Feel a bit bad about making fun of good efforts, but there was a very good example of a non-decision being made quoted the other day on OSDL Desktop Architects group mailing list. It was said that one of the things that had been agreed upon at the meeting in Portland was that when people where recommending GUI toolkits they would recommend those which allowed cross-platform development. On the face of it seems like a meaningful agreement, but in reality its not. If you look at what people actually use on GNU/Linux today its Gtk, FLTK, Qt, wxWindows, Swing, SWT and XUL and to some degree Motif. So I guess the agreement is that nobody recommends Motif…Wow the power of people coming together and making hard compromises :)
Christian F.K. Schaller
Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics. Anything I write in this blog is me speaking as a member of the open source community, official Red Hat communication happens on Redhat.com. The comments are my own personal opinion.
Just FYI: wxWindows is named wxWidgets these days
(yes, MS tapped on the shoulder after 12 years of ignoring the name and I believe it was even knowingly sponsoring a tad bit in the history)
On the other hand, they are discussing common protocols and libraries. Let the market decide what toolkit is best, and improve the interoperation of toolkits. It is impossible to “pick the winner” anyway, as none of the frameworks have more than 30% of the market (ex: java, XUL, gtk, qt, UNO, motif, etc…). The best is to create a flexible way to be able to integrate any toolkit to the linux desktop.