GNOME vs Canonical

[Ralph Janke]

  Well.. bemused you can bet.

Another interesting aspect is the question of:

Why is Canonical wasting their time with Gnome, when they get far more
co-operation from KDE.

Let's get back in history and look why Gnome was even started. In fact some
people (among them Miguel de Iqaza and IIRC Jono Bacon) were not happy with
the Qt licensing at the time. Today, the IP issue is actually reverse 
due to the
heavy reliance on Mono by Gnome and the related patent issues.

Ever since KDE redesigned the Desktop with KDE4, I have the feeling some in
the Gnome community (and very likely only a very influential minority)
wanted to take the frustration of some KDE users at the time and create
a bigger canon between the two desktops (maybe to make it more difficult
for people to change back). As a KDE user I have often felt (and that might
absolutely be

And the Ubuntu community (ie., us, unless you use Kubuntu, in which
case you're looking on bemusedly from the sidelines) is caught in the
middle.  But honestly, if you didn't care about the political back and
forth between free/open source software groups before, you probably
don't need to care any more about it now.

a wrong perception) that Gnome is not as interested in inter-compatibility
as KDE is.

Well.. and in some way this led to the point that even with far less 
resources within
and outside of canonical KDE made a lot more efforts to play ball with 
everybody.

Interestingly, even with all those efforts KDE has maintained its own 
profile and is
a viable alternative.

With this in mind. KDE is certainly in the position if Mark should 
decide at some point that
unity is actually better support by KDE and Qt to change the platform 
and run it there.

I am not sure if this ever will happen, maybe the mere possibility of it 
will bring some of the
hot heads together and act more magnanimously. For whatever it is worth, 
I think this whole
soap opera shows quite clearly the strength of open source and its 
competition "within". Choices
are good and innovation is fostered when there is some friendly competition.

Let's just hope the community understands that friendly competition is  
a good thing, and that
the competition stays friendly instead of wasting time by fighting each 
other when we could
innovate great stuff instead.

Just my 2 cents (Canadian!)

- Ralph

On 03/15/2011 09:44 AM, Darcy Casselman wrote:
> And the Ubuntu community (ie., us, unless you use Kubuntu, in which
> case you're looking on bemusedly from the sidelines) is caught in the
> middle.  But honestly, if you didn't care about the political back and
> forth between free/open source software groups before, you probably
> don't need to care any more about it now.