Re: KDE - GNOME

[Brian Behlendorf <brian collab net>]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Right. I remember debating the Troll Tech folks at the Linux Kongress in
> Cologne a few years ago. We managed not to shout at each other. It's much
> worse than FreeBSD vs. Linux, which gets pretty silly and heated.

But since FreeBSD can run most Linux apps, most people don't have to
care.  Well, at least, FreeBSD users don't.  =)  I'd go further and say
that the *BSD dists are more alike each other than the various Linux
dists, and they tend to work better with each other.  See
http://www.openpackages.org.

I think competition can be a good thing - it keeps each party striving for
something better.  It's why I'm damn happy there are other good free
web servers than just Apache; it also means that innovation can be
decentralized, so that someone doesn't have to wait for us to see
whether embedding an HTTP server in the OS kernel is a good idea or
not, for example.

When it hurts is when either party introduces intentional incompatibility
for the sake of lock-in - which is the usual reason why commercial
entities diverge from common standards (led to the Unix wars, etc).  So
long as there's always an effort to collaborate on naming conventions and
file formats and the like...

	Brian