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."
