alt Hacker NewsReally great documentary, very much suggested to watch it.
I had no idea Gnome was started without ever talking to the Qt and KDE people. If there was discussion and a solution about the license, the present would be very different I assume. Still, there would be many WMs and DE's, but KDE would be somewhat of a centerpoint.
Also, Aaron Seigo took the criticism of KDE 4 quite hard I would guess. It might be why he is not involved in the project anymore.
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> the present would be very different I assume.
I frankly doubt it. GNOME has pushed many problematic choices which KDE hasn't, or at least hadn't initially. From the anti-usability bent of the UI (few buttons, monochrome over color, non-configurability), to the dependence on systemd, to dropping X in favor of Wayland etc. And this is in part motivated IMHO by the organizational backing for GNOME which is different than KDE.
I’m not sure if you grasp how bad the license situation was. Debian wasn’t even able to ship KDE, like at all. Something had to be done, well beyond “just have a conversation”.