halting problem :: Episode 1.2: Desktop Wars

:: ~10 min read

The desktop wars begin, and competitions heats up. We’re going to see the initial reaction to KDE’s licensing woes in the larger Linux ecosystem, and how that played into GNOME’s adoption. Plus: Red Hat enters the fray, and creates the Red Hat Advanced Development laboratories, and GNOME releases version 1.0

The year is 1998.

In an abandoned warehouse in San Francisco, in a lull between the end of the previous rave and the beginning of the next, the volume of the electronica has been turned all the way down; the strobes and lasers have been turned off, and somebody cracked open one of the black tinted windows, to let some air in. On one of the computers, made by parts scavenged here and there, with a long since forgotten beer near its keyboard, a script is running to compile a release archive of GNOME 0.20. The script barely succeeds, and the results are uploaded to an FTP server, just in time for the rave to start. There’s no need to write an announcement, the Universe will provide.

At the same time, somewhere in Europe, in a room dominated by large glass windows, white walls with geometric art hanging off of them, and lots of chrome finish, the hum of 50 developers with headphones working in concert quiets down after the project leader, like an orchestra conductor, raises to his feet. He looks at every young developer, from the 16 years old newcomer with a buzz haircut, to the 25 years old grizzled old timer that will soon leave for his 5 years mandatory military service; he then looks down, and presses a key that runs the build of a pre-release for KDE 1.0. The build will of course succeed without a hitch, and the announcement will be prepared later, in the common room, with a civilised discussion between all project members.

The stage is thus evenly divided.

The players are:

  • KDE, a commune of software developers using a commercially backed toolkit to write a free software desktop environment
  • GNOME, a rag tag band of misfits and university students, writing a free software toolkit and desktop environment

These are the desktop wars.

I jest, of course. The reality was wildly different than the memes. Even calling them “the desktop wars” is really a misnomer — after all, we don’t call the endless, tiresome arguments between Emacs and vi users as “the text editor wars”; or the the equally exhausting diatribe between spaces and tabs aficionados as “the code indentation wars”. At most, you could call this a friendly competition between two volunteer projects in the same problem space, but that doesn’t make for good, click-bait-y, tribal division.

Far from being a clinical, cold, and corporate-like project, KDE was started by volunteers across the globe, even if it did have a strong European centre of mass; while it did use a version of Qt not released under the terms of a proper free software license, KDE had a strong ethos towards user freedom from the very beginning, being released under the terms of the GNU General Public License; and while it was heavily centralised, its code base was not a machine of perfect harmony that never failed to build.

GNOME, on the other hand, was not a Silicon Valley-by-way-of-Burning Man product of acid casualties and runaways; its centre of mass was nearer to the East coast of the US than to the West, even if GIMP was initially developed at Berkeley. GNOME was indeed perceived as the underdog, assembled out of a bunch of components developed at different paces, but its chaotic initial form was both the result of the first few months of alpha releases, and of the more conscious decision of supporting and integrating existing projects.

Nevertheless, the memes persisted, and the battle lines were drawn by the larger free and open source software community pretty much immediately, like it happened many times before, and will happen many times after.

The programming language was one of the factors of the division, certainly, bringing along the extant fights between C and C++ developers, with the latter claiming the higher technical ground by using a modern-ish language, compared to the portable assembly of the former. GNOME used the existence of bindings for other languages, like Perl, Python, Objective C, and Guile, as a way to counter-balance the argument, by including other communities and programming paradigms into the mix. Writing GNOME libraries surely was a game for C developers, but writing GNOME applications was supposedly to be all about choice. Or, at least, it would have been, once the GNOME libraries were done; while the project was in its infancy, though, the same people writing the libraries ended up writing the applications, which meant a whole lot of C being unleashed unto the unsuspecting world.

From a modern perspective, relying on C as the main programming language was probably the most contentious choice, but in the context of 1997 it would be hard to call it surprising. Sure, C++ was already fairly well known as a system level language, but the language itself was pretty much stuck to the 2nd edition of “The C++ Programming Language” book, published in 1989; the first ISO C++ standardisation came in 1998, followed by one 2011, 13 years later. Additionally, programmers had been bitten by the binary incompatibilities across compilers as well as different versions of the same compiler, while the language evolved; and the standard library was found lacking in both design and performance, to the point that any major C++ library, like Qt or Boost, ended up re-implementing the same large chunks of the same basic data types. In 1997, writing a complex, interdependent project like a desktop environment using C++ was the “edgy” effort, for lack of a better word, comparable to writing a desktop environment in, say, Rust in 2018.

Another consideration, tied into the support for multiple languages, was that basically all high level languages exposed the ability to interface their internals using the C binary interface, as it was needed to handle the OS-level integration, like file and network operations.

We could debate forever if C was the right choice — and there are people that still do that to this day, so we would be in good company — but in the end the choice was made, and it can’t be unmade.

By and large, though, the deciding factor that put somebody in either the KDE or the GNOME camp was social and political; fittingly, as the free and open source software movement is a social and political movement. The argument boiled down to a very simple fact: the toolkit chosen by the KDE project was, at the time, not distributed under a license that fit the definition of free software, and that made redistributing KDE a pain for everyone that was not the KDE project themselves.

The original Qt license, the Qt Free Edition License, required that your own project never depended on modifications of Qt itself, and that you licensed your own code under the terms of the GPL, the LGPL, or a BSD-like license. Writing libraries depending on Qt also required to jump through additional hoops, like sending a description of the project to Trolltech.

