“The peculiar and ambiguous events of the day were temporarily
swept aside late yesterday afternoon when I was party to very
pleasant phone interviews with Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman of
Helix Code, which hopes to become a successful business by
providing value-added services for Gnome users. (A news story on
what they had to say about their project will appear here soon.)
And while they did not, of course, endorse KDE, the sense I came
away with was that there’s no fundamental dislike of the rival
project. In fact, Miguel says he regrets some of the highly
publicized things he’s said in the past about KDE.”
“‘I wouldn’t say that there are any hard feelings,’ he said.
‘There has always been a competition factor; I personally made a
couple of mistakes a few years ago, but all in all, I think we have
very good relations with the KDE people. There are some very nice
people working with KDE, for instance Kalle Dalheimer, a great guy.
I haven’t had a lot of contact with most of the KDE team, but the
ones I’ve spoken to are pretty nice people.'”
“‘What really matters is the users, the developers, the code,’
said Nat. ‘Of course, the license is important. I think what
matters is what actually happens, and not what the big guns are
saying at any given point.’
“‘To me there’s no Gnome-KDE war to speak of. This is not a
Larry Ellison-Bill Gates thing.'”