GNOME day, from 1997

I keep a list, and this just got to the top:

[maiki@yuzu ~]$ task 22

Name          Value                               
ID            22
Description   Support gnome project               
Status        Pending
Entered       2020-07-25 14:13:31 (3w)            
Last modified 2020-08-10 21:15:41 (5d)
Tags          interi                              
Virtual tags  PENDING READY TAGGED UDA UNBLOCKED
UUID          989e4e82-781e-4929-b7b7-322150aa5a82
Urgency       0.92
Reviewed      1597119341                          

    tags    0.8 *    1 =    0.8
    age   0.058 *    2 =  0.115
                         ------
                           0.92

Date                Modification                          
2020-08-10 21:15:41 Reviewed set to '2020-08-10 21:15:41'.

As part of my efforts to support the reality I want. Well, their web site makes it hard to find how to help aside from financial, and somehow I landed on a Google Calendar that only had a couple of events, today:

Screenshot_2020-08-15 GNOME

One of them link to The GNOME Desktop project., the message declaring the intent to create GNOME:

The GNOME Desktop project.

From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>
To: gtk-list redhat com, kde fiwi02 wiwi uni-tuebingen de, guile cygnus com
Subject: The GNOME Desktop project.
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 22:19:34 -0500


  	       The GNOME Desktop project
          (GNU Network Object Model Environment)
  http://bananoid.nuclecu.unam.mx/gnome
  • Goals

We 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.

  • We plan to export the GTK API through a procedural database
    (which will in fact be an object database) to allow easy
    integration with scripting languages and modules written in
    other languages.

    - We plan to use GTK/Scheme bindings for coding small
    

    utilities and applications. When these bindings are more
    mature, it should be possible to write complete applications
    in Scheme.

  • Some common questions regarding the project

Why don’t you just use/contribute to KDE?

KDE is a nice project; they have good hackers working on it and
they have done a very good job.  Unfortunately, they selected the
non-free Qt toolkit as the foundation for the project, which poses
legal problems for those desiring to redistribute the software.

Why not write a free Qt replacement instead?

The KDE project -in its current form- has about 89,000 lines of
code, on the other hand, the source code for the Qt library has
about 91,000 lines.

Qt also forces the programmer to write his code in C++ or Python.
Gtk can be used in C, Scheme, Python, C++, Objective-C and Perl. 

Also, we believe that KDE has some design problems (they have lots
of good ideas though) that we plan to fix.

Under what license does the GNOME fall?

As most GNU software, GNOME application code will be released
under the GNU GPL.  GNOME specific libraries will be released
under the terms of the GNU LGPL.

Will you rewrite everything from scratch?

No.  We will try to reuse the existing code for GNU programs as
much as possible, while adhering to the guidelines of the project.
Putting nice and consistent user interfaces over all-time
favorites will be one of the projects.

We plan on reusing code from KDE as well.
  • Joining the GNOME mailing list:

We have created a mailing list for people interested in discussing
the development of this project. To subscribe, use this command:

echo ‘subscribe gnome’ | mail majordomo@nuclecu.unam.mx

Hey, cool. :slight_smile: