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A comment on RHEL is deprecating KDE. Parent comment

Re:RHEL is deprecating KDE by int_19h on Friday November 02, 2018 @08:43PM (#18367949)
Ubuntu came long after the "funny licensing thing" - Qt was licensed under GPL for the first time in v2.2, which was in 2000. So the switch happened in KDE 2.x timeframe. And then KDE 3.x (which was arguably the pinnacle of the "classic" KDE series - the one that was competing against Gnome 2.x) was GPL from the get go, and that was 2002. The initial release of Ubuntu was in 2004.
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Re:RHEL is deprecating KDE by chomp on Friday November 02, 2018 @09:53PM (#18368188)
You're right. Ubuntu warty shipped with libqt3. However if you remember back when, there was still an axe hanging over the KDE team in the form of Trolltech. The fear was that if Qt free stopped existing one day (or if Trolltech wanted to stop licensing as GPL), the community would be up a creek.

The clarifying agreement: (https://dot.kde.org/2004/07/24/trolltech-and-kde-free-qt-fou...) finally fixed things in a way to where if Trolltech got bought out or stopped releasing the free version, it would immediately become BSD licensed. This agreement still exists to day as far as I know.

As far as I remember discussions going back then, people did not trust Trolltech much, and knew the license situation was "weird" - even after the GPL licensing. I don't have anything I can cite specifically, only old discussions that I vaguely remember.

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Re:RHEL is deprecating KDE by int_19h on Saturday November 03, 2018 @02:01AM (#18368955)
I don't remember licensing being an issue in 2002, when I first started seriously experimenting with desktop Linux. Qt being dual-licensed under GPL was generally seen as good enough, since it meant that KDE could fork it if they needed to. There were several major distros running KDE 3.x out of the box - notably, SuSE and Mandrake.

I think Ubuntu went with Gnome because back then it was perceived as the less configurable and flashy, but also less confusing of the two. KDE 3 was for those who wanted to configure everything - the "power user" crowd. Gnome 2 was more spartan (and became more so over time - I remember the outcry when they replaced the path textbox with breadcrumbs!), but mostly "just worked" in ways that people coming from Windows or OS X could readily understand. And Ubuntu was supposed to be the Linux distro for casual users...

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