It wasn’t about merit; it was about that commie copyleft license!

It was a classic GNU meltdown. KDE showed up first in 1996 trying to build a normal, coherent desktop using Qt, a shiny new C++ toolkit that actually made apps look like they belonged together. But Qt’s license (at the time) didn’t let developers redistribute modified versions, which meant KDE depended on a layer the free‑software world could’t fork or fix if things went sideways. That was a huge red flag for the GNU crowd

Instead of joining KDE, a group of developers launched GNOME in 1997 specifically to avoid Qt’s licensing baggage. They built everything on GTK; a toolkit born out of GIMP, and made it clear the project existed because Qt wasn’t “free enough”

Meanwhile, others tried a third approach: Harmony, a free Qt clone meant to let KDE apps run without relying on Trolltec’s license at all. Yes, Linux briefly had three projects because nobody wanted to compromise on a toolkit license.

Eventually Trolltech blinked. Qt got progressively freer; first the QPL, then the GPL in 2000; which finally resolved the original complaint. Debian immediately started shipping KDE once the licensing conflict disappeared.

-By then it didn’t matter. GNOME had its own ecosystem, design philosophy, and momentum. KDE kept evolving with its configurability-first mindset, while GNOME leaned into a more opinionated workflow. The licensing war ended, but the architectural fork didn’t.