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."
