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UserLinux Continues Debate Over GUI 564

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Following up the earlier Slashdot item on this, LinuxWorld is carrying both sides of the discussion as to whether UserLinux GUI should be GNOME only, as Bruce Perens last week decided "by fiat," or include KDE."
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UserLinux Continues Debate Over GUI More

UserLinux Continues Debate Over GUI

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  • Gnome or KDE (Score:5, Funny)

    by panxerox ( 575545 ) * on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:04AM (#7779243)
    how bout a slashdot poll? 1. Gnome 2. Kde 3. Command line 4. Wine version of XP 5. Cowboyneil is my interface

    • Re:Gnome or KDE (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pherris ( 314792 )
      From the current poll [slashdot.org]:
      This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

      While this advice is for just /. polls it's sound advice for anything here.

  • If we did a Slashdot POll, the winning choice would inevitably be:

    All I have is a 9600bps serial line YOU INSENSITIVE BASTARD.

  • What's the big deal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HairyCanary ( 688865 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:09AM (#7779260)
    If you don't like the distribution, don't use it. Simple as that. Keeping the OS simple and maintainable as a laudable goal, and I would find it difficult to argue with them just because my personal choice GUI wasn't included (though neither Gnome or KDE are *my* personal choice :-)). The beauty of open source is that anyone can do this -- if you really disagree with their choice on which GUI to include, make your own distribution and include just KDE with it.

    • Re:What's the big deal (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:31AM (#7779393)
      if you really disagree with their choice on which GUI to include, make your own distribution and include just KDE with it.

      What's better, you can just apt-get kde on UserLinux.

      Gnome will be the default, supported option. It's sensible to pick only one to "officially support", and let the hackers use the other to their heart's content.

      Gnome is the better "supported" option because it doesn't require royalties for closed source development. This matters in countries where you can buy 3 developer months for single license of Qt (and for 3 developers, you need 3 licenses).

      • Re:What's the big deal (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ankit ( 70020 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:48AM (#7779524) Homepage Journal
        Its just like you can simply download and install mozilla/firebird/opera/etc on any windows machine - internet explorer would only be the default. You dont have to use it.

        UserLinux is targeted at the enterprise community. It probably (and hopefuly) be used by non-geeky types who simply use what is installed on their computers. You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.

        I am not sure what the right approach would be though. It makes sense for an OS to have a consistent "face" to a non-techie user. Though choice is great (and it is the reason why I use linux), it can be a hinderance for someone who is not inclined to try out 5 different window managers before she decides which one to use!!

        • Re:What's the big deal (Score:5, Informative)

          by sydb ( 176695 ) <michael @ w d 2 1 . c o . uk> on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:25PM (#7779799)
          I don't mean to stalk you in this story!

          You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.

          KDE made a choice when it based itself on Qt. Times change and KDE's problems have changed - KDE is a good Free Software* desktop environment. But because Qt is GPL'd, it presents a barrier to proprietary development that is against the goals of UserLinux.

          If being the default desktop of UserLinux is so important to KDE, why don't they re-implement their desktop ontop of an LGLP'd toolkit?

          If it's not so important that they are willing to do that, then people should stop being upset. In the choice of a default there will be a winner and one or more losers. XFCE lost here too, but they're not whining. Only one desktop can be the default!

          As for the Netscape comparison, I think there were other factors which led to Netscape's demise, like a bloated product (Communicator). Look how people prefer Firebird over Mozilla. There's still time for IE to be ousted - all the time in the world, from now to the end of time.

          * Or is it? Look at what TrollTech say here [trolltech.com] - TT don't want you using Free Qt on inhouse projects, but the GPL says you can [gnu.org]. This makes me distrust TrollTech.

        • Re:What's the big deal (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TandyMasterControl ( 136043 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @01:03PM (#7780036) Homepage
          UserLinux doesn't even *exist* yet. That's a far cry from having a monopolist's power to "persuade" 90plus percent of the market to switch over to using Internet Destroyer instead of Netscape more or less overnight (as they upgrade from windose95 to 98 or 2000).
          There are no grounds to make an MS - UserLinux comparison. In fact it's ludicrous.

        • Re:What's the big deal (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Arker ( 91948 )

          You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.

          If you can, there's something wrong. You can't kill a free software project like that. It only dies if it no longer serves the developers goals.

          Personally, I'd rather see them adopt GNUStep than either one - and if enough folk agree with me we might see another project taking that route. I'm sure there will continue to be other distros that choose to support KDE. It's not the end of the world, because free software is not the

  • Holy War (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SkArcher ( 676201 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:10AM (#7779271) Journal
    I sense another Holy War incoming over this. In all honesty, while having a single interface to deal with would be easier, I don't feel the GNOME ca claim to be it. Nor can KDE, but shortening the field by including only one in this project is a bit anti-competitive, and OSS has allways thrived on the competition between similar projects.

