Vadim,

thank you for your feedback. I have also read your message on the

kde-core-devel list. Answers to both this post and that message follow.

1. I agree that the title of the article and my posting to your list seem unrelated: the current title has been chosen from LJ staff. In any case, Bluecurve was just a starting line: the issue is U*nix desktops, not Bluecurve or Red Hat
2. Your comments are valid (more below) but from some of them it may look that you didn't read the whole article (see below), and/or my answers to previous posters.
3. I do know that Bluecurve is just a layer of paint: my piece came from seeing otherpeople (both Gnome and KDE users) reacting as if somebody had commited a crime
4. As already said in this forum, personally I don't know and don't really care if Gnome X is behind or ahead of KDE Y: I and many others don't use any of them, and sometimes it just seems another "VI or EMACS" diatribe. Ditto for distributions. Choice is what matters, isn't it?
5. Latest releases...demonstrate that KDE leads on Desktop. So?

   Latest sales figures demonstrate that Windows XP leads on Desktop:

   should we switch to XP?

6. Frankly, one issue I have with K/G (I keep calling them so because I don't see any difference from this point of view), and another reason why I wrote the article, is that all statements like "If foo wants to keep their user base - they should give respect to bar" make me uncomfortable
7. The part that makes me more uncomfortable (apart from an instinctive "so much for 'Free' SW") is when "bar" is not simply a set of standard interfaces, protocols and formats (which would make a whole

   lot of sense, see my quote of Havoc Pennington), but a whole set of

   applications a huge monolythic package, take it all or leave.

8. I know that KDE has Unicode support and other things I mentioned

   in the article: however, see again what I say about making all

   existing application respect such right level of standards

9. I fully agree with what you said on the kde-core-devel list about

   XFree: what makes me unhappy is that a lot of

   energies have been put in making all windows nicer and consistant

   before fixing the mess at that level. I am not questioning

   anybody's rights to choose the project to work on, I'm just saying

   that things seem to have happened in the opposite order, and that a

   lot of people find nothing wrong with this. For example, just two days

   ago on the koffice-devel list, you rigthly complained that

   "current packaging of XFree86 (by *all* distributions) really

   sucks. For example, KDrive (TinyX) is not packaged at all". For the

   record this is one of the thing that we are doing in the RULE project

10. Just one more time before dinner: the pointers to standards and other

    things in your message are very good and do cover the real problems:

    what makes me sad is to see a lot of users, and, apparently, many

    developers too, just ignore them.

    Thanks for your contribution

    Best Regards,

    Marco Fioretti