Microsoft and Apple have the incentive of selling to billion-user markets. The open source community, on average, appears to have demonstrated a lack of interest in opening up the user-base further (and expecting that user-base to just roll their own solution creates multiple catch-22 and tragedy of the commons problems).
Why one of the commercial open-source vendors hasn't taken this on as a core challenge, I do not know.
Technically true, but for practical purposes IBus is the standard. That's what Fedora and Ubuntu use out of the box. Firefox beta telemetry shows about 89% IBus vs. 11% FCITX.
> My biggest problem with IMEs in free software land is that we've had groups like Gnome lean on IME developers and push through their vision of how it should work -- even though the people pushing their vision don't use IMEs. I ended up migrating to FCITX just because it was the last hold out not to cave to pressure.
What wrong thing did the Gnome folks push for?
Some things evolved, some things didn't. O hi X Windows!
They are all very nearly the same age.
Windows 1.0 was fairly primitive, but Windows 2.0 supported overlapping windows (!) in 1987, coincidentally the year that X11 was released.
My biggest problem with IMEs in free software land is that we've had groups like Gnome lean on IME developers and push through their vision of how it should work -- even though the people pushing their vision don't use IMEs. I ended up migrating to FCITX just because it was the last hold out not to cave to pressure.