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The Unity license changes are making me personally feel a whole lot better about fighting the GTK vs Qt battle all those years ago..

@blandford ??? Relevance? Yes, Unity turned proprietary, but what it does have to have with Gtk (I know, Qt used to be proprietary)?

@mcepl This is the type of thing that many of us were warning against back then. For a for-profit company, a proprietary technology that is foundational to an ecosystem is too tempting to ignore. Eventually, Enshitiffication comes for it all. For all its faults, GTK's license and governance has proven resilient to that.

@blandford And fortunately Qt seems to be still OK as well.

@mcepl @blandford It's not at all clear that Qt would be available under its current license if GTK didn't exist.

They went through a number of "not quite Open Source" licenses before settling on the current licensing. It's not clear they would have gone all the way if there weren't alternatives.

@jamesh @mcepl @blandford You don't need to be under a company to through "enshittification". The number of external stakeholders that increasingly have problems with GTK and have been pivoting away from it has demonstrated that there are problems with GTK today too.

The real issue is that when a group of people get comfortable with their dominance, they stop caring about their stakeholders. Even in tiny ponds like Linux desktop GUI toolkits.

Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

@jamesh @mcepl @blandford Qt is far less susceptible to this because they have the ultimate poison pill underpinning the project: forced relicensing to a permissive license (BSD-2-Clause, IIRC).

GTK has no such poison pill forcing them to serve the larger community. It shows.

@Conan_Kudo @mcepl @blandford I see that poison pill agreement as one of Trolltech's first experiments with not-quite-open-source.

Qt was not available under the LGPL back then: the status-quo license was the Qt Free Edition license, which you can read here: invent.kde.org/historical/qt1/. Far fewer people could use this license than the current Qt Open Source edition.

If Qt was the dominant toolkit for Linux desktops and was still under that license, then all most Open Source desktop apps on Linux would be dependent on the commercial license. That's the kind of lock in that led Unity to try this royalty change.

@jamesh @mcepl @blandford Sure. But it was nipped in the bud, and they've grown to embrace open source in a way that few corporate-driven open source products do.

Meanwhile, GTK has always been under the LGPL, but the community around that has been... contentious, to put it mildly.

There are plenty of examples on the internet, even in the GNOME GitLab of this.

Open Source alone does not protect you from toxic people. Caring about the community and stakeholders does.

@Conan_Kudo @jamesh @mcepl

1) That "nipped in the bud" is what I'm referring to. It didn't just happen — it took a lot of hard work by a many people for a half-decade to provide an alternative in order to force TT's hand. I'm glad we now have two great Free Software toolkits to choose from, but it almost wasn't that way.

2) The GTK developers get a tremendous amount of vitriol and precious little help, all for putting out a great FOSS toolkit. Please take your axe and grind it elsewhere.

@blandford @Conan_Kudo @jamesh

> Please take your axe and grind it elsewhere.

I did, together with my code.

@brian @blandford @jamesh @mcepl > The GTK developers get a tremendous amount of vitriol and precious little help, all for putting out a great FOSS toolkit. Please take your axe and grind it elsewhere.

I get this. My "axe to grind" is the excuses I get when I've reported people for poor conduct. We've had people like that in KDE too, and they're a detriment to the projects they're part of. For the most part, they've been excised from the main KDE projects. We're better for it.

@brian @blandford @jamesh @mcepl The GNOME folks have their vision, I get it. And there are a number of great people in the GNOME community. But people really forget that "a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch". And some of these folks have outsized impact and importance, which makes it much harder to deal with.

It's easier to ignore when other people defend you from bad actors. It's not when everyone else is silent.

@Conan_Kudo @blandford @jamesh @mcepl I haven't really noticed any more 'bad apples' in GNOME than in other similar projects.

@brian @blandford @jamesh @mcepl I suspect I experience it more because of my work on Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE.