[clug] KDE Desktop

[George at Clug]

Apologies to anyone who may not appreciate how my emails look.


In my defense, I will just say, they look quite a bit different
between what I send and what arrives back in my inbox.


Thanks,

George.



On Saturday, 01-06-2019 at 16:10 George at Clug via linux wrote:


Hi,


Who has tried KDE Desktop recently?


Today I installed Debian Buster KDE Desktop, and was amazed at how
much it has been updated since I installed it from other Distros.


The KDE GUI is menu driven, and thus I actually quite liked the new
look and feel. 



Very polished and stylish looking.


If anyone has comments, I would be interested in reading.


I would ask, is the KDE Desktop well supported?  And are there still
any issues with ownership of Qt ?  I guess FOSS purists would have
issue (e.g. Richard Stallman).



https://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/01/13/new-agreement-with-the-kde-free-qt-foundation/
https://www.qt.io/faq/


1.1. Who actually owns and controls Qt?
Qt trademarks and most of the copyrights are fully owned and
controlled by The Qt Company. The development work for Qt toolkit is
done through the open source governed Qt project by The Qt Company
R&D and external Qt contributors. The Qt project is an open
ecosystem and infrastructure for developers and companies to
contribute to Qt. All external contributions are licensed to the Qt
company allowing re-licensing under both open source and commercial
terms.
The Qt Company has a binding agreement with KDE Free Qt Foundation to
ensure the availability of Qt under certain open source licenses for
desktop and mobile platforms. The open source community and
availability of Qt is an extremely important part of the whole value
proposition of Qt, and something The Qt Company wants to commit to and
drive forward.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE
In the beginning Matthias Ettrich chose to use Trolltech’s [1] Qt
framework for the KDE project. Other programmers quickly started
developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, a few applications
were being released. On 12 July 1998 the first version of the desktop
environment, called KDE 1.0, was released. The original GPL [2]
licensed version of this toolkit only existed for platforms which used
the X11 [3] display server, but with the release of Qt 4, LGPL [4]
licensed versions are available for more platforms. This allowed KDE
software based on Qt 4 or newer versions to theoretically be
distributed to Microsoft Windows and OS X.





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Plasma_Workspaces
KDE Frameworks [5] provide more than 70 free and open-source libraries
built on top of Qt [6]. They are the foundation for KDE Plasma and
most of the KDE applications, but can be part of any project that
would like to make use of one or more of its modules. 


https://kde.org/announcements/rmsresponse.php

In a recent editorial [7] on Linux Today, Richard Stallman claimed
that KDE is still in violation of the GPL even though Qt is now
covered under the GPL and all KDE code is compatible with the GPL. His
rather absurd reasoning is that since KDE once violated the GPL, it
will always be in violation unless the individual copyright holders
"grant forgiveness."  We maintain, as always, that there are no
licensing problems with KDE. Here's why: 



All code in KDE is copyrighted and covered under a free software
(Open Source) license. The vast majority of the code was written
explicitely for KDE. A few bits were written elsewhere and
incorporated into KDE. 





















Links:
------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolltech
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Frameworks
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)
[7]
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-09-05-001-21-OP-LF-KE
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