Huh? KDE has had that for ages

Posted Aug 22, 2002 9:19 UTC (Thu) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

Note that the HIG was not sponsored by any companies, though some Sun dudes worked on it a lot (thanks Calum and Nils!). They're members of our community however, not "Sun drones". Ximian, to my knowledge, contributed very little to the HIG.

This is a community work.

- Jeff Waugh

Posted Aug 23, 2002 3:03 UTC (Fri) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

Flames from the gnomes about NIH are really not needed. Let's talk about "Harmony".

OK, let's talk about Harmony. For those of you young 'uns, Harmony was a project to reimplement the Qt graphics toolkit from scratch, using an Open Source license (I think GPL, but it has been awhile). The TrollTech Qt library was, at the time, not Open Source, and this caused major problems for many people around the world, since it meant that KDE, which has always been licensed under the GPL yet linked with the non-free Qt library, was actually illegal to distribute. Accordingly, many who would otherwise have loved to distribute KDE felt they could not do so without mocking the GPL and its principles. (Violating the GPL because "the software is basically free anyway" is not so different from violating the Microsoft EULA because "warez are basically free anyway".)

Harmony was intended to replace Qt so that KDE could be legally distributed. TrollTech refused to relicense Qt with a GPL-compatible license (not that they had any obligation to do so!) and the KDE folks refused to add a clause to the KDE license explicitly allowing it to be linked with non-free libraries, or Qt in particular.

The Harmony project was never completed, mostly because TrollTech eventually re-released Qt under the GPL (dual-licensed with their own license terms) so the whole issue went away, leaving a lot of relieved users and a faint sour taste in the mouth.

But before that happened, the Free Software Foundation helped found a competing desktop environment based entirely on free software, so that KDE, which was not even legal to distribute, would not be the only alternative for people seeking a Pee Cee experience on Unix. It was and is called GNOME, and the rest is more or less history in the making.

So tell me again, how were either Harmony or GNOME were NIH projects? Both were founded to fill the need for a desktop based entirely on free software. To ignore that point is revisionist. You may or may not believe it was OK for the KDE team to release software whose license prohibited its redistribution, but the competing projects were originally about free software, not NIH.