In: Root » Computers and technology » Linux
In 1996, Matthias Ettrich posted a now famous newsgroup post that described some of the problems that he had with the Unix Desktop. Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking, free desktop environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available, so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody's needs if we could offer a real GUI... IMHO a GUI should offer a complete graphical environment. It should allow a user to do his everyday tasks with it, like starting applications, reading mail, configuring his dekstop... All parts must fit together and work together.... The goal is NOT to create a GUI for the complete Unix-system or the System-Administrator... The idea is to create a GUI for an ENDUSER. With this post he started building the KDE Project. KDE originally stood for Kool Desktop Environment but later was adapted to be K Desktop Environment. The mascot for KDE is a green dragon named Konqi, who can be found in various applications. Matthias chose to develop KDE around the QT Toolkit, and by 1997 the first large complex applications were being released. In 1998, version 1.0 was released. However, there was much debate based on the fact that QT was not licensed around a free software license. Two projects came about from this debate, one named "Harmony" which would only use free libraries and another project called GNOME. In 1998, the QT toolkit was licensed under a new Open Source license called the Q Public License (QPL), and in 2000 QT was released under the Gnu General Public License (GPL). KDE is primarily a volunteer effort. However, many companies employ developers to work on this project. Some of these companies include Novell (through the purchase of SUSE Linux), Trolltech (the company that produces the QT toolkit), and many others. At the time of this writing the current version of KDE is 3.5.2. The next major release of KDE will be version 4 and will include many changes. For more information on KDE visit the project's Web site at www.kde.org. The project's homepage also provides information on how you can help out with the project and contribute back to the KDE community.
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