[Fsf-friends] KDE vs GNOME war

Sandip Bhattacharya sandip at lug-delhi.org
Mon Oct 10 18:13:10 CEST 2005


On Monday, 10 Oct 2005 7:39 pm, Sriram N wrote:
> I'd say there's nothing wrong with developing Gnome using Mono, which is
> based upon some standards - ECMA standards. There was a lot of hue and cry
> over the patents issue, but this seems to have largely settled down. One
> can use name spaces and packages that are non-MS - GTK#, for e.g.

Being a standard is not good enough. What is a standard anyway? It is just an 
endorsement by a well known, supposedly vendor neutral organization. OSI is 
one, it certifies various FLOSS licenses as being OSI compliant or not. But 
this "standard" is not considered good enough for FSF, isn't it?

Similarly, you need to understand the conditions under which the C#, CLI stuff 
is "standardized". Check out:

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Standardization_and_Licensing
[2]: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/03/11/mono.html

Here is an excerpt from [1]:
"""
While Microsoft and their partners hold patents for CLI and C#, ECMA and ISO 
requires that all patents essential to implementation be made available under 
"reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms." The companies have agreed, 
instead, to make the patents available under "royalty-free and otherwise RAND 
terms."
"""

BTW, Aren't ISO and ITU  the same organizations which doesnt provide freely 
available standard documents (like IETF or W3C)? 

Here is an excerpt from [2]:
"""
The licensing status of Mono is of immediate concern to most would-be 
adopters. Isn't Mono at risk of being wiped out by Microsoft patents? De 
Icaza explained the situation. The Mono runtime is an implementation of the 
Common Language Infrastructure standardized via ECMA. Microsoft has granted a 
license to use this technology under so-called "reasonable and 
non-discriminatory" terms.

On top of the core system sits two stacks of APIs. One of these is an 
implementation of Microsoft's APIs for user interfaces, web services, and 
database access. The other stack is entirely unique to the Mono project and 
includes things like bindings to the GTK user interface toolkit, the Cairo 
graphics system, and Mono's own database layer.

It is conceivable that Microsoft would enforce licensing terms on the 
implementation of the APIs that it hasn't submitted to ECMA. In the worst 
case, says de Icaza, distributors of those APIs would need to pay fees to 
Microsoft. None of this would touch the other, Mono-specific, APIs. The two 
different stacks of APIs are being kept separate to account for this 
possibility and to ensure that Mono is distributed by vendors such as Red 
Hat, who are reluctant to take on an unknown patent situation.
"""

While there is no immediate danger, and there has been real good that has come 
out of the mono project (some of the apps like Beagle have been really 
good!), the fact is that the project will forever be under the shadow of M$.

I have been enamoured with the Mono project till some time back(check some of 
my enthusiastic posts of mine on this list some months back). But the more I 
think of it, the more I am uncomfortable with the idea of one of the two 
major desktops of Linux moving on to such a wobbly scenario. As [3] points 
out:

[3]: 
http://www.osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1395

"""
We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room. 
The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room. The 
technical merits of Mono are basically irrelevant if its a trojan horse in 
the long term.
"""

Do note that I am *not* questioning Mono, or asking people to drop it totally. 
The OP on this list talked about KDE and Gnome, and the argument against KDE 
was that it was initially based on a non-free toolkit, and people (here?) 
will never forget it. But things have changed for the better - Qt is Free 
now, and will always be.

But Gnome on the other hand is moving to a non-Free platform(.Net is supposed 
to be a platform)! 

Which situation would you be more confortable with?

- Sandip

P.S. Mandatory disclosure: I have been a long time KDE user. Some months back 
when I tried to move on to Ubuntu 5.04, I used Gnome for a while. It has come 
pretty much a long way. But then I took a look at the latest KDE, and was 
blown away. Now I am back to KDE. While Gnome has gone forward quite some 
way. KDE *seems* has gone even further ahead in both UI and stability.

P.S.2. I feel like being in a catch-22 situation. I like KDE but would not 
like to develop on QT, as it is too costly for professional development. I 
find Gtk+ to be affordable and Free, but dislike its decision to look the 
same on different platforms. I would prefer Wxwindows (which is a wrapper 
over Gtk on Linux, and win32 API on Windows) but is one of the worst 
documented development SDKs. :(((


-- 
Sandip Bhattacharya  *    Puroga Technologies   *     sandip at puroga.com
Work: http://www.puroga.com  *   Home/Blog: http://www.sandipb.net/blog

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