> Qt which was non free
It was GPL licenced. If you call that "non-free" that's downright Orwellian.
It was GPL licenced. If you call that "non-free" that's downright Orwellian.
It was already GPL for almost a decade when the described events happened.
The flamewars over this at the time were epic. Had Qt already been GPL'd, the chances of Gnome taking off would have been far smaller - though there were other differences as well, the GPL issue was by far the most prominent.
It wasn't. That was the point here. You do not know your hoitory well enough to comment.
I'm all for using the definitions correctly, but people can make mistakes and deserve to be answered gently.
The only related thing I can think of is the argument that permissive free software license lets people build proprietary software on top of the licensed work, but the argument is not surprising and it's still true. I also don't remember slavery being mentioned. That would be a bit much. Now I can't manage to link this matter of fact with the discussion, KDE and GNOME both being GPL software.
Besides, I hate this sentence. It is very wrong, or true for any OS, whichever you prefer, and I'm seeing it more and more often. This kind of falsehoods doesn't need to be spread like this. Linux just doesn't get in my way and it has just worked for how I've been using my computer for years. To the contrary, the desktop environment and tools it lets me use are very efficient for me.