Posted by: Per Abrahamsen
on January 07, 2004 12:46 AM
I'd be very surprised if such a strategic move as choice of desktop was done by engineers.
If I was a manager at Sun my requirements to a desktop would be 1) third party developers should be able to develop applications with no royality or license restrictions, 2) development should not be controled by a third party (Sun should at least be able to fork as a last resort), and 3) there should be a momentum behind the desktop.
KDE would be an option, but it would require that Sun negotiated a permanent license With Troll Tech that a) covered all their users (i.e. allowed royalty free development and distribution of proprietary KDE application for Sun machines) and b) allowed Sun to fork Qt under this license. Such a license could probably be negotiated, but it would be exepensive both in money and time.
For Gnome these strategic problems were non-existent, so it was chosen even though it might have been technically inferior at the time.
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Technical reasons
Posted by: Per Abrahamsen on January 07, 2004 12:46 AMIf I was a manager at Sun my requirements to a desktop would be 1) third party developers should be able to develop applications with no royality or license restrictions, 2) development should not be controled by a third party (Sun should at least be able to fork as a last resort), and 3) there should be a momentum behind the desktop.
KDE would be an option, but it would require that Sun negotiated a permanent license With Troll Tech that a) covered all their users (i.e. allowed royalty free development and distribution of proprietary KDE application for Sun machines) and b) allowed Sun to fork Qt under this license. Such a license could probably be negotiated, but it would be exepensive both in money and time.
For Gnome these strategic problems were non-existent, so it was chosen even though it might have been technically inferior at the time.
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