Matthias Ettrich is the creator of the KDE desktop environment. At LinuxJournal, Aleksey Dolya interviews Matthias about the process of creating KDE and what he’s up to these days.
Interview with KDE’s Matthias Ettrich
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I hope there are more to come soon. Its always cool to learn a bit about the future and the developers making your favorite applications.
I also like Qt, even though I have not used it too long. I expect nothing but the best toolkit with the most innovative technologies from Trolltech. Qt also has a very nice online manual.(However, many parts of the Trolltech website seriously need to be updated, especially in the “developers” section.
Here: http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/codecomp/index.html?cid=4 It should also have a comparrison to GTK 2.2.1. and up.
I always thought of Matthias Ettrich and the early KDE hackers as being politically inept, pressing ahead with the use of a non-free toolkit despite knowing full well the devestating impact that would have on the free software community. It seems now that he really did understand what he was doing, and indeed has a deep love of free software – he took an awfully big risk though, if Qt had never been GPLd things might be very different today, and of course we are left with a fractured widget toolkit/platform scene as the result.
I’m still not sure if the price was worth paying, but I view Ettrich in a far less harsh light than before after reading this.
Not really… Qt is in much more competition commercially with the two big commercial toolkits (Qt and MFC), than the one used almost wholly for free software development (gtk)