Thanks to Casey for
this link.
“Personally, I believe that KDE 1.1 is a modestly extensible,
quick, and stable environment, and I think you’ll see from this
review that KDE is putting a face on Linux that’s bridging the gap
between so-called established, “easy to use” OSes–like Windows and
the MacOS–and Linux, the mythically evil, CLI-based realm of pain
and suffering.”
“There are other issues that bear mentioning, too. Distributed
under the GNU General Public License, KDE is free for the taking,
so long as the taking is compliant with the copyleft, of course.
However, not all is happy in the world of “I’ll decide what the
word free means” Linux. KDE was built with, and requires, ‘Qt’ (KDE
1.1 requires Qt 1.42), a toolkit that some users find suspicious on
account of its “commercialability.” The fear had been that someday
the developers of Qt would use their “ambiguous” license as a long
arm into your pockets. Detractors sometimes focus on KDE’s decision
not to use LGPL’d (ostensibly “free”) libraries while supporters
have argued that Qt is just as functionally “free” and was a better
choice, anyhow.”