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Re: [ProgSoc] Text editors/Web dev apps for the Mac



On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 18:11 +1000, jedd wrote:

>  It was ... a good decision
>  in the sense of starting to build a coherent system that could gain
>  popularity, momentum, advocates, and developers quickly.

I don't agree. It was a divisive, foolish decision. Without it, not only
would the Harmony developers likely have spent their time on improving
QT and/or KDE, but GNOME may never have taken off. (This latter may have
been a good or bad thing in a FL/OSS-wide sense, but in that they cost
themselves access to developers, it was bad for TrollTech, QT and KDE.)

Mistaking control for security is a common error. In TrollTech's case,
they assumed that by maintaining control over what happened to the QT
codebase, that they'd protect themselves from divisiveness. Instead,
they created it. They'd have been much better off noting that

- network effects are in play, particularly for a foundation library

- therefore the mass of developers will tend to cluster around one
source tree _anyway_

- unless they can't get along, in which case the ability to fork makes
life easier for everyone (the BSDs needed to go in different directions;
that they could do so without permission made continued progress
possible for all involved)

- and in some [rare] cases (EGCS->GCC-3.0), it turns out that the
encumbents are being numbskulls and that the ability to fork is a
necessary pre-condition of their re-education. (People who are afraid of
being re-educated tend not to learn too much...)

>  Yes, it's a bit fuzzy, but I think there's a valid comparison in there
>  to be made between the qtlibs and the LGPL and (non-)free BIOSes
>  and intent and reality and (dare I say it) pragmatism and expectations
>  and all sorts of other things that make life so interesting.

A better comparison is non-FL/OSS-libc and the specific exception in Gnu
GPL to permit the use of system libraries; that the work would of
necessity start where we were was obvious. That such a compromise was
accepted when there was no alternative indicates no hypocrisy. A failure
to get past it now that alternatives exist is another matter of course:
does _your_ phone run Linux?

>  As Raz mentioned, the Harmony project was just one such beast.
>  I believe they got about 20-30% of the way through it before Trolltech
>  became clued.  It's possible that this was part of the driver for Tt,
>  but that may be a stretch.

It would have been a consideration. That their imagined security was
merely a case of the emporer's new clothes would have been rather
obvious if KDE made its return to Debian powered by Harmony instead of
by QT. TrollTech would certainly have been aware of this when they ade
the change.

>  Arguably GTK fits the same category (the non gimpy bits) and it's
>  a shame that the worst thing to come out of Tt's prevarications
>  was, in fact, the Gnome desktop.

I don't understand this.

>  Is there an interesting comment to be made about the fact that
>  the library upon which Gnome now relies is less free than the one
>  that KDE stands on?

Did I miss a memo? The copyright notices on the copies on libgtk2,
libqt3 and libqt4 in Ubuntu indicate that all are "Gnu GPLv2 or later".

- Raz


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