[Fsf-friends] KDE vs GNOME

[Harish Narayanan]

balachandran c wrote:

>Unless we are working with some kind of "sins of the father" model, we should just stop attacking KDE based on Qt being non-free at some point in the past. This is just too tedious. 
>
Tedious as it may seem to you, it is something people (admittedly new to
all of this and get their information from web-based magazines (which
tend to gloss over the details)) need to be aware of, in my opinion.
However smart or rational people might be, not all decisions are always
purely objective. Case in point, I don't see a problem with the "sins of
the father" model as applied here, because internally, I've correlated
this episode with a notion that the core developers behind this project
didn't care about the things I care about. Technology, however nifty,
cannot bridge that divide.

And no, I don't revel in arbitrarily attacking it. It only comes up when
people title their posts "KDE vs GNOME war" and think aloud as to why
people even bother with GNOME given KDE is "so much better". I am saying
*I* don't use KDE, and there are reasons some distributions default to
GNOME, however cool kparts or dcop may be.

That is all.

>You don't hear too many people attacking GTK for being LGPL.
>  
>
Because then you'd have some person pointing out that QT, though GPL on
all platforms (now) is also dual licensed on all platforms. And the
other license is such that you buy a copy from Trolltech, and you're
free to build and distribute software based on it, not releasing the
source or needing to allow for any other freedom.

Which really isn't all that different from what the LGPL, if you think
about it.

Harish