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Our Blogs Open Sauce Shuttleworth has some nice words for KDE | Shuttleworth has some nice words for KDE |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 15 July 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 But then since he can't piss off the GNOME people altogether (the interview was done at the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference), he added: "The flipside (sic) to that is that this predictability and also the choice of the LGPL has made GNOME very good for business." Does he then favour a switch away from GTK to QT? No, he merely thinks "it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT." I'm not too sure about values when it comes to GNOME - unless it's the push to wholesale, crass commercialism. But then that's my view. KDE, which began life in October 1996, has from its inception been using QT, which was then a non-free library, owned by a company called Trolltech (now acquired by Nokia). At that time, it was easy for the FSF to paint KDE as being from the dark side. But now QT is free too. However, there is no move by the Free Software Foundation towards recognising this essential fact about KDE. Last year, I asked the FSF founder Richard Stallman whether the organisation would consider nominating KDE as one that now met all the requirements for a free software project, Stallman replied: "That would be a very drastic thing to do." In this context, Shuttleworth's comment in the derStandard.at interview, that, "whether we'll be able to have the FSF excited about something, have GNOME excited about something, have Nokia excited about something which makes life better for developers - that's gonna be the interesting challenge for me", does seem rather disingenuous. Many more portions of this interview are couched in terms that one can only describe as hedging one's bets, statements like, "I think the KDE-guys have a point when they say, if all you do is have an everlasting commitment to a stable API/ABI and do releases once every six months, you can never make big shifts of innovation". It's not very clear as to what Shuttleworth is aiming at or for what he is trying to prepare the ground. Whatever it is, one thing is clear - we surely do live in interesting times.
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