Shawn Gordon, whose company is one of the more aggressive
purveyors of desktop software in the Linux/Open Source space,
answers a slew of questions from GUI-Lords.org. Among the topics:
why he chose KDE over GNOME as a development platform, how he plans
to compete with proprietary offerings, and why theKompany.com uses
both Open Source and proprietary licenses.
"Q. Why do you think KDE is superior to GNOME for the
desktop?"
"A. The OO framework just makes a lot more sense for a desktop.
Qt is an extremely efficient framework and is well documented.
Having a commercial company like Trolltech who has a vested
interest in the quality of Qt, means that Qt is always going to be
good. In this regard you see a reversal of the GNOME situation
where there is a single source that can be gone too and questioned.
GDK/GTK/GTK+/GTKetc are just out there with no real responsibility.
I don't really understand the decisions of companies like Eazel and
Sun to go with GNOME, from a technical perspective it just doesn't
make sense, it only makes sense if they really want to manipulate
the underlying structure significantly."
"I don't want to be seen as disparaging all the hard working
programmers who have spent their time on GNOME, they have certainly
done some good work and have good intentions, and lord knows C++
isn't my personal strong suit, but our objective opinion coming
into this was KDE was going to work better for us."
