I 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.