    • Anti Competitive? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Moth7 ( 699815 )
      So it's anti-competitive to prefer one option for doing the job that you want done? Was I anti-competitive for un-selecting the KDE checkbox when I did my minimalist install? As I see it, this is a prime example of competition that they can thrive on - they both have to prove their case and one gets included - if thats not competition then I don't see what is.
      • Did you possibly fail english in school?

        By any reasonable measure of the term competition is served by actually having a competitor.

        The non inclusion of KDE as an available choice means that GNOME has no competition in the UserLinux package. You unselected the KDE checkbox when doing your install by choice. This decision unselects the KDE checkbox for all who would use UserLinux, and does not give the option to recheck.

        This isn't about your personal choice, it is about you _having_ a personal choice, reg
        • Last I heard people weren't being forced to use UserLinux. KDE is available, for free, to anyone who care to install it. So a Linux distro chose not to include multiple versions of everything, big deal. If you have a problem with it, make your own alternative (based on UserLinux if you so choose) distro with KDE only and people will have even more choice.

          I'd love a distro that only provide a trimmed down set of apps, as it would save me the hassle of going through the guesswork of what I should remove or

        • Re:Anti Competitive? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by TKinias ( 455818 )

          scripsit SkArcher:

          This decision unselects the KDE checkbox for all who would use UserLinux, and does not give the option to recheck.

          Not really. apt-get install kde will `recheck' it nicely, regardless of whether it's included on the installation media or supported by UL. That's why basing UL on Debian is so important.

    • Speaking of Holy Wars. <RMS>It's GNU/Linux!!! </RMS>

      In all seriousness, the insistence that Linux should be "Free", and therefore be stuck with KDE or GNOME will make it harder to achieve the goals of ease of use. Ease of use is not just for programmers. it needs to be for <cliche> grandma users as well.</cliche> People need to start paying more attention to some of the UI's used by the windows clones like Lindows, on the grounds that even if they suck technically, they are easier t

    • Re:Holy War (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Svennig ( 665498 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:30AM (#7779386)
      In all honesty, while having a single interface to deal with would be easier.. OSS has allways thrived on the competition between similar projects

      This competition also gives OSS its greatest downfall - there just arent any standards. You wanna write for QT? do x. You wanna write for GTK? do y. You wanna write for something else? do z. Someone needs to make an standardised API for all linux guis and stick with it.

      Say what you want about M$ Windows, but it provided a standard. The ability to program on one GUI and reach 80% of people is fantastic.

    • No kidding (Score:3, Funny)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 )
      I sense another Holy War incoming over this.

      So you are saying that a holy war between Gnome and KDE will be coming? Proponents of various desktops trolling and flaming each other on Slashdot?

      We are truly living interesting times.

  • Why does it matter so much? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I really don't get it. UserLinux seems targeted towards a very specific goal that KDE cannot meet because of the Qt widget set. That's that, right? What is the big deal? Why does it matter to KDE ppl anyway? Why is it so important a matter that it has required months of discussion to no end except bitching and fantasy conceptions of what KDE will someday be?

    • Re:Why does it matter so much? (Score:5, Informative)

      by fritmebufstek ( 558201 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:33AM (#7779408)
      It matters to the KDE folk, because we ( a group of some twenty enthusiast KDE and Debian developers ) were intending to work together with UL on making UserLinux a KDE based enterprise distro that would easily beat other available offers. Bruce's decision stopped this plan, but we are continuing the effort standalone now. Furthermore, the licensing argument is bogus, read why below.
      • It matters to the KDE folk, because we ( a group of some twenty enthusiast KDE and Debian developers ) were intending to work together with UL on making UserLinux a KDE based enterprise distro that would easily beat other available offers.

        So to be clear on this, your intention wasn't some marvelous egalitarian distribution with equal showing for Gnome and KDE that so many people here are going on about, your hope was to base it on KDE instead? You agree with the basic idea of Bruce picking one desktop env

  • Why I'm not optimistic for UserLinux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jbellis ( 142590 ) * <(jonathan) (at) (carnageblender.com)> on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:11AM (#7779281) Homepage
    They're targeting the enterprise market -- defined explicitly by Peren's whitepaper as (paraphrasing) the market that Red Hat gets $$$ in support fees for.

    I just don't see companies who want that level of support settling for "here's our linux distro, and if you want support, uh... here's a list of 3rd party providers." Remember LinuxCare? They're still around, but only because they moved away from providing third-party support solutions.
  • I prefer gnome to KDE. And I see that KDE is more advanced.

    by Bruce's decision I see some hope for gnome to speed their development. That's why I think it is good.

