[Foss-cafe] a little piece i wrote on the end of the world

[Fred Smith]

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 13:03, dep wrote:
> btw -- what does everyone think of novell's decision to have its desktop 
> be qt-based? the possibilities are all interesting, some more than 
> others, but there is the potential for much good here, methinks.

Definitely not a good thing for Novell, although I'll never have to use
it (because of this decision) so it doesn't matter all that much to me. 
The licensing issues ($1500 a seat for any non-gpled or internally used
application) and lack of decent language bindings for QT (Only C++!? 
You've got to be joking) will make the Novell/SuSE combo a complete
non-starter for companies wanting to release integrated, consistent
looking applications for the linux desktop. While it's a great ideal to
try to get everyone to use a GPL license for their applications, it's
also pretty short-sighted as many organizations currently depend on some
sort of NDA encumbered technology to get their work done. Being locked
into C++ is just painful compared to putting a GTK application together
in Python, PHP, Perl, C or C#.  Plus, QT (and the KDE desktop) is just
ugly and buggy and delivers a pretty poor user experience.

Beyond that, it likely means throwing away the #1 application that
they've got (Ximian Evolution), which was their key to getting a
featureful corporate desktop system that could integrate with existing
solutions.

-- 
Fred Smith <fps at dividedsky.net>
Divided Sky Internet
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