From: Benjamin Meyer < ben _+_+_+_ at _+_+_+_ meyerhome.net >
To: i _+_+_+_ at _+_+_+_ drunkenbatman.com
(remove the _+_+_+_'s)
Subject: KDE and OSX

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I recently read your OSX article and one of the two guys working on the KDE 
port I thought I might comment on this quote of yours:

"KDE sees something on the wall with this. Why, exactly, do you think KDE is 
working so hard to port their frameworks over to OSX? Do you think they have 
a completely altruistic reason (well, not saying they're doing it for a bad 
reason) for KOffice running on OSX?"


Breaking it down:

"Why, exactly, do you think KDE is working so hard to port their frameworks 
over to OSX?"

I wouldn't exactly call it "so hard"  For me I hack on KDE whenever I get the 
spare chance.  I love technology and when the opportunity came last fall to 
get a new laptop for work I pulled in a few favors and got them to get me an 
OSX laptop.  I can still do all my office work so they said ok.  Now seeing 
how TrollTech recently made a GPL'd release of Qt and KDE had already been 
ported to X11 OSX via Fink it doesn't take a genius to go the extra work and 
make the native port.  Probably 80% of the actual work I have done on the 
project was done over Christmas break same goes for the other Benjamin.  So I 
would hardly call our efforts a full time team effort.  I get around to it 
maybe once every other week and I am mostly just working on little X11 fixes 
at this stage of the game, hardly full scale integration.

"Do you think they have a completely altruistic reason (well, not saying 
they're doing it for a bad reason) for KOffice running on OSX?"

Honestly yes.  For me porting KDE was done for the same reason that I got the 
Apple laptop in the first place.  I am curious about technology and wanted to 
learn more about OS X first hand.  Porting KDE gave me that opportunity.  If 
at the same time I gave a really cool API to ton's of developers and several 
hundred apps including an Office Suite to users at the same time... well that 
was cool too.

Just like I believe that developers should learn a new language every six 
months developers should never let themselves be boxed in.  They should 
always seek out the alternative no matter what they might have to see what 
they have to offer.  Maybe it is junk, but even amongst junk there are good 
ideas that just need the right platform.

If you have any questions about this feel free to ask.

- -Benjamin Meyer

P.S.  A few corrections: You don't pay KDE, all of KDE's libraries are 
licensed under the LGPL.  If you use Qt's stuff you have to pay TrollTech.

P.P.S.  I wouldn't count KDE out just yet in the Gnome vs KDE war.

1)  As a developer I have tried both and KDE is and always has been easier to 
develop for.    Now if you are someone who is tossing together a little app 
that you are going to put online for free Free is GPL or LGPL so it is really 
about what is easier to develop for.

2) If you are a commercial company you want to pay someone for support.  The 
people I work for do/did/always will.  Doesn't matter that I have only used 
it once and it cost less then the extra computer I got last week they 
practicly demand it and for some things (using Debian on a server) I have to 
fight them to let me not pay someone for the OS.

3) Just like on OSX Linux is rapidly realizing the KDE / Gnome will never go 
away and there is a whole lot of work on standardizing the desktop so that in 
the future java, qt, gtk, motif, and every other toolkit out there will look 
and behave the same on the desktop.  So in five years KDE and gnome will 
probably still be around, but users wont know because they will look the same 
to them.  If Apple is going to do something it must do it quickly or else 
Linux is going to solve its own problems on its own.  Just last week I 
communicated with a Gnome developer on yet another way to have commonality.

- -- 
Public Key: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/public_key.asc
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