The Impact of Licensing on Desktop Environments

The discussion delves into how the licensing of the Qt toolkit influenced the rise of the GTK framework and the GNOME desktop environment. Originally, Qt was not released under an open-source license, leading developers to create Gtk and subsequently GNOME due to concerns over potential changes in Qt's licensing. This fork allowed the GNOME project to flourish and become a standard in many Linux distributions, primarily because developers were wary of the proprietary optimizations that could arise from the Qt license. The conversation suggests that if Qt had a friendlier licensing framework, KDE might have dominated the desktop space, but it also implies that this could have limited innovation by encouraging toolkits duplication.