“Many of us woke up this morning and read Richard Stallman’s
editorial on Linux Today with a growing sense of incredulity. At
first, some of us thought it was a joke — it didn’t make any
logical sense, after all. But after it sunk in that Stallman was
doing yet another snowjob on KDE, a lot of our incredulity turned
to anger. If you want the official KDE position on his editorial,
go here. But if you want to know how a few KDE developers feel,
read on.”
“Stallman has been a longtime detractor of the KDE Project. So
much so, that his Free Software Foundation helped start a project
whose only purpose was to be an “anti-KDE” — GNOME. The GNOME
developers themselves have gotten past all that and have created
something that stands on its own merits. Stallman, though, seems to
still be stuck in the past with his “KDE is bad, use GNOME to
punish them” mantra.”
“Basically, Stallman saw that with Qt under the GPL, all of his
licensing problems went away. Ergo, there was nothing for him to
fall back on anymore. So he comes up with this notion that we have
to beg forgiveness of our copyright holders or we will be in
violation of the GPL forever.”
“Don’t get us wrong; we could understand and accept that
Stallman would still push GNOME over KDE — it is under the GNU
umbrella after all. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is inventing
special rules after the fact just to bash KDE. This is hardly fair
play.“