To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: guadec interoperability progress
From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>
Date: 14 Apr 2001 12:03:35 -0400


Hi,

People might want to read Dave Mason's report from GUADEC here:
  http://people.redhat.com/dcm/guadec.html

Two notable things, first we had a group of KDE hackers at GUADEC and
a keynote by Matthias Ettrich, and a lot of good interaction/planning
went on; second the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors adopted the
following statement:

  We believe that for GNOME to be successful, it needs to interoperate
  with other computing environments and services platforms. Thus we
  are in favor of increased collabration with KDE to insure end users
  will be able to seamlesly mix KDE and GNOME applications.

The fact is that one primary virtue of open source software, and our
big selling point vis-a-vis the proprietary world, is that we put the
needs of the user first - we put the customer in
control. Interoperability is a specific customer need that's
underserved by the proprietary world. So we are making
interoperability - not just with KDE, but with Windows, Java, etc. - a
primary concern of the GNOME project.
 
A second motivation for our statement is the observation that ISVs are
often scared off by press reports of the GNOME/KDE conflict, and they
fear that they will select the wrong desktop to support with their
applications. Thus we are joining with the KDE project to commit to
interoperability, and to ensure that selecting a development platform
for an application will not mean selecting one or another group of
users. That is, ideally, users using GNOME or KDE should not care what
toolkit was used to develop an application. This will be our goal, and
already the GTK+ and Qt teams have been working together on various
initiatives. And of course it's already true that apps written with
GTK+ or Qt will work fine on either desktop; the remaining challenges
are primarily cosmetic.

This is not to say there can't be friendly competition between GNOME
and KDE. But it should be comparable to the competition between
various window managers; they all work with all apps, and the choice
is up to users. Users should even be able to choose some of the
lower-profile desktops such as XFCE or GNUStep if they
like. It's just a harmless user preference. 

Competition on this level is beneficial, a good way to ensure progress
continues - witness the stagnation in Motif/CDE once the "desktop
wars" were over, and compare it to the constant advances made by GNOME
and KDE. But competition must be accompanied by a firm commitment to
interoperability. So we are making that commitment and following
through by working closely with the KDE team.

This isn't all new at GUADEC; see http://www.freedesktop.org where
work has been going on for some time. But progress at GUADEC I hope
makes our seriousness of purpose very clear.  We are firmly committed
to the view that the real war is between free software and proprietary
software. The war between GNOME and KDE is decidedly over, with users
and free software as the victors.

Havoc