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Little bit OT but a good reading.
by AC on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @04:40
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Due the article from Nicholas Petreley yesterday on Slashdot. Now even Miguel de Icaza writes about GNOME. Even he admits that GNOME has seriously fallen behind KDE. Read more
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-March/msg00026.html
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by steve on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @10:14
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What's with the licensing FUD from miguel - what is he talking about?
"Those with long-term visions believe strongly that the foundation
for building applications on Linux should be royalty free so Gnome is a
good choice there."
"end-users which [sic] do not care about the royalty issue do feel that KDE is a better
desktop."
Royalty issues???? WTF?
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Cowardly Anonymous on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @11:16
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"Royalty issues???? WTF?"
It's just Mr. de Icaza once again voicing his affection for the LGPL over the GPL. His pursuit of encouraging commercial software development on Unix platforms has continually influenced Miguel to spout his appreciation for the LGPL. Since he firmly believes commercial development will not happen using GPL'ed libraries (even though there is plenty of evidence of commercial companies successfully adopting the GPL in the past), he will for the rest of time refer to such things as "royalty issues."
Indeed, Miguel recently refered to the GPL as "tainted":
http://dot.kde.org/1044312611/1044364582/1044368376/1044370818/1044374726/
Judge for yourself where his biases lay.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by LMCBoy on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @13:58
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OK, I'm a huge GPL fan, but I actually do see Miguel's point. If you want to attract commercial software to Linux, an LGPL toolkit is clearly preferable to a GPL toolkit.
Personally, I don't care if there is never much commercial software available for Linux; given a choice, I will always choose the Free software alternative! So, to me, the GPL vs. LGPL thing is a total non-issue; however, I can see why someone who wanted to attract commercial vendors would prefer the LGPL.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by anon on Tuesday 04/Mar/2003, @06:58
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It sounds like a good assumption, but the facts indicate that Qt's dual licensing model is superior regarding commercial attraction to Linux. Already, IBM, Adobe, and *many* *many* of the worlds largest software companies are using Qt. This 'royalty/tainted' FUD that Miguel is throwing around is crap.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Jim Dabell on Tuesday 04/Mar/2003, @08:29
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Actually, I think that has more to do with the quality of the toolkit than the licensing model. A couple of thousand isn't much when you factor in all the other costs of developing an application.
What I don't understand is why businesses don't use the GPLed version to develop with, and buy a single developer's license for the closed-source version, and compile with that.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by anon on Tuesday 04/Mar/2003, @09:18
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Sure, no one can argue that Qt is excellent and that is the largest factor in it's success ... but I think the dual licensing/cross-platform nature and the knowledge that a real stable company is behind it also probably helps for commercial third-party licensees.
You can't use the GPL version to develop and then switch to a commercial license. That is restricted in the license AFAIK.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Jim Dabell on Monday 10/Mar/2003, @05:45
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> You can't use the GPL version to develop and then switch to a commercial license. That is restricted in the license AFAIK.
Which license? The GPL only covers redistribution - so as long as it's kept within the organisation during development, they don't have to agree to any of the terms in it. And until the end of the development cycle, they don't need the commercial QT, so they don't have to agree to any of the terms in that until that point.
So unless the commercial license has something to the effect of "you may not link code to this version that was previously linked with the GPL version", I'd say somebody doing this would be in the clear.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by ricky martin on Thursday 26/Jun/2003, @08:17
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jim u nonce, get out more and stop killing time on this crappy sites!
get the bacon on kid.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by rob field on Friday 27/Jun/2003, @01:11
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too much low level spinning last nite kid and i pulled no one. wish i was like dave the playa. respect to the DBA.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Cowardly Anonymous on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @10:56
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Quoting a response Havoc Pennington made to Miguel's message above:
"I hope your mail won't land on Slashdot or some other web site."
