Linux Journal: Inteview with Miguel De Icaza

“AD: Could tell us about the idea behind
creating GNOME?

“MdI: We wanted to make Linux succeed on the
desktop. It was and is fairly successful as a server platform, and
it really shines there. But, we did not want to see free software
limited to the server market. We wanted end users to be able to get
this system and have the same freedoms and potential that those
using Linux for a server operating system were enjoying.

“KDE was an inspirational project, 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. Part of the
background to create free software, and ensuring that things were
fully free, came from my involvement with Linux on the SPARC, which
I helped develop. Around that time the x86 was not very fast, and
we were running Linux/SPARC, Linux/ALPHA and Linux/SGI. But the
downside was that proprietary applications coming out for Linux on
the x86 just did not run on our higher end computers. And there was
not much that could be done about it, as we did not have the source
code…”

Complete
Story