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We certainly would. KDE (the Kool Desktop Environment) was created as a free clone of CDE[0]. Then GNOME was started because of licensing problems with Qt[1].
by senko 4y ago
We certainly would.
KDE (the Kool Desktop Environment) was created as a free clone of CDE[0]. Then GNOME was started because of licensing problems with Qt[1].
Had CDE and Motif been open sourced under a suitable license then, it is likely there would have been a single major desktop environment effort, at least in the start.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Origins
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1
- anthk 4y agoFirst XFCE releases were not free as in freedom, but free, and they were literal CDE copycats made in XForms. Then XFCE 4.2 happened, they switched to GTK2 and killed XFFM for thunar in some release. XFFM was much better than Thunar.