    I also hope that decision about mozilla and gumeric + OOffice will solve their greatest problem: its own widget set. (I prefer galeon to mozilla - mainly because of native widget set == less bloated)

    to conclude: I think that Bruce made the best possible decissions, and I really hope it will be a great success.

    (btw, sawfish is my WM, no

  • Why the licensing argument is bogus (Score:5, Informative)

    by fritmebufstek ( 558201 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:14AM (#7779298)
    Try to find a commercial Gtk app. After googling, you'll perhaps find some from Ximian ( which can arguably be ruled out ), and perhaps a few more. Now try to find a commercial Qt app. You'll find hundreds ( including high-profile ones from Adobe and others ).

    This means that commercial developers are willing to pay for a quality toolkit, as much so on Linux as on other OSs. Free software folk needn't worry either, as Qt on X is free as in both.

    • Re:Why the licensing argument is bogus (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:33AM (#7779406) Homepage Journal
      The reason there weren't too many commercial apps was that until recently gtk lagged far behind Qt. (The gtk file selector was a joke, for example). But gtk2 was a vast improvement, and now the 2 are for practical purposes equal. (File selector is getting fixed in 2.6). So expect to see a lot more gtk apps soon.

      And its not like there aren't any now. Mozilla uses gtk (though not exclusively) and netscape which is based on mozilla is closed source. This wouldn't have been possible if gtk were GPL. Similarly for openoffice and staroffice.

      Thirdly, big companies like Adobe can pay for Qt. But userlinux is targeting much smaller enterprises as well, and its doubtful if they can.

      Fourth, there's the issue of control. What insurance do you have against Qt jacking up the price of a developer license?

    • Re:Why the licensing argument is bogus (Score:4, Informative)

      by manyoso ( 260664 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:34AM (#7779419) Homepage
      More reasons why the licensing argument is bogus:

      The emerging Linux cell phone market: choice? Qt
      IBM PDA reference implementation: choice? Qt
      Adobe? Qt
      Samsung? Qt
      Sharp? Qt
      Boeing? Qt
      Daimler? Qt
      Chrysler? Qt
      Disney? Qt
      Fujitsu? Qt
      General Electric? Qt
      Hitachi? Qt
      Honda? Qt
      HP? Qt
      IBM? Qt
      Intel? Qt
      Mitsubishi? Qt
      NASA? Qt
      NEC? Qt
      Shell? Qt
      Siemens? Qt
      Sony? Qt
      Toshiba? Qt
      Toyota? Qt
      Unilever? Qt
      Volkswagen? Qt

      Hmm, I'm starting to sense a pattern here. Now, go find the list of ISV's or commercial companies developing with GTK+. And no, RedHat and Sun don't count. Why you ask? Because they are distributions silly. You didn't see me listing all the distributions that support or prefer KDE/Qt.

      And yet another reason the so-called licensing issue is bogus? The FSF prefers GPL'd libraries as a matter of principle. Not LGPL. That is why they changed the name to 'Lesser' and put up the why-not-lgpl paper. So, the FSF would rather Qt and GTK+ were both GPL with *no* ability to support proprietary developers... gratis or otherwise. Besides, shouldn't the community benefit from some form of recompense from proprietary developers using our Free systems? Yes, we should and with Qt, we do.

      Some community names went around spreading this ridiculous 'licensing problem' with Qt as deliberate FUD. And now we all have to clean up after their mess.
      • More reasons why the licensing argument is bogus

        It's a different thing to voluntarily choose a commercial toolkit, and be forced to pick one because it is the only way to get the LAF right for the desktop platform.

        Besides, shouldn't the community benefit from some form of recompense from proprietary developers using our Free systems? Yes, we should and with Qt, we do.

        Community wouldn't benefit. Trolltech would.

        I think it's simply better to use some of the money that the companies will save by Peren's
      • You're conveniently listing large corporate and government users for which the QT license fee is peanuts.

        And pointing out that the FSF prefers the GPL is hardly a good argument for why one should choose a GPL'd toolkit for a distro intended for enterpise users... The FSF is hardly a bastion of support for corporations.

      • Hmm, I'm starting to sense a pattern here. Now, go find the list of ISV's or commercial companies developing with GTK+.

        In fact quite a few do, especially when writing software specifically for Linux. For instance, VMware, Real, Loki, there was some photo website company who support Linux (can't remember their name now) who have a GTK app to upload images and stuff.

        Really, having a big list of companies who use Qt is not that useful. The fact is that NO major platform in existence today requires you to

    • Ximian's apps aren't commercial, for the most part they sell support packages and their code is still available under the GPL.

