Healthcheck - Mono: Too much monkey business

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"KDE was the original custom desktop environment for Linux, give or take a dozen or three window managers. As of 1998, the K(ool) Desktop Environment was the first comprehensive integrated desktop environment for Linux, but KDE had a problem. It was based on the framework of Trolltech's Qt libraries which weren't available under a free software license.

""KDE was an inspirational project," de Icaza later recounted, "but at the time, the Qt toolkit on which KDE was built was a proprietary toolkit. It was a disgrace that everyone in the community had worked so hard to create a fully open-source [desktop] (a legacy to all humanity) that we would give up in the end because of the lack of a free toolkit. So GNOME was started to make sure that we had a fully free system, and it was based on the most advanced C toolkit available at the time: the toolkit built by Peter Mathis and Spencer Kimball for their most excellent GIMP imaging software.""

Complete Story

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