Ubuntu and the price of Unity

“Disagreements about the shape and form of the free software
interface, and issues around the politics of licensing are not new.
GNOME itself came into existence in the late 90s when problems were
identified with the licensing of the Qt toolkit used by KDE, which
was the first truly integrated desktop environment for Linux.

“Qt was open source in the sense that the code was visible, but
the license wasn’t approved or compatible with the GPL. Since
nearly all KDE applications were written under the GPL, this meant
that the applications were in violation of their own licences.

“Miguel de Icaza, at that time a rising star of the free
software movement and co-creator, with Federico Mena, of the GNOME
project, expressed the mixed feelings of many users and developers.
‘KDE was an inspirational project,’ he told Linux Journal, ‘but at
the time, the Qt toolkit on which KDE was built was a proprietary
toolkit.'”

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