Oops.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Mogwai AC on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @11:36
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Looks like Miguel de icaza finally realized that KDE is better than GNOME. I understand that since he runs his own company and like to get monetary to pay his employees he has realized that this is only possible if you work for and on a serious Desktop Plattform which is definately KDE. Why do you think he is working so hard on Mono, just because of the fact that C is not a good language for something like a Desktop or for rapid application development. The reason why many GNOME applications suffer today, they look unesthetical and all differently. I bet that KDE has filled all dreams that Miguel had and now he feels pissed. Look still no GNOME 2.0 or 2.2 final release from Ximian, what are they waiting for ? He likes the way KDE works but wished it was GNOME that works like this. Yeah this problem many people have these days. They stare on KDE and say wow 'my dream Desktop' and then they say 'shit that it isn't GNOME'. Look how many people recently converted from GNOME to KDE and the amount is growing.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Stof on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @12:30
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Yeah he admits that KDE is better. Congratulations guys, you have won the desktop war.
You can stop actively flaming GNOME down now. It's over. You have won.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by anon on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @12:51
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What to do to get rid of the GNOME trolls? They wont go away.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by AC on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @13:07
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No offense but I only see 2 trolls here. You and Stof - while the others made good valuable points in their statements. I mean those who call other people trolls are usually those who start trolling. I mean the writings show here have value and wasn't cut out of the ass of someone.
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by ac on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @13:58
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I would like to point out that you yourself have now called 2 people trolls. I don't know how that will affect your 'I mean those who call other people trolls are usually those who start trolling.' theory! ;-)
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Troll on Sunday 02/Mar/2003, @14:17
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My excuse is "I haven't started" :)
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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Eric Laffoon on Tuesday 04/Mar/2003, @19:52
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This is certainly a much mellower Miguel than in years past, not to mention more pragmatic. That's good to see. Of course old habits die hard so he is still waving the "royalty issue" around. I think it's a dead issue because clearly it has proven to be a winner. We get solid organized development of our toolkit for GPL'd software and commercial entities get that plus a company to support them. As has been pointed out many of Gnome's partners are beginning to adopt QT. Clearly this has been a win for everyone except Gnome. Also Ximian proves bytheir existance that some business entity somewhere being involved can be a benefit. Many company support the Linux kernel in various ways too so what it really comes down to is how a partictular project should be supported. In my opinion IBM and sun can afford to pay for support and if I were going to sell QT based software it would cost me a lot less than to develop M$ .NET.
While I'm sure it was sad for Miguel to see KDE running where Gnome was started it still has some wry humor for others. Miguel seems to be basing the ongoing existance of Gnome on the red herring of his "royalty issue" and the emotional and time investment of it's developers. The second is understandable from a developer perspective but in no way should be made an argument for any reason for people to adopt it. Other factors ought to prevail for users.
It was interesting that he made this statement. "I personally (because of the emotional component described before), would like to see more work be done on the Gnome desktop and less on replicating infrastructure." Petrely's recent article soundly thrashed them for having abandoned their focus on infrastructure. Clearly this is crucial for how it affects your app. With Quanta we sacrificed a lot of little stuff to establish a powerful "infrastucture". The simple fact is you are never going to be fast, clean and powerful without it. KDE has managed to make so much progress precisely because of it. In fact they seem to be changing course to a more spartan development model in the name of "streamlined usability". They acknowledge that they have lost their edge and then they seem to go out and do the exact opposite of what you would think the lesson to learn is...
Users of a product follow their more technically inclined friends. Those people are called in the marketing world "early adoptors" and they want power and configurability because they want to get the most out of their software or they like to play with it. Where are these types of people going to go now? Spending effort to produce product without first focusing on infrastrcture is what marketing departments like M$ do to produce inconsistent and buggy software. I'm not saying that Gnome will do that... I'm saying play the odds. On top of everything else they are coming to their developers telling them they need to work harder to produce what they make and here is how to tell your user he can't have what he wants. My question is, knowing open source development, where is the fun in that?
I've long advocated for two strong desktops to give people a choice. I thought Gnome 2 and 2.2 were going to be addressing a lot of this stuff that Miguel seems to be saying they don't have time for. Is it mostly delivering things we had over a year ago like AA fonts? I don't think it's really a matter of which desktop is better. I think it's more a matter of them needing to somehow learn the right lessons before they are so far behind there isn't another viable desktop besides KDE. Perhaps it is a matter of not admitting somebody else is right even if it means jumping from one lifeboat to another.
Frankly it's just sad. They've gone through three desktops in two major releases and seem to be changing various other aspects of their architecture before they can bear fruit and now Miguel seems to be advocating slapping something on top and worring about the structure later. There's no point in debating. This looks pretty bad to me.
Be kind when developers and users come to you...
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