Of course, that put the KDE project in the clear: they were consuming Qt mostly as a black box, and they were releasing their own code under the terms of the GPL. It did place the distributors of KDE binaries on less certain grounds, though, with Debian outright refusing to package KDE as it would put the terms of the GPL used by KDE in direct conflict with the terms of the Qt Free Edition License; the license itself was really not conforming to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, so distributing Qt itself (as well as any other project that decided to use its license) was out of the question. If you wanted to use pre-built packages for KDE 1.0 on Debian, you had to download and install them from a third party repository, maintained by KDE themselves.

Other distributions, such as SuSE and Mandrake, were less finnicky about the details of the interaction between different licenses, and decided to ship binary builds of KDE as part of their main package repositories.

The last big name in the Linux distributions landscape at the time was Red Hat, and things were afoot there.

Just like Debian, Red Hat was less than enthused by the licensing issues of Qt and KDE, and saw a fully GPL and LGPL desktop environment as a solution for their commercial contracts. Of course, GNOME was mostly alpha quality software at the time, and had to catch up pretty quickly if it wanted to be a viable alternative to, well, shipping nothing and supporting roughly every possible combination of window managers and utilities.

Which is why, in 1998, Red Hat created the Red Hat Advanced Development Laboratories.

The RHAD labs were “an independent development group to work on problems of usability of the Linux operating system”: a few developers embedded in upstream communities, tasked with both polishing the many, many, many rough edges of GNOME, and taking over some of the unglamorous aspects of maintenance in a large project.

Under the watchful eye of Mark Ewing and Michael Fulbright, RHAD labs hired Elliot Lee, who wrote the CORBA implementation library ORBit, and worked on the componentisation of GNOME; Owen Taylor, who co-maintained GTK and shepherded the 1.0 release; Carsten “the rasterman” Haitzler, who wrote the Enlightenment window manager and worked on specifying how other window managers should integrate with GNOME; Jonathan Blandford, who worked on the GNOME control centre; and Federico Mena, who worked on GIMP, GTK, and on the GNOME GUI for the Midnight Commander file manager, as well as writing the first GNOME calendar application. In time, the RHAD would acquire the talents of other well-known GNOME contributors, like Havoc Pennington and Tim Janik, to work on GTK 2.0; Christopher Blizzard, to work on the then newly released Mozilla web browser; and David Mason, to work on the GNOME user documentation.

In September 1998, GNOME released version 0.30, to be shipped by Red Hat Linux 5.2 as a technology preview, thanks to the work of the people at the RHAD labs. Of course, it was not at all smooth sailing, and everyone there had to fight to keep GNOME from getting cut — mostly by convincing the Red Hat co-founder and CEO, Robert Young, that the project was in a much better state than it looked. The now infamous “Project Bob” was a mad dash of 36 hours for all the members of the RHAD labs to create and present a demo of GNOME, making sure it would work — at least, within the strict confines of the demo itself. Additionally, Carsten Haitzler would write a cool new theme using the newly added loadable module support in GTK, to show off the capabilities of the toolkit in its upcoming 1.2 release. Up until then, GTK looked fairly similar to Motif, but counting on his experience on the Enlightenment window manager, Haitzler added the ability to customise the appearance of each UI element in a variety of ways.

Of course, in the end, it was the theme that won over Red Hat management, and without it, “Project Bob” may have failed and spelled doom for the whole RHAD labs and thus the commercial viability of the GNOME project.

In December 1998, Trolltech announced that Qt would be released under the terms of a new license, called the “Q Public License”, or QPL. The QPL was meant to comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines and lead to Debian being able to ship packages of Qt, but it did not really solve the issue of GPL compatibility, so, in essence, nothing changed: Debian and Red Hat would not ship KDE until its 2.0 release, 2 years later, when Trolltech relented, and decided to ship Qt 2.0 under the terms of both the QPL and of the GNU GPL.

By the beginning of 1999, KDE was about to release version 1.1, whereas GNOME locked down the features for a 1.0 release, which was announced in March 1999. In April 1999, Red Hat Linux 6.0 shipped with GNOME as its default desktop environment. The 1.0 release was presented at the Linux Expo, in May; the presentation was hectic, and plagued by the typical first release issues; GMC, the file manager, for instance, would crash when opening a new directory, but the session manager was modified to restart it immediately, so all you’d see was a window closing and re-opening in the desired location.

The splash of the first major release attracted attention; it was a signal that the GNOME developers were ready for a higher form of war, one that involved commercial products that could integrate with, and be based off of GNOME.

The desktop wars were entering a new phase, one where attrition and fights by proxy would dominate the following years.


Next week we’re going to zoom into the nascent ecosystem of companies that were born around GNOME, and focus on two of them: Ximian, or Helix Code as it was called at the time; and Eazel. Both companies defined GNOME’s future in more ways than just by adoping GNOME as a platform; they worked within the GNOME community to create products for the Linux desktop, and they shaped the technical and social decisions of the GNOME project well after the first chapter of its history.

Alongside that, we’re also going to look at the effort to bring about the era of components that was initially outlined with the GNOME acronym: a desktop and an object model. We’re going to see what happened to that, once we step into “The land of the bonobos”.

References

history of gnome gnome podcast

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