On Wed, 16 Apr 2003 23:10:54 +0200
Praise
Yes, it impossible to get a GPL program out of business, but it is possible to make it silently die. Or to make it loudly improve (and it is the most common case). Jim Gettys from Digital/Compaq/HP was giving talks a few years ago talking about the birth, death and rebirth of the X Window System. Jim also sits on the board for both KDE and GNOME.
Competition is good for open software as it is for commercial software.
Both KDE and GNOME are better today partially because they have to
compete against themselves as well as Windoz. And, one thing we in the
Linux community like is to have alternatives. If I get sick of my KDE
desktop, I can always configure GNOME or go to one of the other window
managers available.
--
Jerry Feldman