      The licensing argument is still very much a valid one, however. I heard that the only reason Sun's Java Desktop is built on GNOME and GTK is because they were scared of QT's licensing costs. The rumor is they even considered buying out TrollTech and releasing QT under the LGPL, but sadly no. Sun's work on moving StarOffice/OpenOffice to a more sane toolkit will be to GTK rather t
    • How about another major Gtk vs Qt advantage. Go look at the GNU Win CD or The Open CD and count the Qt/KDE apps. Or let me save you the time and do it for you. Zero. Think that just might matter to Enterprise customers working in a diverse environment?

      The pisser with the Qt license is that a project must decide before writing the first line of code which license they plan to release under and you can't change your mind later. You can't dual license either. And if you opt for free you can never port t
      • The pisser with the Qt license is that a project must decide before writing the first line of code which license they plan to release under and you can't change your mind later. You can't dual license either. And if you opt for free you can never port to an unfree system.

        Why? YOu can always use a commercial qt license and release your code under any license you wish. It's your code after all. You can even modify the commercial qt and ship the modfified qt with your closed source product. Also you can u

    • you don't understand how companies work (Score:4, Insightful)

      by penguin7of9 ( 697383 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @09:01PM (#7783008)
      Having worked for a bunch of companies, I can tell you that's not the way things work.

      A lot of corporate development is in-house. The Troll Tech license and license fees mattter a great deal for that. They matter not only because of the short-term cost, but they also matter because of the long-term control Troll Tech gets over commercial applications.

      In fact, Troll Tech's control is a problem even for "free software folks", because the design and direction of Qt is ultimately driven by Troll Tech's commercial interests. And you can't weasel your way out of that fact by arguing that if Troll Tech starts going down the wrong path, people can just fork the GPL'ed version of Qt because the very reason for choosing Qt is KDE's assertion that no open source project could deliver a toolkit of comparable quality.

      In fact, another strike against KDE and Qt is the fact that KDE already screwed up big time once. Far from being the result of a careful plan, the current dual-licensing scheme for Qt is the result of Troll Tech averting disaster by changing their license after KDE went on for a couple of years merrily developing software under an open source license incompatible with the QPL. The impression one gets as an outside is that KDE doesn't know what the hell they are doing with licenses. And it doesn't help either that Troll Tech is clearly responsible for killing the Harmony Project, an attempt to develop a more liberally licensed Qt-compatible license, because it would cut into their sales. Neither of those is a big recommendation for KDE or Qt.

      And, in fact, some of those in-house applications later become open source. But the decision to open source is not something companies make at the start of a project--it takes time to deal with lawyers and business people. With Qt, we'd have had to pay Troll Tech for commercial development licenses just so that we could start developing only to have wasted that money later when we get the corporate OK to open source.

      So, why is it that, so far, there are more commercial Qt applications than Gtk+ applications? Well, first of all, I'm not sure that's true--where is the data? Secondly, the Qt applications I have seen are usually from companies like Adobe, whose Linux offerings basically suck.

      But, in any case, until maybe last year, Gtk+ really was behind Qt (after all, it started later as well), but it has now caught up. But before then, there were already plenty of commercial projects in toolkits like Tcl/Tk and wxWindows, both of which have even more liberal licenses than Gtk+.

      In my own experience, Qt's license is deeply harmful to Qt's acceptance for commercial projects: many commercial developers just don't want that sort of dependence on a software vendor, let alone a little company from Norway, even if the money didn't matter. But the money does matter. And Qt's license is also harmful to Qt's use for open source projects.

  • Why argue? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fiskbil ( 734457 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:19AM (#7779326) Homepage
    Why do people always have to argue that you should use this or that? The beauty of it all is that you can choose, if you do not like a distribution that ships with only Gnome then don't use it. If it's based on debian you might just as well install debian and KDE (if that's what you like) or grab a source-dpkg or a dpkg and install KDE on UserLinux afterwards. I realize that many see the need for a common environment with less choice. Mostly to make it easier to move from some other OS to GNU/Linux. But those who want KDE in UserLinux are probably competent enough to get it on their own or use another distribution, they probably won't have a problem choosing between Gnome and KDE. :) Arguing can be interesting and sometimes good, but this just seems like a pointless discussion to me.
    • The beauty of it all is that you can choose

      If you bothered to read the context of the discussion this is considered a negative in this case.

      The stock FOOS arguments does not allways play even in Slashdot, sometime a little thinking is required.

  • Or... Because it will be Debian Based... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HighOrbit ( 631451 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:20AM (#7779327)
    apt-get install kde.

