Troll Tech AS has announced that the Free Edition of its flagship product Qt, a toolkit for building graphical user interfaces, will be released under a special open source license called the QPL. This announcement, endorsed by such open source luminaries as Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond and Caldera Systems Inc president and CEO Ransom Love, effectively heals a longstanding rift in the Linux community. Qt is used in the K Desktop Environment (KDE), a graphical user interface for Linux. Motivated partly by the fact that Qt was not, until today, technically open-source software, one group of Linux developers initiated a separate GUI project for the operating system. This one, they said, would use only free software. This project was dubbed the GNU Network Object Model Environment, or GNOME. KDE is far closer to realizing its ambitions than second-starter GNOME, but insiders say GNOME has attempted much more ambitious innovations – in particular, integration of applications through a CORBA bus. With Qt now recognized as free software by the community’s leaders, one GNOME developer, Greg Hayes, announced that he was giving up on GNOME to go back to KDE. He was, however, almost the only GNOME developer to do so. The rest seem determined to persevere. The consensus on the Gnome mailing list, Slashdot and in the Linux Weekly News appears to be that Linux is big enough to support both projects. Indeed, some say that if the GNOME and KDE developers can work together on interoperability, a choice of competing GUIs could be the best of all possible outcomes. รก
