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Again, I was speaking about Gnome's creation, which was first released in 1999, before Qt was freed, and started in 1997, 3 years before this and a few months after KDE's first release.

It's relevant to the reasons for the creation Gnome. Gnome was very specifically created before that and the whole ruckus over that was if anything one of the big drivers behind the GPL release of Qt.

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.

Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are "modern history" compared to the events we describe. Back then (way before those release) KDE was less free than Gnome.