As I already blogged here, in October past year I was invited to Évora, in order to participate in a round table about “Gnome vs. KDE”. In my first slide I suggested that in my opinion a more adjusted title for the round table would have been “Free Desktops vs Proprietary Desktops”. I think fights between projects that have less than 5% of the global market is not very clever and only gives advantages to the real adversary. Specially when the projects have almost the same goals.
Well, fortunately a lot of people think this way, and that is why almost 6 years ago, in March 2000, the FreeDesktop.org project was started. During these years, the best ideas from the different Desktop projects were progressively moved to the shared software infrastructure. New projects have also been created there to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Early this year, a new project was announced to share efforts between the free software Desktop projects: Freedesktop Promotion. This time collaboration is going to happen also in the marketing area. The motivations are very well explained in this article.