Прошло ровно 10 лет с момента публикации анонса проекта GNOME, выступающего в роли свободной альтернативы KDE и CDE, который Miguel De Icaza опубликовал в списке рассылки gtk-list.
Why don't you just use/contribute to KDE?
KDE is a nice project; they have good hackers working on it and they have done a very good job. Unfortunately, they selected the non-free Qt toolkit as the foundation for the project, which poses legal problems for those desiring to redistribute the software.