    For those users stuck inside the default gui and without knowledge of the command line (the real target audience of "UserLinux"), I am sure there will be a front-end installer to add new packages. Just include alternate guis as optional packages to be added at the users' descretion. Why stop at KDE? You could include any number add-in optional packages that are not "default". Anyway..., multiple packages that all do the same thing (like guis) will simply increase the complexity, bloat, and confusion for the target audience. Select one good one, and they can add others if they so desire.

    This whole debate sounds to me like what the BSDers call "bikeshedding". Arguing ad nauseam over minor details like colors because the deep-down architectural stuff is beyond intelligent discussion for most folks.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:20AM (#7779329)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Down but not out (Score:3, Insightful)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:20AM (#7779333) Homepage Journal
    Offtopic: Slashdot editors, could you please avoid posting links to linuxworld. The ads are highly intrusive and there's javascript on the page that autoreloads it every minute or so, presumably to serve newer ads.

    Back on topic. I have to say it is really sad to see KDE left out (and I say this as a long time gnome user). KDE is definitely the more mature and enterprise ready project. But then I can see Bruce's point of view. It doesn't make sense to support both, and Qt's licensing could easily put off commercial/proprietary developers.

    Had the KDE and GNOME teams not thumbed their noses at each other for so long, and actually worked on interoperability issues (remember all the bitching when Redhat released bluecurve), all this could have been avoided. I mean, in that case it wouldn't have been difficult to support both.

    Still, its very early in the game and there's miles to go, and both projects can compete if they work with a unified vision. Its encouraging to see that they're doing just that. The KDE proposal, for example, was big on integration (GTK, OO.o, mozilla).

    Also, nobody is stopping a KDE/debian enterprise collaboration, which seems to be on the cards. On the whole the commercial interest from the big vendors has helped greatly. So while the userlinux decision is definitely a sad thing, the future looks bright.

    Uhh.., looks like this is my 500th post! Excuse me while I go out and get a breath of fresh air :)

    • The KDE and Gnome teams ARE working on interoperability issues, and have been for years. It's the users that are bitching and thumbing their noses at eachother.

  • I don't understand this... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:25AM (#7779359) Journal
    If someone wants to recomplile their own version of UserLinux, can't they? Why not start a spinoff project - call it UserLinux - K Edition or whatever? This was done with Knoppix (Gnoppix).

    Seriously, what's the big dealio? It's all open source!

    • There are, broadly speaking, several general reasons why Perens' decision have been criticised:

      1) If you succeed, you will make GNOME A de-facto standard and do to KDE, XFCE etc. what Windows did to Netscape

      2) You won't succeed because cutting out KDE will castrate your system

      3) You are wrong; KDE is better

      Personally, I'm open to discussions around reason 1, and I quite agree with the 'KDE side' on reason 2.

      What isn't made very clear in Perens' article is that by removing KDE, you don't just remove an

  • For crying out loud, people. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:34AM (#7779415) Homepage
    Bruce Perens is making a GNOME-only linux distro. There's no reason for you to try to stop him. It isn't like there aren't 9000 other distros to choose from. Heck, it isn't even like there aren't ten to thirty other linux standardization movements similar to what Perens is doing.

    Perens is convinced that in order to do what he wants this distro to do, he needs to choose one desktop environment and focus to it. He's also convinced that GNOME was the right choice for this. You know what? If he's wrong, all that will happen is that his distro will fail. Life will go on, and only Bruce Perens will have lost any time from it. In the meantime, if you like, you can go and make a KDE-only linux distro of your own, and it will succeed or fail or whatever.

    I think Perens has an interesting little experiment going on here. If he's wrong, he's wrong, and if he's right, you know what? Once he has something good, you can take what he did, fork it, and add/insert KDE. Huzzah. In the meantime, who cares?
  • ...until somebody makes a choice you disagree with, apparently.

    We're all aware that the whole point of this "free software" exercise is that people are free to do whatever they want with it as long as they share, right? Even if other people think it's a bad decision?
  • The fact that you linked to the original story doesn't make it not a dupe. The fact that linux world is now hosting the articles isn't news either. Please.

  • Here's the Trolltech Troll (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:42AM (#7779476)
    The argument is this :

    SCO's bosses at Canopy controls Trolltech which controls Qt which controls KDE.

    (do an nslookup of www.trolltech.com and www.kde.org to verify that last bit of logic)

    The second contention that's a touchy subject is "Canopy controls Trolltech". Somebody is going to post a link to the trolltech site that says "only 8% of Trolltech is controlled by SCO/Canopy".

    Then what the hell is Ralph Yarro (Darl Macbride's boss) doing on the board directors of Trolltech? [linuxsa.org.au]
    Link here for the skeptical.

