Re: Resignations

[Bruce Stephens <b stephens isode com>]

"Greg S. Hayes" <sdc@choice.net> writes:

> No longer does it seem that we are fighting the good fight for a
> free desktop... now, unfortunately, it seems that we are
> re-inventing the wheel.

Is that true?  The non-freeness of Qt was an important issue---perhaps
the critical one, originally---but it was never the only issue.

There are technical things which Gnome planned to do differently too.
Those issues remain.  In reinventing the wheel, perhaps one can invent
a better wheel.

And some people's interests are probably a little broader.  It's not
just that they want a C based toolkit (to make it more convenient to
use languages other than C++), they wish to avoid giving too much
power to a single company.

With Gtk+'s license, commercial companies can write proprietary
programs; with Qt's (as I understand it) they must buy Qt
professional.  That potentially gives Trolltech a unique position,
just as the Open Group once had with Motif.  Admittedly, there wasn't
a free version of Motif; on the other hand, at least it was possible
to buy Motif off a variety of vendors.

I agree that this frees up KDE and other bits of free software,
however.  

I'd expect various distributions to start/resume distributing KDE;
perhaps the future will be a combination of applications with some
written with KDE's libs and some with Gnome's, with themability so
that they can look and work similarly.  Perhaps Gnome 1.0 will be
sufficiently compelling that RedHat won't feel the need to include
KDE.  Perhaps some distributions will be aimed at Windows escapees and
will provide KDE as the default interface, and some will be aimed at
the rest of us who've never really felt the desperate need for
universal consistency, and will include random bits of whatever the
best of the X world contains, including Gnome and probably KDE
(presuming that KDE applications can be used without buying into the
whole of KDE, which I'm reasonably sure is the case).

I don't see anything wrong with people continuing work on Gnome simply
for technical reasons, just as people continue to work on n different
text editors.  Just the possibility of win32 ports for some bits might
be enough for some people (apparently Gtk+ ports reasonably, and
there's allegedly a Gimp on win32).