On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote: > > KDE's authors were certainly pragmatists. But many in the linux community > > did not like this. Partly because of ideaological reasons (which are clear > > enough, and I'll spear them here) and partially for practical reasons: > > > > QT HAS A MONOPOLY > > s/HAS/HAD ;) > > > - What if I want to apply a patch QT doesn't like? (I'm not allowed!) > > Yes, you are, please read the QPL license. Fact is, that with since KDE 1.0 > beta 2, QT was patched by the KDE (small) team.
Indeed I can't find any such limitation in the copy of QT (1.0, (c) 1999-2000) on my system. But I specifically remember the notes of qt 1.44 of a certain Madrake version that had an explicit authoriztion from TrollTech to apply a certain patch. Anyway, what was the license before 1999 (or 2000)? > > > - What if QT doesn't want to support it anymore? > > Then it would have become GPL (again, read the license). > > > - What if QT suddenly doesn't like SuSE? It is in a position to deny them > > of KDE and give their competitors an unfair atvantage > > No it's not, and wasn't.. Again: you read it out-of-context: thse quotes referred to the situation before the license change. > > > I suspect that this is why RedHat chose not to include KDE (until it was > > forced by the community). > > Nope. They were including KDE after the license change only (see bero's RPMS > for Red Hat 4 days after the license change) > > > Anyway, what do linux people do when they are faced with a non-free > > software? reimplement > > > There has been at least one effort to re-implement QT. It did not get much > > help from KDE's folks. Therefore I must assume that they didn't feel bad > > about this license. > > Yup, the free-QT, but it was done with some help from the KDE developers. "the" ? IIRC (I can't back this with quotes from quick searches). : There were good reasons why it never took off. Partially because it never got enough encourgement from key KDE developers. For them the "free" QT license was good enough, as it has been for some distros. > > > Other people decided to build their own, competing, project: GNOME: Gnu > > Network Object Model Environment (or something simlar). As its name > > sugests, they have implemented there a number of novel buzzword concepts > > ;-) (e.g: network transparancy). > > Ah yeah. Anyone remembered Red Hat 6.1 with GNOME? :) IIRC it was RH 6.0 that officially announced gnome 1.0 or something similar. Anyway, I remember gnome 0.9-something in redhat 5.2 and IIRC they had even gnome 0.3-something in one of their previous releases (not as the default desktop, naturally) > > > RedHat needed a solid desktop for their distro, so they have actively > > supported gnome, by assigning developers to work on it, and by including > > it in their distro even before it was ready. > > Way before it was ready... nothing changed so much actually - feel free to try > Red Hat 8.1 beta (phoebe) with their GNOME... I dare say that gnome 1.0 consumed less memory than current gnome, but it was far less usable and far less stable. (the same applies for the KDE version of the time, (1.1, IIRC) compared to the current one) > > > SuSE, Mandrake (the distro that now calls itself "pure GPL") and others > > had no problem with shipping KDE. Actually the demand of people has forced > > even RedHat to add KDE into its distro. Debian was maybe the only distro > > that didn't have KDE for licensing reasons. > > And 1 day after the license change - the whole debian users and their dog did > apt-get install kde - I know, I've seen some logs ;) <debian-rulez> yea, apt makes this too easy to install it. Why not install it. Using it is another thing :-p </debian-rulez> > > > Gnome has been the field test of a number of nice concepts. It has grown > > to something fairly different from KDE. By the time QT have changed their > > license to something more acceptable (2000? 2001?) gnome has become > > something completely independent. There is no point in merging the two. > > Yup, you cannot merge them... > > > But if some KDE zealots mention "duplication of efforts" as a reason for > > not developing anything other than KDE, this sounds very ironic: > > > > for 4 (5?) years KDE developers were dependent on a non-free library for > > a major functionality of their desktop. They did about zero effots to work > > around this *major* problem (I stress again: both idealogocal and > > practical problem). It is by pure luck that QT has changed its license. It > > is also by pure luck that QT has not collapased or anything in the > > interim. > > Nope, non luck at all. KDE DOES promotes and sell licenses. Trolltech are not > Eazel, and they are and were aware of the issues. I've heard many people that say MS should start porting its server software to linux. Somehow it's not happening. And does a company always do the right thing? Maybe a company has some bigger fish to fry? (such fish can be discovered once ownership is changed) > > > If one of the above would have happened, the work of the KDE project would > > have been lost. Some of the developers would have abandoned it. Some might > > have joined Miguel and Redhat in the project-that-starts-with-g . This > > would have been a major duplicated work! > > Why do you think so? SuSE, Mandrake & slackware were releasing KDE with the > QPL'd QT, and TrollTech didn't ask for a single dollar from them. Every patch those distros wanted to apply had to get the approval of TrollTech. TrollTech behaved nice and not held out anything. But they were in a good position to discriminate certain distros. "And what if [...] got hit by a bus"? Once again: this time there was a happy end. But a happy end is not guaranteed. I can't think of better examples of projects that got hit by relying on non-free libraries that seemed "free enough". Maybe: - LyX (excluded from distros for years) - Anything in the microsoft front? - I think that there were a couple of stories in the OpenStep/GNUStep front This threat *is* real > > > After all - if 99% of the entire Linux community can agree to use > > > XFree86, why do we need 2 desktop enviroments? it's just confuses ISVs, > > > it's a nightmare to interoperate between them.. > > > > Only one XFree for historical reasons. That is not to say that there is no Berlin around (though it didn't take off). There are also some X servers for the low-end. -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