    The issues is real simple. If Canopy doesn't control Trolltech and Trolltech support Linux, then why haven't they

    1) Come clean on exactly what their relationship is with Canopy ... and ...

    2) Voted Ralph Yarro of the board.

    Trolltech should come clean. What is their relationship with Canopy? Does canopy have contractual rights to sit on the board? Do they owe debt to Canopy? Does Canopy have warrants on Trolltech? The silence is deafing. Speak Trolltech, tell us the truth.

    The sad thing is QT is a good product. They could increase their respect and marketshare by telling the Canopy chumps to take a hike.

    • SCO's bosses at Canopy controls Trolltech

      Not according to Trolltech's investor list [trolltech.com], which claims that the employees own nearly two-thirds of the stock. Even Borland owns more than Canopy and SCO, which put together control less than 6 percent of Trolltech.

      • Re:Relationship with Canopy: Less than 6% (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @09:26PM (#7783105)
        Not according to Trolltech's investor list, which claims that the employees own nearly two-thirds of the stock. Even Borland owns more than Canopy and SCO, which put together control less than 6 percent of Trolltech.

        So, to reiterate the parent poster's question: what the fuck is Darl McBride's boss doing on the board of directors? As one who has defended KDE and spoken rather vehemently against UserLinux's exclusion of arguably the most mature Linux desktop in previous stories on this subject, I'd really like to know. Frankly, any business with a relationship with Canopy is open to serious question, given SCO's recent behavior. Guilt by association may not be popular or politically correct, but in the business world, where almost all backroom deals are run on personal contacts, suspicion by association is very warrented.

  • "UserLinux" = misleading name (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Florian ( 2471 ) <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:49AM (#7779530) Homepage
    The first thing UserLinux needs to fix is its own name. Given that it will not be end/home user distribution, but a business OS designed to compete with the expensive "enterprise" offerings of RedHat and SuSE, it should be better called "Free Enterprise Linux". (The term "free enterprise" would also communicate to corporate people what "free" in "free software" is about.)

    If UserLinux was an end user-oriented distribution, it surely had to pick KDE instead of Gnome, since KDE is the more integrated and stable GUI and is less messy in the architecture underneath (while Gnome/GTK has the lead in 3rd-party applications and, since recently, UI polish).

    But for a "Free Enterprise Linux", there must not be any hidden costs for enterprise software development. This demands that libraries and SDKs should, where possible, be LGPL- or BSD-licensed, and not GPLed with for-pay-exceptions (like in Qt and MySQL).

    Of course, the question remains if, due to its proprietary-friendly licensing and relatively conservative (=stable) design process, FreeBSD wouldn't be the better "Enterprise Linux" anyway. After all, the GPLed Linux kernel could be ditched in favor of a BSD kernel with almost the same arguments the UserLinux project now ditched the GPLed KDE libraries in favor of the LPGLed Gnome libraries.

    But since Linux is all the hype even where it doesn't make too much sense (like in PDAs, for which Minix would be much better suited), it's good that the "UserLinux" project attempts to prevent that commercial distributors do the same horrible mistakes with Linux and their "enterprise" distributions the proprietary Unix vendors made in the 1990s.

    -F

  • Oh, the irony (Score:4, Interesting)

    by truth_revealed ( 593493 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:03PM (#7779635)
    Bruce writes:
    It is possible for us to make our system entirely royalty-free for solution developers, both Free and proprietary. This dictates some software choices: GNOME and PostgreSQL rather than KDE and MySQL, simply because of the way those products license proprietary developers. This will support a large ecosystem of both Free and proprietary solution developers by lowering the financial barriers to entry all the way to zero.

    So, let me get this straight - he wants to discourage the use of GPL'd code in UserLinux in order to have businesses create proprietary applications that can not in turn be included into UserLinux because they will not be free?

    Sounds like an interesting one-sided ecosystem.

    If he took this commercial-friendly argument to its logical conclusion he would dump the GPL'd Linux from UserLinux in favour of BSD. But then it would not be much of a UserLinux, would it?

    • No, he would not. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      So, let me get this straight - he wants to discourage the use of GPL'd code in UserLinux in order to have businesses create proprietary applications that can not in turn be included into UserLinux because they will not be free?

      Sounds like an interesting one-sided ecosystem.

      If he took this commercial-friendly argument to its logical conclusion he would dump the GPL'd Linux from UserLinux in favour of BSD. But then it would not be much of a UserLinux, would it?

