Competition And Cooperation - An Honest Look At The Dynamics Between The KDE And GNOME Communities

Speaker: John (J5) Palmieri

The story behind the two leading Free Desktop desktop environments is so rich it could spawn any number of soap opera scripts. GNOME was started out of the fires of a license debate which was engulfing KDE at the time. From the start KDE and GNOME were bitter enemies separated by a thin ideological line. Even years after the license issues were worked out a heavy animosity still lingered between the communities and someone always found lines to draw between the two. Not all of this was bad though. Through intense competition and one-upmanship both projects evolved at a rapid pace. And then the communities matured a bit. Freedesktop.org was started and a new era of technology sharing and cooperation started to happen. Possibilities loomed and all of a sudden projects started to spring up with the express purpose of unifying bits and pieces of the KDE and GNOME infrastructure. The question is, is this what we really want?

This talk will go through the history of KDE and GNOME and attempt to answer that question. It will point out where cooperation has worked beyond our wildest dreams and where it has become a hindrance. It will also attempt to show competition as both a driver and dead end on the road to broader acceptance of the Free Desktop.

John (J5) Palmieri

John Palmieri is a GNOME developer who works on Red Hat's Desktop Team. He is also one of the GNOME representatives to the LSB and the maintainer of freedesktop.org's D-Bus project. His experience working on cross desktop projects and de facto standards gives him a birds eye view of the interactions between the KDE and GNOME communities and where they can improve to the advantage of both projects.

Media

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