The second reason given, which has to do with building a community is pretty broad but more believable.  Fedora has made huge strides while also sticking to its guns in the freedom department and being valuable upstream contributors. It may be that we sacrificed short term gains which can be gotten via a bit more differentiation, or out of the box “just works” on closed hardware but as companies are being convinced to open up their specs and open drivers are being written, a large portion of which is being done by Fedora developers working upstream, little of the short term gains matter much.

I suspect the real reason is somewhere in the community vein, staring with the Kernel and X team developers who work tirelessly making sure their work is fit for upstream consumption and can be supported in the long term. Following their lead the rest falls naturally out of that single notion of moving Linux forward as a whole. Kudo’s to all my Fedora friends - keep moving forward.

Is this going to happen?

First off this is a highly unlikely scenario. The planets would have to align, Qt would have to go LGPL, Nokia would have to loosen controls on contributions to avoid a fork, the Qt team would have to accept a community which has slightly different goals and the GTK+ team would have to signal their willingness to move. We are not going to turn our back on the great work the GTK+ teams are doing and most certainly the base libraries we use such as GStreamer wouldn’t change.

What are the possible advantages?

• Less confusion for the non-insiders on what to learn and program for
• We can get rid of the whole Freedesktop common widgets talk (e.g. Print and File dialogs) which is nonsense and a distraction anyway
• Hopefully less bickering in the community meaning a more unified and focused front against larger threats
• Focus can move from the lower toolkit layers to the higher level desktop layer which really define the value differences between GNOME and KDE
• Easier technology sharing

Note that these are all only possible advantages and may not even happen even if there was a move.

 What are the possible disadvantages?

• More bickering on how to write applications (who’s approach to usability wins out?)
• Less focus and a return to writing applications without a shared guideline (just look at old XLib interfaces - almost like snowflakes)
• A loss of identity
• Loss of amazing GTK+ developers who may feel abandoned
• Splintering of the community so we have parallel GTK+ GNOME and Qt4 GNOME development
• Screwing ISV’s who bank on GTK+’s stable interface
• GTK+ isn’t just a license - we would be losing a lot by switching away from the codebase
• Falling into the growing pains GTK+ 2.0 brought GNOME and Qt4 is still bringing KDE
• A loss of activity at Freedesktop.org which is actually sometimes useful in producing dialogue and shared practices
• A loss of control over the direction of the toolkit effecting the quality and feel of the GNOME desktop
• Really a lot of development is moving to the web - will toolkits be important enough to warrant the pain of the move

What this wouldn’t be

This wouldn’t be a merging of GNOME and KDE.  Each community has a different idea of what constitutes a usable desktop and Qt would simply be an implementation detail bellow GNOME.

Conclusion

This is pretty much a pipe dream.  It solves some issues while creating a whole host of different ones.  I’m not going to advocate it other than seeing what peoples reactions are.  On the flip side if the work was put behind it, the planets aligned, and both communities came to an agreement I wouldn’t object to the arrangement.  Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath nor would I be elated or saddened if it did or did not happen. To me it is all what is best for Linux, GNOME, Free Software and the wider market. It is unclear what direction would be best (any claims to that knowledge would be suspect) but honestly and actively looking at the possibilities is a useful activity, however remote. People reading should not put their “hopes and dreams” on this or believe it to be more than it is.

Ingredients:

Pasta
5 large shrimp, shelled
1 sliver of ginger root, brunoise
1 Tbls. of fresh sliced scallions
1 Tbls. Sweet Cream/unsalted butter
1 leaf of fresh sage
salt and pepper to taste

Cook the pasta in boiling water. When the pasta is almost done start the sauce. Melt the butter in a sauté pan and add the ginger, scallions and fresh sage. Add a pinch or two of salt and sauté until the butter just starts to turn brown. Add shrimp with some more salt and pepper and cook on both sides until orange to the eye and firm to the touch. You need to manage your heat here as you don’t want to burn the butter and you don’t want to move the shrimp except to turn them once. This will also allow the ginger to start to caramelize. Toss the finished pasta in the pan and get it coated with the butter sauce. Take off the heat, let it sit for a minute and then plate and serve. Sprinkle some fresh scallion on for colour.

I would have taken pictures but it was so good it was gone before I remembered I had a camera.

Istanbul was a great place to have GUADEC this year though I wasn’t really able to be a part of the regular conference schedule due to my Foundation duties.  These days I am mostly around for the community aspects and to get a feel for where said community is headed.  To that effect for me GUADEC is mostly about friends, food, beer and moving GNOME forward in a stampede of boisterous hackers with common interests.  Along those lines here is a summary of GUADEC though my eyes (more…)

• are GIT users? - roughly 90% of the hands in the room went up
• are BZR users? - less than 5% of the hands in the room went up
• are Hg(Mercurial) users? - roughly the same as BZR, perhaps a few hands less

Converse amongst yourselves.