Introduction to Free Software - SELF | Sharing Knowledge about ...
Introduction to Free Software - SELF | Sharing Knowledge about ...
Introduction to Free Software - SELF | Sharing Knowledge about ...
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© FUOC • P07/M2101/02709 147 <strong>Free</strong> <strong>Software</strong><br />
Where the programming languages used in KDE are concerned, C++ predo-<br />
minates. This is mainly due <strong>to</strong> the fact that this is the native language of Qt,<br />
although a great effort is expended on providing links <strong>to</strong> allow developments<br />
in other programming languages. Certainly, the number of lines of code in<br />
the minority languages corresponds almost integrally <strong>to</strong> the actual project for<br />
creating the link, although this does not mean that they are not used at all,<br />
as there are numerous projects external <strong>to</strong> KDE that use them.<br />
Table 9. Programming languages used in KDE<br />
Programming language Code lines Percentage<br />
C++ 5,011,288 82.05%<br />
C 575,237 9.42%<br />
Objective C 144,415 2.36%<br />
Shell 103,132 1.69%<br />
Java 87,974 1.44%<br />
Perl 85,869 1.41%<br />
9.4. GNOME<br />
The main objective of the GNOME project is <strong>to</strong> create a desk<strong>to</strong>p system for<br />
the end user that is complete, free and easy <strong>to</strong> use. Likewise, the idea is for<br />
GNOME <strong>to</strong> be a very powerful platform for developers. The initials GNOME<br />
stand for GNU Network Object Model Environment. Since GNOME started, va-<br />
rious ways have been proposed for translating it in<strong>to</strong> Spanish, but none of<br />
these ways has ever managed <strong>to</strong> satisfy everyone involved. However, from the<br />
name, we see that GNOME is part of the GNU project. Currently, all the code<br />
contained in GNOME must be under a GNU GPL or a GNU LGPL license. We<br />
can also see that the networks and the object-orientated modelling are extre-<br />
mely important.<br />
9.4.1. His<strong>to</strong>ry of GNOME<br />
Whilst the freedom of KDE was still being argued <strong>about</strong>, in the summer of<br />
1997, as fate would have it, Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman met at Redmond<br />
during some workshops organised by Microsoft. It is probable that this mee-<br />
ting caused a radical turnaround in both, resulting in the creation of GNOME<br />
by Miguel de Icaza when he returned <strong>to</strong> Mexico (along with Federico Mena<br />
Quintero) and his admiration for distributed object technologies. De Icaza and