Europe. But no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license" Certainly KDE has the lead in DEs, but lets not forget the behaviour of Trolltech and the licensing of the Qt library, they did it once, and I've not doubt in my mind that if it wasn't for GNOME they'll be charging everybody for the use of Qt. It's plain and simple they could change the licensing of Qt4 or Qt5. They are not trustable, unless they license the Qt library ONLY with the GPL and do it for the foreseable future, if this doesn't happen I'm glad to have GNOME. I believe GNOME is the counterweight that refrains Qt became totally proprietary software. Good news for us. One more point, the healthy competition of KDE and GNOME is in the spirit of free software, the best code will prevail, I like and use both, but as I've said before due to these small details, I use more GNOME, and I think it has improved a lot, I hope that it gets better.