The truth about Red Hat and IPPA

[Patrick]

Could it be they selected GNOME because it's a better desktop? It does seem to be the choice of the enterprise distros.

Oh no, here we go! It's all about the licensing. Gtk is licensed under LGPL, QT is licensed under the GPL.

[Tsuroerusu]

Could it be they selected GNOME because it's a better desktop? It does seem to be the choice of the enterprise distros.

Oh no, here we go! It's all about the licensing. Gtk is licensed under LGPL, QT is licensed under the GPL.

Hehe, I know that was a long and boring discussion, but hey, people want the playful/witty banter right? You asked for it, whoever you are, and that's exactly what you'll get. Especially with my round-ups/rants (Decide for yourself what they are) on multimedia apps for Linux on LaGER. I will do GNOME audio and video players on the next episode, after that I'll do some desktop agnostic ones and then after that I'll do audio/video editing and dvd authoring apps (I found a very cool KDE app that I wanna keep as a surprise, if anyone can guess what it is, please don't tell).

Yes, that's the main reason they dropped the foundation. An E-mail was sent to everyone on the Fedora mailing list asking how people were willing to commit financially to the project. The result was that the community couldn't come up with even a fraction of the money and resources Red Hat was already poring into Fedora. Red Hat didn't didn't want to drop their support just so they could call Fedora a foundation.

Makes perfect sense, thanks for clearing that all up for me.

If Novell saw Red Hat as an enemy, why use GNOME? SUSE has contributed a big bunch of code to KDE in the past, so if Novell wanted to stick their head in the ground they certainly could.

Could it be they selected GNOME because it's a better desktop? It does seem to be the choice of the enterprise distros.[/quote]
Seriously, don't get me started on that.

Did you listen to the episode of TLLTS where I was on? I think it's all about the toolkit, imagine you being Novell and with that "Which Windows apps do you wanna see ported to Linux?" survey in hand approach Adobe and show 'em the numbers and then in the last second say "Oh yeah, you have to go pay Trolltech a shitload of money before you can use Qt for proprietary programs", Adobe would probably be like "Are you on crack or something?", since Qt is licensed under the GPL it's not allowed to be used for proprietary programs, GTK is licensed under the LGPL and can be used for proprietary programs and doesn't cost even a penny to use for that, Qt is like 700 euros per developer, and imagine a giant like Adobe with hundreds of developers, gets pricy when you do the math.

And by the way, until September of 2000, Qt was only available under the QPL which was very much incompatible with the GPL and people were discussing lcensing up da ass. All that stuff probably made GTK make more sense for the corporations, and I can understand why it still would do today, but one thing I think especially Novell has to consider, and I seriously hope they already have, is that they're going directly in the flesh of Microsoft, throwing a fast punch before Microsoft can move it's fist (Read: Vista) to get a small chunk of the Windows audience and publicity in general attention to their desktop products. I personally think that KDE is far eaisier to use for people used to Windows, and GNOME is better for people used to a Mac, and both of them are equally complicated to learn for anyone who've never used any of them. But let's face it, 95% of the world know Windows, so I think it's a little bit dumb not using the best gun for that target, although I will give Novell some credit here, they havn't dropped KDE neither in terms of them including it in their upcoming SLED 10 distro or supporting it.

[Gomer_X]

Could it be they selected GNOME because it's a better desktop? It does seem to be the choice of the enterprise distros.

Oh no, here we go! It's all about the licensing. Gtk is licensed under LGPL, QT is licensed under the GPL.

I don't buy it. If that were the case, why does Red Hat ship KDE? It's not the default, but it's still there.

Red Hat has been GNOME for a long time. That decision was made when KDE was considered non-free because of the license. I think the fact that GNOME is popular among corporate desktops has brought more corporate support (and developers), which means it's more tailored for a corporate environment.

The decision may have been based on the license at one point, but I think coporate distros have stuck with GNOME because it's more suited for that environment. Just my opinion, of course.