+ Following the recent discussions + and flamewars about KDE vs Gnome, I got worried that we see a + repetition of the same damaging infighting from which Unix has + suffered before. Competition is a good thing, but the current + situation leaves application developers with a difficult decision to + make: Write for KDE, using qt/harmony or write for Gnome, using GTK? + Whatever happens to these projects, we will end up with a lot of + duplicated efforts and a mix of applications written for either of the + two environments. The result will not be the consistent look and feel + that both projects aim for. +
+ + The people on the wxWindows developers team thought that we might have + a solution for this problem, if we can get some outside help to get it + done. Let me explain: wxWindows is a cross-platform development + toolkit, a library of C++ classes which provide GUI concepts as well + as other cross-platform issues such as container classes, debug + features or configuration management. It has been around since 1992G + and started by supporting Motif, XView and MS-Windows, with a direct + X11/Xt port added later. Last year, a major rewrite was started and we + now have a much advanced library, available for MS Windows, with a + Motif port under construction. Later last year, Robert Roebling set + out on a one-man project to build wxGTK, a gtk-based implementation of + wxWindows which in less than a year has become sufficiently stable to + use it as the main development platform of rather large + applications. The original wxWindows license is a variant of the LGPL, + which should meet no objections from the free software community. In + fact, this has been an open source project long before the term became + commonly used. wxGTK is covered under the LGPL itself. +
+ + Our idea is, that if this is good enough to work across different + operating systems (a MacOS port is under construction, too), it could + easily bridge the gap between KDE and Gnome. The quick evolution of + wxGTK has shown that a new port based on an existing widget set or + toolkit can easily be created by a small team within few + months. Therefore, we would like to start a project for a Qt/Harmony + based wxWindow library, wxQt. It would then be possible for + application developers to write the same source and copile it either + for KDE, Gnome or even any of the other supported systems. +
+ + But for this we need help. The core developers are all pretty busy on + the existing ports, but we could provide significant help and support + for any such effort. A wxQt port could also recycle lots of existing + code from the other ports. + + Please, join us in this effort and, if you feel that you could + contribute, join the wxWindows developers mainling list for further + discussions. Just send a mail containing "subscribe" to + wxwin-developers-request@x.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de +
+ You can find some more information about wxWindows at the following places: +
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