Re: The industry standard

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Joel Coulson wrote:
> 
> Would anyone like to comment on what they see will be the industry
> standard Desktop: Gnome & something or KDE?
> 

Neither one. I consider it a mistake to think of it this way if you're
talking about programming APIs; programmers always choose from lots of
alternatives (on Windows for example: Perl, Python, C, C++, Delphi, MFC,
Qt, Tcl/Tk, Visual Basic, and more). This is when MFC is the clear
monopoly choice and standard, and granted MFC is most popular but the
alternatives are viable and well-supported.

This is even more true in the free GUI platform space. We are not talking
about one of them being MacOS or Next or Amiga or OpenLook; those
platforms died because they were tied to doomed proprietary vendors who
dragged the programming interface down for their own business purposes. 
Will this happen for GNOME or KDE? _Can_ it happen? It really can't, as
long as people are interested in the respective platform. There are
hundreds of volunteers working on each, and thousands of people developing
for each. There's no sign of that ending.

So, you may as well ask whether vi or Emacs will win programmer's hearts
in the end; and that battle has been going on for close to 20 years.

Free software genuinely offers people choices; enjoy them. 

Havoc