      The basic argument is that a GUI toolkit may

  • Bruce Perens: Theory of Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tacocat ( 527354 ) <`tallison1' `at' `twmi.rr.com'> on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:06PM (#7779652)

    According to the article he mentions that UserLinux is intended to be based upon Debian. The reason why is extremely important to understand:

    The overall viability of UserLinux will be based upon the size and quality of the ecosystem of solutions around it, both Free and proprietary. So, in order to get any Free Software into businesses, our Free system must promote the creation of a large collection of proprietary solutions that do not exist today. As we penetrate the enterprise, we will continue to move Free Software higher up the application stack, until these businesses make use of Free Software predominantly. But you need proprietary software to get in the door.

    We are looking at what is best described as an evolutionary process of development. This follows a more organic than Project Management path.

    In the beginning there was Minix and it was expensive and not free but it worked well enough. Following this was the development of a free replacement called Linux.

    Some time after that came Applixware, an Office Products Suite. It was expensive but it worked. Following this was StarOffice and now OpenOffice.

    Given these two, we have evolved the software industry to such a point that there is now a very adequate if not excellent free software which can provide us with:

    • A base Operating System: Linux
    • A very suitable browser: Mozilla
    • A very suitable Office environment: OpenOffice
    But before each of these could exist, there was a non-free proprietary variant. Not always the case: Xfree, Postgresql, vi, emacs, and so on. But they do exist.

    The point that is so important here to understand and except is that Open Source, Free, non-Proprietary software is getting really good all the time.

    Distributions themselves are following the same path. SuSE and RedHat cost money, but Debian and it's variants are getting better and gaining a larger percentage of users who consider these to be "good enough" to use every day.

    In order to effectively provide a "good enough" solution to the Businesses, Open Source communities have to provide all of their free software as easily as possible. But it is extremely important to make it possible for someone to develop a proprietary software solution to fill in the niches that Debian is missing today so that Free Software, as a whole, can move into an ever increasing circle of "good enough" for users.

    If there are any barriers of any kind to that entrance it will hurt the overall effectiveness of this process. Any questions or concerns, current or future, about the licensing of software development under Qt, MySQL or anything else, will only make it less attractive to a developer to invest in making a product for UnitedLinux only to have it completely fucked up by a bunch of whining lawyers.

    Personally, I'm rather surprised that he didn't select GNUstep as the desktop of choice. Long term, it might be the best of the three options mentioned.

    • Re:Bruce Perens: Theory of Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)

      by zangdesign ( 462534 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:47PM (#7779937) Journal
      You make a good point about GNUStep - by selecting it, you open up the work of Mac software as well. Some not-so-drastic changes to the code and a recompile later, you've got an x86 version of PPC application.

      Perhaps GNUSteppers should start THEIR own distro.

      Heck, with the licensing options, all the major desktops should have a distro. Let the market decide!

      I'm not kidding.

  • Is "proprietory-friendly license" so important ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pirhana ( 577758 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:22PM (#7779774)
    As someone who have read almost all the mails in the list so far, I think the decision to go with GNOME was taken in a BAD way atleast. First there was a lot of discussion about the technical merits of these 2 and later it was decided to go with GNOME based almost solely on "proprietory friendly" license of GTK. If that was the only criteria for selecting the softwares, then what is the purpose of discussion? its easy to compile a list softwares with the above license. Also, as far as I understand(someone correct me if I am wrong in this please) QT has been adopted by the ISVs far more than the GTK. It boasts of a customer base including IBM, Adobe , Samsung and many many other high profile companies. So if all these companies have found the technical mertis of QT(better documented APIs, more powerfull, architectural superiority etc.) more than the "proprietory unfriendly"[sic] nature of the license, then why the same logic does not apply to Userlinux? . The same goes with Epiphany also. It seems to be (not finalized though) decided that Epiphany would be the default browser. There was a lot of discussions about browser choice also. Mostly it was agreed that Mozilla firebird was the best choice . But then at the end Epiphany was chosen(?) based solely on the "better GNOME integration".Again why there needs to be a lot of discussion about the technical merits if at the end some criteria like "proprietory friendly" nature of the license and "Gnome integration" are going to be the sole criteria. Is these 2 factors so important to give such a huge weightage over technical merits and everything else ? After carefully reading all the mails also, I have not found a good answer for these concerns. Perhaps I am missing something. But anyway I wish all the best for Bruce and his effort.

  • Why doesn't someone ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by petabyte ( 238821 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:25PM (#7779797)
    get working on building the KDE add-on.

    I'm pretty much a gnome-only fellow; gnome 2.4 on this gentoo box and dropline gnome on my slackware laptop. That said, I still need qt and the kde-libs. I rarely use them (well, I really only use them for lyx and k3b as there isn't anything like k3b for gtk) but I still need them.

