Great, I'll bite.
Tinku Sampath wrote:
What is happening every where?. Are you coming to my point?.
No, not really. Just what is your point?
The fight continues and have reached at a stage that must be seriously considered by every member of the Free Software community. I have a doubt. If GNOME is not great enough ( I am extensive KDE user from the beginning... No doubt in it... I tried GNOME at each of its release.. But i am not satisfied a little bit about it in considering as my desktop... I can't see any of my friends using GNOME as their desktop...
And I've been using free OSs for just over 10 years now and I haven't used KDE. So what is your point? If you are a newbie (as you say you are), how "extensive" of a KDE user could you be? How many releases of GNOME could you have tried?
I can see a few other people who are newbie to GNU/Linux using GNOME since most of the beginners start with Fedora and go for a personal desktop installation where the Red Hat guys continues to deselect KDE from their install section as default... Fact that, most of them don't know there is a feature rich polished alternate desktop named KDE ...), then why it can't be improved?. I don't know whether you know this fact. The birth of Mandrakelinux ( now Mandriva Linux) is a result of this war which started long ago when Red Hat removed KDE from their distribution supporting only GNOME. But after the popularity of Mandrakelinux, Red Hat was pressurised to include KDE with their distro but still GNOME as default. Even nowadays Red Hat is showing their excessive discrimination towards KDE. Most people ( including me ) are away from Fedora due to this attitude. Is GNOME is preferred since GTK is purely under GNU GPL?
(Firstly, gtk+ is licensed under LGPL and not GPL. But belabouring that point will be counter the argument I am trying to make, so I will leave it at that.)
OK, now let me restate your story from the point of view of someone who has been around since before GNOME, or even usable X on normal hardware. I am sure older people than me can jump in with their anecdotes, but for now, bear with me.
Contrary to many people's opinion on this mailing list, RedHat did and does not release its OSs with non-free software. As you've noted (from your Tux magazine article, or whatever), QT was once non-free. Which means your beloved KDE was once entirely dependent on non-free software. If Trolltech dies, KDE dies. If Trolltech charges for QT, KDE dies. You get the idea.
Distribution developers who care about this sort of thing (RedHat) did not ship KDE, and actually actively supported (and still do) GNOME development once it begun. Others who didn't care about this sort of thing (Mandrake, which was for a long time just an RH release + KDE) shipped KDE. Later on, with the POPULARITY OF GNOME, QT (X11, not all ports) was made GPL, and thus KDE became free and THEN RedHat shipped it.
If it were just "popularity of Mandrake" that had grown, I can assure you RedHat wouldn't have shipped KDE.
A deeper implication of this is that the KDE developers didn't value their freedom and decided to base their choice of toolkit purely on convenience. QT has since then slowly been made more free on different platforms, but is still non-free on some platforms. But some people, and I know at least one, who do not forget or forgive these things so easily. RedHat has also invested a lot in GNOME development over all these years and spent much time tuning their software to work well with it.
Given these, among other reasons, why wouldn't RedHat relegate KDE to a sort of second-class status?
And, I have to add. Free software projects, both large and small, are not just about some product. At some level, they are about community and friendship and all the other things that happen when you have small and large teams working on things. Just because you waltz in and feel one group has to give up what they're doing (just because you feel it would be better if they spent their efforts elsewhere) and help other projects doesn't mean it will happen. Is <insert app A> better than <insert app B>? Probably. But if I put in a lot of time into app A and the other developers are my friends and I have fun working on it, I won't drop it for app B. However great it might be.
Oh, and just to let everyone know I can be a trolling child too: I don't like the way KDE looks. Never did. I find it too.. "plasticy" and too filled with gradients. That, plus initially, enlightenment was GNOME's default window manager. Now if you were a sucker for mindless eye-candy, choosing an ultra-slick looking (but quite buggy and unstable) GNOME over a ( more polished, perhaps) bland KDE is a decision that involves little thought.
Harish