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.
> 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.