On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 09:17 +0800, Ray Rashif wrote: > GTK+/GNOME has been ugly and dead ever since Qt/KDE was made > available. I believe the primary reason for corporates and the rest of > linuxkind not favouring Qt was its license - and that's no longer an > issue now as we see it (:
All the major Linux distributions and Sun Solaris uses Gnome as their main desktop environment. This is mainly because of the historic lisenses of Qt. Red Hat Advanced Development Labs was working on Gnome 1. Red Hat has been working on every release after that. http://web.archive.org/web/19990421142013/http://www.labs.redhat.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.labs.redhat.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.labs.redhat.com/projects.shtml http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) was one of the developers that worked for Red Hat Advanced Development Labs. http://web.archive.org/web/19990424073400/www.news-observer.com/daily/1999/01/17/biz00.html Ximian (previously called Helix Code) was another important developer team. I seem to remember that they focused most on the end user experience while Red Hat focused most on the lower end of the stack. They was later bought buy Novell just before Novell bought Suse. Ximian pushed for Gnome as the standard desktop in Suse. http://web.archive.org/web/20000407120058/http://www.helixcode.com/ http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS9319363052.html http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/SuSE-Users-Panic-Unfounded/ I know from first hand observation and participation that the Qt license has been a major issue that has been debated for years. Knut Yrvin (the community manager of Qt Software) and me had many heated debates about this is in the past. I do not know what he personally had to do with this, but he is one of those who push hard and wide. I will buy him a beer next time I see him. Nokia uses Gnome technology in their Internet tablets. Many questions was asked when a Gnome company like Nokia bought Qt. Nokia has been working on merging Gnome and KDE technologies for their own needs. Version 5 of the Nokia Maemo Linux plattform will see some of this work. http://www.gnome.asia/static/upload/event_file/gnome_asia_maemo_qt_002.pdf http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/05/qgtkstyle-now-part-of-qt/ Gnome and KDE will co-locate their main developer conferanses this year. My guess is that will be a very interesting, challenging, creative, and important event. A major opportunity for the future of the free and open desktop. "GNOME and KDE to Co-locate Flagship Conferences on Gran Canaria in 2009" - http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2008-07-guadec-akademy-grancanaria.html There are some issues that remains to be sorted out. George Makrydakis points out some interesting issues in this blog: "LGPL 2.1, Qt 4.5 and C ++ templates" - http://lab.obsethryl.eu/content/lgpl-21-qt-45-and-c-templates It seems like this issue is already forwarded to the license lawyers at Nokia. The future is promising. Enlightenment? It might be used by some, but my guess is that it will be hard to push the Enlightenment technology on a large scale. KDE and Gnome have many years of stabilization and a working ecosystem of developers surrounding them. KDE and Gnome goes towards shared technologies and standardization. Enlightenment can join in, but it seems like Enlightenment have different interests. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/31/1917240 I am personally opening a bottle of Champagne if the Qt license change happens! Have a nice, hot, and humid day! -martin _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
