On Saturday, April 09, 2011 18:37:44 Mark Wallace wrote: > If I have my history straight, KDE is actually about six months older than > Gnome. Gnome started because it's founders were horrified that KDE was at > least partially built on proprietary code.
KDE is built upon Qt. Originally Qt had a different license (the QPL, I believe), which free software advocates found objectionable. So... yes. > What made things so difficult for 4.0, if I have my history straight, is > that they moved completely away from proprietary code, either because the > code that they were using became open source, or they rewrote things in > open source code. No. Qt has been under the GPL for a while, and both KDE 3 and KDE 4 are under the same license. I believe it was purely a matter of design and redesign decisions for the next version. Phonon, Plasma widgets, Compositing, etc -- overall it radically changed how the Desktop gets used. Along with this came big changes in Qt 3 vs Qt 4, and having programmed in both I can tell you that it isn't easy to translate a Qt 3 app into a Qt 4 app. Qt 4 incorporates MVC theory [Model, View, Controller] and has native SVG support. A lot of the new replacement Classes have to be used in very different ways, so old code actually has to get redesigned in order to be ported. The bottom line is that both the underlying library dependencies and the design changed. That's a lot to deal with at once. so it's not a big surprise that the early versions of KDE 4.0 were a bit rough. > I think that there still are a lot less applets and things in KDE, > possibly because the writers of those never cared enough to rewrite. > > I also understand that there were some morale problems at KDE. I am > guessing that they reached out to Mark Shuttleworth, giving him some > special status within KDE because they needed his help to keep in the > game. >From what I've read I gather that both Mark Shuttleworth and KDE have been working with the freedesktop.org, so they have some mutual interest, and that Gnome hasn't embraced some the freedesktop.org recommendations. I wouldn't say that Mark Shuttleworth had "special status" with KDE, though. I think it's simply that they each have their own design goals, and often those design goals are well aligned. That's not a bad thing. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium May 4 - Inkscape Jun 1 - Zimbra Jul 6 - Jul 2011
