The word with Mark Shuttleworth

I ran across (with the help of slashdot 🙂 this interview with Mr.
Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, and found it very interesting. It’s a good
insight into how a commercial entity is successfully, or hopefully
successful, working with the open source community to make things
better. I’ve complained a lot here about the Linux desktop experience
and Mark feels the pain and is trying to do something about it.

A couple of interesting points he brings up. One is on the Gnome/GTK
versus KDE/Qt battle that’s been going on for years, and for years too
long IMHO. And he mentions the point that I think is really underlying
the issue and that’s licensing. GTK is popular because it’s LGPL which
allows for software using it to pick their own license. Qt is
technically and aesthetically better, but sorry, unless it’s
commercially friendly in a free form, it’s going to lose the battle.
And apparently it is losing from what is stated in the article.

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