SO WHERE IS THE COMMUNITY... haan !?

"" I thought that the majority of the KDE and GNOME developers were sponsored by either Red Hat or Novell? ""

Yes i believe they are, but the projects are independent in a large scale, and with agreed and respected large design guidelines, trying to follow standardization efforts and guidelines... and how hard it was to achieve the present 'status quo' (nasty that Gnome vs KDE war)!,... and how much it remains to be done?

If the battle goes hard for differentiation and interoperability, as Linspire CEO says that 'Linux is not Windows', meaning differentiation, which should clearly not be a decisive factor, and instead **is a dangerous illusion** considering the past BSDs and 'Open' initiative failures with terrible consequences for Unix adoption, when everyone started to seek differentiation instead of standards, and because of past records of M$ which have only allowed interoperability to the point they please... messing APIs, changing protocols without notice, 'bubby' trapping code... and their immense FUD machine always blaming the other part!

So this differentiation can easily be extrapolated in spirit to Linspire is neither Suse or RH or Mandriva or Ubuntu... or Sabayon or PCLinuxOS or Linux XP... or any other way around, and we can easily expect much more pressure for *those sponsored or payed developers* to follow internal guidelines instead of the common standardization efforts.

In servers the issue is transparent because differentiation is based mostly on cleanness of code and support quality, and is not feature intense or have any visual impact, and so standards hold.

On the desktop all hell breaks loose for standards.

**Funny that Beryl+compiz will manage to integrate but AiXGL and XGL dont !!?** ,... and why isn't NX server integrated in the Xorg project, considering that X is such a good network protocol ?

... PERHAPS SMALLER INSTITUTIONS (guys!) MANAGE TO MOVE FASTER, INTER-OPERATE BETTER AND FASTER, AND INNOVATE FASTER THAN BIG CORPORATIONS!...

So M$ plays a nice guy, offers interoperability - which they should guaranty anyway by international regulatory bodies and courts of law orders - promoting heavily with it that differentiation trump card, for prospects of adoption and financial gains... but what that they are trying to achieve is to torpedo Linux standards, specially on the Desktop.

IMO so far, the best interoperability effort with M$ was ODF. It made them scared since a long time and willing to go along with it. That is the way to go, because *those that don't learn the teachings of history are doomed to repeat the same mistakes themselfs*.

... so why cant Linux learn from Unix history... and be a dominant desktop powerhouse instead ?

Actually, you're wrong, about KDE at least. The large majority of KDE developers are volunteers
working on KDE their spare time. Which, of course, makes the achievement of KDE even more
amazing.