It's pointless (and ultimately counterproductive) for vendors to take sides in "support" of developer groups who don't need this kind of help. (Red Hat, VA Linux and Sun are behind GNOME, while SuSE, Caldera, MandrakeSoft, Corel, Siemens and Fujitsu are behind KDE.) There are too many similarities between this strategizing and what happened 20 years ago when the Unix world started to polarize in a similar way. Sun and AT&T advocated the Open Look desktop; IBM, HP and Digital (now Compaq) championed Motif.
Back then we also had PR engines masquerading as foundations and alliances. The end result was the CDE desktop compromise, which functions far more like Motif than Open Look but has failed to gain momentum despite a decade of trying. I have yet to hear from anyone who thinks the Unix dispute produced any technical innovation of widespread and lasting value. But it certainly produced its share of noise, and may have retarded Unix growth enough to give Microsoft's Windows NT an easier entry into Unix turf than it would otherwise have had.
Some claim that the KDE League and GNOME Foundation are different kinds of organizations, and to a certain cosmetic degree they are. The GNOME Foundation describes itself as a democratic board of developers and explains that the big companies are simply invited to participate as advisors. But let's not kid ourselves -- if the Foundation makes a decision that the GNOME community won't follow, grassroots developers will vote with their feet and choose other projects to work on. In other words, the important GNOME decisions are made by consensus of its army of volunteer developers, and the foundation has little role to play beyond the persuasive effects of board members' opinions.
For their part, the KDE League folk are up-front about the fact that theirs is just a PR play -- it's topic number one of their FAQ. Mind you, the KDE leadership has its own share of self-induced credibility problems. The very creation of the League is an indication that the forming of the GNOME Foundation affected KDE organizers far more than they first let on. The formation of the League also has, to their own detriment, diverted the public's attention away from the actual KDE software, notably the recent release of version 2.0.
One of the most noticeable differences between the current Linux desktop dispute and the old Unix wars is the number of fence-sitters this time around. Nobody was neutral in the Unix battle. This time significant names such as IBM, Compaq, TurboLinux, HP and Borland are trying to play Switzerland by putting their names behind both the GNOME and KDE efforts.
Such a play makes no sense; each camp seeks to make its project the definitive Linux desktop, and an organization that supports both would-be standards appears more ignorant than one that stays out of the fray. This divided support is akin to sending arms to both sides of a war; it may be a neutral action, but it intensifies the confrontation and makes coexistence that much harder to achieve. Vendors could have more effectively shown their support for free and open-source software by simply donating staff and resources without fanfare and without strings.
Fortunately, most developers on both sides don't appear to be getting caught up in this dispute. I can only hope that common sense will prevail and that this will be the last marketing salvo for a while, if not forever. Let's get back to the way the Linux world has always evaluated its options and its software -- on the merits. Just put the software out there and let implementors pick what best suits their needs.
Are you taking sides in the KDE-GNOME battle? Let me know in the TalkBack below.
