iTWire – Shuttleworth has some nice words for KDE???
July 16, 2008 8:49 am freesoftware, gnome, maemoI hate to give attention to Sam Varghese, but he is, after all, my favourite free software Shock Jock – always looking for conflict, or the controversial angle on the most innocuous statement.
This week, he wrote:
Is Mr Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, slowly warming towards KDE?[…]
Given the amount of flak that the recent KDE release – 4.0 – has taken from the pro-GNOME pundits at sites like linux.com, you would think that the worst possible thing any supporter of GNOME – as Shuttleworth is perceived to be – could do is to speak out in support of anything associated with KDE.
But you would be wrong. Shuttleworth is now floating the idea that there can be a QT-based GNOME.
So we look farther, and see that Sam is referring to the article in derStandard.at which Andreas wrote in GUADEC. Mark says, and I paraphrase: “GNOME’s platform licencing is company friendly, QT’s isn’t, but if QT were to change their licencing strategy to a company-friendly licence, GNOME would have some hard choices to make”.
To be fair, let’s get the direct quote in here:
A lot is going to depend on what Nokia is going to do from a licensing point of view. And separately what GNOME is going to do if Nokia makes the QT-licenses effectively compatible with the GNOME vision, can they embrace QT as a platform? […] I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT. There are licensing issues, GNOME is very much built on the LGPL, allowing companies to build their own products on a free software system, giving them some freedom and flexibility in their choice of licensing. That’s very frankly been a huge drive for the adoption of GNOME by corporate ISVs.
So, let me read between the lines (well, in fact, I’m just reading *on* the lines): if QT became LGPL or X11 or BSD, that would instantly make it a more attractive platform for commercial developers. Mark thinks that it’s possible to bring the GNOME vision of universal access through a beautiful, simple, accessible, internationalised, integrated user experience to the QT platform.
I may be nuts, but isn’t that more an indictment of KDE than a recommendation? Isn’t he saying “the KDE guys should be more like GNOME”? Isn’t he suggesting that if QT were available as LGPL or more liberal that we all become C++ hackers and port GNOME over to QT?
As it happens, I think that’s extremely unlikely, given the investment in C that GNOME has already made – changing the underlying platform would mean re-writing every single application, and leaving a lot of dead & wounded behind. Plus, I have a lot of faith that through improved bindings and a less shackled GTK+, combined with the 2-3 year “vision” arcs that the release team proposed at GUADEC, that we can inject a healthy dose of adrenaline into the heart of GNOME over the next couple of years.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I do agree with both Mark Shuttleworth and you. It is a fact that it would be a lot of work to rewrite Gnome to use C++.
The LGPL license of the Gnome platform is the reason why Red Hat and Sun have paid for a major part of the development of Gnome.
Would Gnome been chosen if QT was LGPL at that time? Not likely.
I don’t use KDE or QT myself. At first it was because of the license, but now also because I like the work you all have done on Gnome.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Well, looking at the quotes, it seems to me that he’s not talking about KDE at all, he’s talking about Qt.
That said, I never really understood the commotion about Qt’s license, especially since they switched to GPL. Sure, the fact that it’s either GPL or commercial license might annoy some, but the people who are annoyed are usually people who would like to take advantage of Qt, while not giving anything back to the community. Now they have to either give code or give money. With LGPL they can go about without giving back anything.
In other words: people who complain about the license are usually leeches and/or pushers of proprietary software. If the goal is to write desktop that is free software, why should the developers be concerned about demands of those who want to push proprietary software on us?
July 16th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I have to admit that I’m more on the KDE side of the fence, but maybe shuttlewoth’s point was to include Qt based programs in the Gnome distribution instead of a complete reengineering of Gnome based on Qt. IMHO it would make sense for both, KDE and Gnome, to ship the applications best up to their users needs regardless of the toolkit the app uses. Some (nowadays pretty minor) technical issues with still need to be overcome, though.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Sam Varghese in ‘uncomprehending idiot’ shocker.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
This is basically about Qt vs GTK, not about KDE vs. Gnome.
Because after all there was a LOT of discussion about the future of GTK.
This discussion is not possible in Qt, because Trolltech steers the direction of Qt.
The most important thing that you should take from this is that developers AND “influencing people” like Mark seem to want that both Qt and GTK collaborate more than they do right now (the other way round, that Kde and Gnome collaborate more, but if they do, I am sure both Gtk and Qt will have some kind of formal agreement on which features to implement to make life of USERS _and_ developers of Gtk/Qt easier)
The license part is really a non-issue. It is basically LGPL vs GPL/commercial.
The biggest issue at hand really is what will happen with GTK, because I am sure Gnome will follow GTK. So people, let’s concentrate on GTK. I already told my feature wish list – it includes css files for use in GTK apps themeing. I never liked the themeing in current GTK, i like my .css files 🙂
July 16th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Hilariously overblown article, and to take such a small part of the article and go with that title, ha! Mark said some nice things about Sun being more open with Java that could have nearly as easily been blown all out of context.
What I took from this was that Mark is aware that QT is getting better and better at integrating with the local platform, and with a bit of work a QT application could be nicely integrated into an otherwise GTK/Gnome desktop.
Since QT 4.2 I’ve been meaning to mess about and see if I can get KDE/QT applications running in Gnome with the standard Gnome button order in dialogs, or at least find out if it is as easy as I hope it could be.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
@dneary: “I may be nuts, but isn’t that more”
i may be nuts as well but i don’t see the point of this entire conversation.
the media once again blindsides a f/oss spokesperson which sucks hugely. let’s not turn on each other in response, though. it’s a f/oss media problem and should be, imho, treated as such.
@Alan Horkin: “I’ve been meaning to mess about and see if I can get KDE/QT applications running in Gnome with the standard Gnome button order in dialogs,”
this works out of the box, as long as dialogs use the QDialogButtonBox, as all dialogs in kdelibs and Qt do right now.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
@Aaron,
I get your point.
The point I was making is that first Andreas, and then Sam, went beyond what was said, in an effort to create conflict where none exists.
In fact, there seems to be some concensus among a lot of people I talk to that QT is a really nice platform, and I suspect that if their licencing were different (and now that their owner doesn’t desperately need licencing fees, it might become different), then GNOME *would* be facing some interesting discussions & decisions.
Dave.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:02 am
@Dave: “The point I was making is that first Andreas, and then Sam, went beyond what was said, in an effort to create conflict where none exists.”
This part I actually find quite offensive. Could you please tell me where I “went beyond what was said”. I published an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, with no commentary whatsoever.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:50 am
@Andreas,
In fact it was the derStandard.at headline which I believed came from you, and which (IMHO) overstated a minor part of the interview: “Shuttleworth: “Apple is driving the innovation” – Sees possibility for a Qt-based GNOME”
You mentioned in private email that the headline didn’t come from you – so allow me to apologise for impugning you. Your editor might have been more careful, though 😉
Cheers,
Dave.
July 19th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
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July 21st, 2008 at 8:39 pm
@Dave,
And you forgot to quote:
MarkS: “I use KDE on my desktop, I enjoy seeing the pace of change there, there is a lot of innovation in KDE4. I think the KDE guys have a point when they say their approach has made it easier for them to make leaps forward than the GNOME approach which has very predictable release schedules.”
So everybody has little own view of the world.
No point to write about it and piss people off ( see Sams Re: )