[CS-FSLUG] Qt relicensed as LGPL

[Timothy Butler]

>>
> I think they will.  It must have been a huge shock to them when the  
> aRts guy acted on his principles.  LGPL plus decent sound plus  
> corporate motivation; I think reliability is probably coming.

	The big challenge, it seems to me, is that KDE has always had a hard  
time focusing on the end user. "Oh, there are ten different ways using  
three different daemons to turn on sound in the main, end user  
configuration tools -- jolly, good, Joe Sixpack is gonna love this."  
Of course, Joe Sixpack doesn't. He wants a thing that says "Sound: on/ 
off."

	GNOME sometimes has gone overboard, but I think their approach gets  
closer to what every typical user I know wants: to hide as much  
complexity as possible. After all, that is what desktop environments  
are about. Where GNOME goes too far, and KDE with increased commercial  
interest could do (the LGPL may help here, as you note) is hide that  
complexity not completely but behind buttons that say things like  
"Advanced Options."

	Their other big task is to kill redundancy. KDE often has kept  
multiple mediocre apps that do the same thing, as opposed to having  
one really good app. Kill all but one and make it the best it can be.  
Oh, and kill the K in front of the name of everything.

	What KDE really needs is to get someone from Mozilla over to run the  
organization. KDE reminds me a lot of Mozilla back in the bad old days  
when the behemoth later known as Seamonkey was Mozilla's main  
offering. It was too complicated and unwieldy. Firefox and Thunderbird  
are successful in large part because they are clean and easy to use,  
with great guis using commercial grade logos and icons, but also  
extensible for power users.

	(Incidentally, that's yet another apt comparison to Mac OS X too, and  
why I love using it. I can extend away with included and cheap or free  
addons to do all kinds of robust UNIXy things, but when I'm on a tight  
schedule and don't want to have to do anything complex at all, or even  
look at a complex configuration dialog, I don't have to.)

	-Tim

---
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