InfoWorld: Gnome gets Mono

According to this column, Miguel de Icaza is dangerously ignorant of elements of .NET, which he's using to shore up some inherent weaknesses in GNOME, which would be a waste of energy to clean up. The solution: it's too late for GNOME, but its developers should have moved to KDE after Qt became GPL'd:

"The real shame is that Gnome once had a great reason to exist, but cleaning it up now seems like a waste of energy. GNOME was born because a terrific Linux desktop called KDE looked as though it would help Linux give Windows a run for its money. Many open-source developers protested that KDE was based on the C++ Qt graphical toolkit because Qt was not true open source at first.

Many of the Gnome developers didn't know or like the C++ programming language, so they weren't motivated to create a free version of Qt. Instead, they started a whole new desktop environment, but not from a well-architected foundation. They began with a network object model. Then they whipped up a graphical toolkit from a graphics program called Gimp. They adapted an existing window manager to fit the desktop. (First it was Enlightenment; now it's Sawfish.) After that, so many people approached Gnome from so many angles that it grew appendages on every surface. It had to in order to support everyone's favorite language. De Icaza first tried to rein in the chaos with something called Bonobo, and now he's hawking Mono as the solution."

Complete Story

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