GNOME, the most popular desktop environment for Linux, is ten years old today! The GNU Network Object Model Environment (although not often referred to as that anymore) was originally announced as a project to build a graphical environment based entirely on free and open source software.
At the time, rival environment KDE wasn't completely free and was frowned upon by the FSF because the underlying toolkit it runs on Qt, wasn't open source at the time. Here's an extract from the original announcement email:
* GoalsWe want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly
applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based
entirely on free software:- We want the applications to have a common look and feel, and
to share as many visual elements and UI concepts as possible.- We want to use the GTK toolkit as our toolkit for writing
the applications.The GTK toolkit (http://www.cs.umn.edu/~amundson/gtk and
http://levien.com/~slow/gtk/) is the toolkit written by
Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball, Josh MacDonald, for the GNU
Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) project
(http://scam.xcf.berkeley.edu/~gimp).- We want to encourage people to contribute code and to test
the code, so that the software will compile out of the box
by using GNU's tools for automatic source configuration.
OSNews links to two pictures of GNOME - one back from 1997 and a recent one, and it really does show you how far the project has come.
So, here's to the future of GNOME!
[thanks to Jack Dunford for the tip]
