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A gnome followup

Our front page article about the change in Qt licensing terms and the future of GNOME has generated a great deal of mail. Only one other time has LWN received so much feedback, and the readers weren't pleased that time either.

Our assertion that the change in Qt licensing was affecting the morale of (some of) the GNOME developers has drawn a lot of criticism. Some people were polite and constructive in their disagreement; others, well, less so. Additionally, some thought that we gave Qt, Troll Tech, and KDE far too much credit for "a small change" in licensing. Others thought we had underestimated the value of the "QPL" and were too harsh on KDE. There was evidently no way to win on this one.

To answer an often-asked question: no, we do not have much in the way of secret sources of information about the GNOME project and its developers. The article was written based on the discussion in gnome-list, and from a general concern about how the GNOME people would react to the news. Quite a few GNOME supporters, if maybe not developers, have gotten there via an "anything but KDE" mentality. Now that KDE is (arguably) no longer an outcast, some of those people will be less fervent in their support of GNOME.

Anyway, the article was written early on Wednesday, with the information that was available. It seems that we overstated the sense of the GNOME developers; many people informed us that it is business as usual in GNOMEland. We see that as good news, and we are sorry for having overstated the situation. That was not good reporting, we should have been more careful.

That said, we have been flamed for some things that we did not say:

We do hope that people will stop putting those sorts of words in our virtual mouths.

Our article quoted a message from Greg Hayes which drew a lot of fire. Please see a followup message that he sent to us to clarify his position.

In the end, the purpose of the article was to say that we need GNOME as much as we ever did. We hope GNOME will continue even though KDE is now poised to take over a lot of desktops. As was stated on the GNOME list, GNOME must now succeed or fail on its technical merits only. It is well positioned for success on that basis.

The other thing we were hoping was that the divisive desktop wars were now over. Some of the mail we have received suggests that this is still not the case. Feelings remain strong in both camps, as witnessed by the fact that we were able to offend both simultaneously. We do hope that people will move to more moderate positions. Rivalry between the two projects is fine. Hostility is unnecessary and inappropriate. Both GNOME and KDE have achieved impressive things; both can be good for the free software world in general. Let's get along.