    Stop arguing some stupid holy war (I like gnome and I'm not moving and I have friends that swear by KDE and aren't moving). If United isn't going to take KDE, someone needs to build a dropline-ese KDE that will bold right on.

  • What I don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theantix ( 466036 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:31PM (#7779842) Journal
    I can understand the business decision to go with one DE over the others... this makes good sense. What I *don't* understand is why Perens refuses to include the KDE libs by default. Including the libs and a few choice applications to fill the gaps where kde apps outperform what gnome offers (k3b and others) would do a lot for improving the total package of UserLinux and keep some of the critics at bay.

    If I can put on my tinfoil hat for a second here, the best reason I can think of for not including the KDE libs is to stir up the traditional KDE/GNOME debate and get more coverage on slashdot and other sites. Trolling for media coverage, it's the wave of the future!

  • Think about users, not geeks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rueger ( 210566 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @12:39PM (#7779893) Homepage
    Lord, this arcane bickering seems pointless. From my reading Perens' goal is to develop a distro that "just works" for the average corporate user.

    I just wrapped up my semi-annual "download a linux distro and see if the damned thing will work" exercise, and once again I'm falling back on Win2K, which does everthing that I need, and does it with a minimum of BS.

    Over the last few years I've tried RedHat, Mandrake, and a half dozen other distros, on both bare machines and dual boot systems. In every case I hit the wall when trying to implement some simple or essential feature. Every time I found myself led into that arcane and recursive hell known as man pages and how-tos. (and mailing lists, and discussion groups and...)

    I'm good with hardware, and can make Windows do anything I need. I have managed to troubleshoot some exceedingly obscure problems in the past. Still, once again I've abandoned Linux because I can't afford to invest weeks of obscure research just to do day to day work.

    I really want to be rid of Microsoft products. I find them more irritating than useful, and surely don't like MS' business practices.

    I love OpenOffice and have pretty much abandoned MS Office. I like Mozilla, and use a wide variety of freeware and open source products.

    I would in a minute abandon MS Windows if it were practical, but to do that I need a distro that will do what Windows does:

    Find and configure all my hardware, set up internet access and networking to allow all of the computers on our system to share files, and easily allow others to use the printers attached to my PC, easily set up my two video cards and monitors, set up to sync my PalmPilot.

    And have decent looking fonts.

    So far every distro I have tried has blown at least two of these basic goals and has offered no easy way to achieve them.

    Again, I cannot afford to spend days or weeks tracking down the obscure solution to make something like HotSync work.

    It does not matter to me whether this happens with GNOME or KDE. If I can boot from CD and have all of these things come up working, I'll buy it.

    If including only GNOME allows Perens' the time to make a truly reliable installer, then I'm for it.

  • Anticommercial commercial distro (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChrisWong ( 17493 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @01:05PM (#7780050) Homepage
    It's funny that one would exclude the top C++ GUI toolkit for commercial development for the purpose of making the distribution friendly for commercial development.
    • It's funny that one would exclude the top C++ GUI toolkit for commercial development for the purpose of making the distribution friendly for commercial development.

      I'm pretty sure the top C++ GUI toolkit for commercial development in terms of statistics would be the Microsoft Foundation Classes, or the ATL (or a mix). It probably isn't Qt.

      You're also overlooking the efforts of the GTKmm team, which is made up of several people with many years of commercial development experience. All the reviews of GT

  • No Perl? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @04:22PM (#7781418) Homepage
    In the same section about choices where he lists GNOME as the choice over KDE, he also lists Python over Perl.

    If this means that all UserLinux-specific scripts ini the distribution will be written in Python, that's fine. If it means that Perl won't even be in the distribution, he's nuts.

    There are certain things that pretty much everyone assumes are available on Linux systems, and Perl is one of them.

    The business world already was offered Unix systems with one choice for everything (that's how most commercial Unix systems worked), and Linux is kicking their asses, and one of the reasons is that Linux includes all these alternatives.

    Picking one GUI for users is one thing, but for things that are used by programs rather than directly by users, a good Linux-for-business distribution should have them all.

  • MySQL vs. PostgreSQL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Sunday December 21, 2003 @08:12PM (#7782795)
    The Gnome and KDE toolkits are about equivalent, so the choice amounts to a coin flip, licensing issues aside.

    Of greater moment is the choice of database library. PostgreSQL is enormously more complete and standard-compliant than MySQL, and (for years, now) faster, and is committed to the more liberal license that Bruce has demanded. MySQL (like KDE) is straight GPL in release 4.x, and lacks many important enterprise features.

    Odd, isn't it, that we don't see flame wars over the database? Probably they will switch quietly to PostgreSQL once they get around to the matter, and nobody will make a fuss.

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