Integrative work

[Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)]

El mié, 17-12-2003 a las 16:12, Ralf Nolden escribió:
> Hi,
> 
> if someone missed the point about the current events of the last weeks: Our 
> job is now to correct any impression KDE is making to the outside world that 
> if someone would want to use KDE, he would be tied to one toolkit and one 
> development environment. 

I wish I was subscribed to the user linux mailing list.

Look, I side with KDE developers on this issue.  If someone is going to
develop commercial apps, I think it's pretty reasonable to pay developer
licenses.

The KDE community needs to press PR people into publishing:

1) that development of KDE applications for commercial ends does NOT
require royalties from the developers, only developer licenses, and
stress that this is cheap (although not perhaps for developing
countries' software houses)

2) that the use of the Qt-provided SDK is really advantageous and
provides a unified and cross-platform development system, which should
be a boon to software houses.

FWIW, I don't think Bruce's gonna change his mind.  But he's not
emotional about it.  He just perhaps has a misunderstanding.  It's true
that from a Cost-of-acquisition the GNOME platform is cheaper.  But from
a TCO perspective, the Qt/KDE solution is better.  For developed
countries.

On another note, the GNOME guys seem to have a more open development
process, and the KDE community has this "appearance" of wanting to do
everything the KDE way.  I think this started when KDE dropped CORBA. 
It has been a healthy decision, in retrospective, but nevertheless, the
consumer perspective remains.

Perhaps binary releases of all KDE applications (not just KDE core) can
prove that KDE is the platform of choice.

The KDE people should attract more commercial development as well. 
AFAIK, the KDE libs are GPL, and so they discourage commercial
development, forcing devels to use only Qt.  Maybe, just maybe, all that
is needed is a special permission to link against proprietary apps in
the KDE libs GPL license, and you should be set.  Perhaps the LGPL is
more appropriate.

> 
> We have to make clear that we do have the power and the force, together with 
> our technologies, to be an *integrative* factor, not one that needs to create 
> its own application set just because we beleive that it's the right solution 
> in the long run. Here, we have to think short term while we can still 
> preserve projects like KOffice to be developed _over time_ to become a speedy 
> and functional replacement of OpenOffice. Until then things like KOffice are 
> _research_ projects, alternatives to test our technologies like Kparts. 
> 
> The keyword is: create mindshare by code that KDE can integrate:
> 
> - OpenOffice.org
> - Mozilla
> - GTK/ other toolkits based applications
> 
> into KDE as seamless as possible. We cannot deny reality the right to dictate 
> us that sometimes we have to do things that we do not always like to do. To 
> cite Michael Gorbatchev: He who comes late gets punished by life. It should 
> be our way to realize that people tend to think of us as the 
> everything-has-to-be-KDE-or-we-won't-use-it crowd and that we have to do a 
> good job right now to make sure this impression gets corrected and we are the 
> driving factor with regard to uniting both our goal to provide a HIG based, 
> easy to use desktop with a bunch of useful apps that is _at the same time_ 
> *the* desktop that is able to run and integrate any application out there.
> 
> One way to do that is to make those apps use our filedialog and printdialog 
> (printing does work in most cases, filedialog is a research project people 
> should look at and maybe make proposals how to change gtk to call the kde 
> file dialog, patches welcome for demo.
> 
> Alex Neundorf is working on the OOo/gtk side, so please contact him if you 
> want to be of help, he really needs hands helping him with this particular 
> project.
> 
> The other way is to check out the cool things that are happening at 
> freedesktop.org which is in particular the organization that will support us 
> with any integrative work, may it be themes, styles, settings and new 
> features in X. 
> 
> Ralf
-- 
	Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)
	GPG key ID: keyserver.net C1033CAD
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