Qt/GTK Skinning

[Kalle Vahlman]

On 7/25/05, Philip Van Hoof <spam at pvanhoof.be> wrote:
> Reality is that a customer who wants a custom Linux desktop application
> right now needs to answer the question: "You want a KDE or a GNOME one"?

And "Do you want it to use mySQL or Oracle?" and "What about
technology A or technology B?". As usual.
 
> And depending on the answer, the salesmen of the software builder will
> have to answer: "Oh I'm sorry, we can't help you with that. We don't
> have developers for that platform".

Salesmen never will say that. They'll sell anyway ;)
 
> And then the customer will ask: "Oh but, you have developers for
> Windows?". And the salesmen will answer: "Of course!".
> 
> That's reality.

For a 90% desktop share with a 20 years of history as a commercial
industry, well that's a surprise!
 
> And I think it's important we (free software desktop developers) finally
> start to see this.

See what? That we all are going to lose our business if we use more
than one version of any given technology? Please.

I do get my bread and butter from open source software, but I do it as
a hobby too. Because it's fun. If you start to require business-level
strategies that tie you up to one thing and one thing alone, it
usually starts to get less fun.

Don't get me wrong, it's all good that money is being introduced into
the open source developement, it just shouldn't start to drive it (too
much) or it'll get boring pretty fast.

Also note that I'm not against unification, I just think it's not
necessary to doom two implementations just because there are two of
them.

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi