Following the recent discussions and flamewars about KDE vs Gnome, we got worried that we'll see a repetition of the same damaging infighting from which Unix has suffered before. Competition is a good thing, but the current situation leaves application developers with a difficult decision to make: Write for KDE, using qt/harmony or write for Gnome, using GTK? Whatever happens to these projects, we will end up with a lot of duplicated efforts and a mix of applications written for either of the two environments. The result will not be the consistent look and feel that both projects aim for.
The people on the wxWindows developers team thought that we might have a solution for this problem, if we can get some outside help to get it done. Let us explain: wxWindows is a cross-platform development toolkit, a library of C++ classes which provide GUI concepts as well as other cross-platform issues such as container classes, debug features or configuration management. It has been around since 1992 and started by supporting Motif, XView and MS-Windows, with a direct X11/Xt port added later. Last year, a major rewrite was started and we now have a much advanced library, available for MS Windows, with a Motif port under construction. Later last year, Robert Roebling set out on a one-man project to build wxGTK, a gtk-based implementation of wxWindows which in less than a year has become sufficiently stable to use it as the main development platform of rather large applications. The wxWindows license is a variant of the LGPL, which should meet no objections from the free software community. In fact, this has been an open source project long before the term became commonly used.
Our idea is, that if this is good enough to work across different operating systems (a MacOS port is under construction, too), it could easily bridge the gap between KDE and Gnome. The quick evolution of wxGTK has shown that a new port based on an existing widget set or toolkit can easily be created by a small team within a few months. Therefore, we would like to start a project for a Qt/Harmony based wxWindow library, wxQt. It would then be possible for application developers to write the same source and compile it either for KDE, Gnome or even any of the other supported systems.
But for this we need help. The core developers are all pretty busy on the existing ports, but we could provide significant help and support for any such effort. A wxQt port could also recycle lots of existing code from the other ports. Please, join us in this effort and, if you feel that you could contribute, join the wxWindows developers mailing list for further discussions. Just send a mail containing "subscribe" to wxwin-developers-request@x.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de
You can find some more information about wxWindows at the following places: