Just found an old Slashdot article (1998) by Bruce Perens where he talks about KDE. He critizises
QT licensing and argues that KDE is not real open-source software. His
conclusion:
GNOME Will Become The Standard GUI of Linux. Because it is 100% Open
Source, because it is technically quite good, and because of the wisdom of
its development team, GNOME will become the standard GUI for Linux. A
large portion of the free software community will simply not accept KDE
because of the Qt license. The only chance left for KDE to reach that goal
is for them to drop what they are doing and rush to finish the a Free Qt
now.
[…]
I'm pretty confident now that before a Free Qt can be done, GNOME will be
in 1.0 or some higher release and will have established itself as the
standard GUI of Linux. KDE will stay around as a good desktop with a
faithful, though slowly diminishing, user community, but it won't grab the
brass ring.
Nice to see that other people are wrong sometimes, too.
Reflected Total Internal Frustration 