- What is the KDE?
The KDE is a desktop environment built to seamlessly
integrate into today's networked environment, with
special regard for the internet. It is free software,
and is source code is also freely available.
The KDE team's hope is to, along with UNIX, bring
open, stable, reliable, and monopoly-free computing
to the average computer user -- a benefit that UNIX
users have been accustomed to for many years.
Used with permission of the KDE Webmaster
- Included in SUSE, Caldera, et. al
The KDE is now a part of the latest distributions of Caldera
OpenLinux and S.U.S.E Linux. RedHat is active in the
development of the GNOME desktop because of licensing issues,
but the KDE can be downloaded and easily installed on a
RedHat system. Conversely, the GNOME should compile and run
on Caldera, S.U.S.E or other distributions.
The GNOME desktop will also be the default desktop of future Debian
systems.
- Licensing issues
The KDE is built upon the QT libraries from TrollTech,
available at http://www.troll.no/
While the QT libraries are free for noncommercial use,
the source is not freely available. This is perhaps the
main reason that some developers struck off to start the
GNOME project.
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