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

[Daniel Cassidy]

Fred Smith wrote:

>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#.  
>
>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.
>  
>
I'd be very surprised if they don't produce a GTK wrapper for Qt, which 
would make all of this pretty much irrelevant

>Plus, QT (and the KDE desktop) is just ugly and buggy and delivers a pretty poor user experience.
>
Matter of opinion. I've preferred GNOME over KDE for at least the last 
year for basically the same reasons, but I don't really feel those 
criticisms apply to Qt.