Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting February 12 2002

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Sat, 2002-02-16 at 22:55, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     While inviting OpenOffice, KDE and CUPS are nice empty political
>     gestures.
> 
> They may be gestures, but they are not empty--an invitation to
> cooperate can lead to real cooperation.

I was a bit rude with that description and I appologise. Guess it was a
combination of to early in the morning and frustration at not seeing
either XFree nor Mozilla invited even if they are essential to the GNOME
project. Now that Keith is probably coming I am more satisfied with the
situation :)

> When Qt was non-free, KDE was a danger to the community, and we had to
> attack it to make people aware of the threat so we could overcome it.
> We succeeded; Qt is free software now and KDE is no longer a problem.
> The ill feelings that linger between GNOME developers and KDE
> developers are not good for the community, and it is very useful
> to help calm the antagonism.
> It might also be useful to organize a specific joint project,
> something that would improve the coherence of a GNU/Linux system
> which uses parts of both GNOME and KDE.  The idea that occurred to me
> was to work on unifying theme definitions, so that a user can define
> a theme just once and have it work with both GNOME and KDE.  Perhaps
> others will have a better suggestion.
Ok, well this is why I called it empty. Cause we had some KDE visitors
at the previous GUADEC. And it was very nice, they where cool people and
everything, and a lot of ideas for integration/cooperation was
discussed. Back in real life the situation is that none of the GNOME
hackers use any KDE apps nor do any of the KDE hackers use any GNOME
apps. Which means that even if we all can agree that working togheter is
nice and everything it is not really something any developer truly cares
about, since integration problems it not something that is a problem for
them using their desktop on a day to day basis. And as the free software
saying goes, a itch that don't itch a developer, doesn't get scratched.

As for adressing your theme idea more concrete, if my memory serves me
right our own Miguel and Mattias Ettrich of KDE did talk about such a
thing 16-18 months ago, but while a nice idea it didn't really itch them
or any of the other people who had the ability to solve it, and hence it
didn't get scratched.

Christian