In creating dbus, I talked to a bunch of developers at KDE, specifically those who worked on Qt and DCOP, about their requirements. Then I met the requirements they said I had to meet for them to use dbus. I did the same for developers at GNOME. Because dbus met the requirements that the actual decision-making developers had, and allowed them to do useful things, it was adopted.

There was no mechanism to strongarm anybody into anything. KDE and GNOME devs told many ideas and many people to take a hike over the years. dbus was simply a matter of figuring out what those developers wanted and focusing on solving the actual problem, rather than hypothetical or philosophical problems.

When dbus was adopted, remember, people had already been down many roads; ad hoc IPC mechanisms, ad hoc communication through files and timestamps, hacks over X11 protocol, DCOP, multiple implementations of CORBA, SOAP, ICE (the old X-associated one), etc. People had wrestled with this problem space a lot and they had some pretty developed ideas about how to do things ideally. dbus was about coalescing those ideas into running code, and that was successful and stuck for a decade-plus now.

People sometimes have a "wtf" reaction coming from Internet protocols or kernel concerns, and while there are some wtf-worthy details in any piece of software, lots of the time people just don't understand the problem. Just as GNOME and KDE both took years to understand it and flailed around with all those protocols that didn't work out well.

The chronology I remember is a bit different (GNOME needed a replacement for CORBA and came up with DBUS; KDE already had DCOP; then Freedesktop happened, with big players pushing to reduce mismatches so that they could ship both environments with less hassle; and KDE scored some and GNOME scored some (more), with DBUS being one of them), but I was just a random observer so I might have got it wrong.

Still, it's a fact that DCOP back then felt much nicer and more humane (I wouldn't know about speed). I haven't used Linux in a while so I honestly don't know now.

i’m usually reading usernames after reading the posts and voting, and i caught myself upvoting every single post of you and nothing else.

you seem to do it right: most level-headed, most informative. thanks.

That seems to be the story of freedesktop.org in total.

It was, iirc, supposed to be a place for KDE and Gnome to hammer out some cooperative issues, so that programs related to each project would coexist better.

These days it seems like Gnome (or maybe i should say Red Hat?) is running the place, with KDE doing its own thing and glancing over the fence from time to time.

i really don't see how you're getting that impression. We've seen cooperation on shared menus, mime types, dbus, and wayland (among others).