KDE was LGPL and flirting with the idea of making money. GNOME was FOSS purist and GPL, making it a safer bet at the time.
Then again, maybe Qt is so much better today than GTK because Trolltech is a company that makes money. (It's not even close; projects are fleeing GTK for Qt, and it's the reason why every GTK app is a toy compared to a Qt alternative, like Nautilus vs. Dolphin.)
It was the other way around. It was GTK/Gnome with the LGPL licensing, while Qt's open source edition was initially GPL-only, before LGPL was added later on.
LGPL means you can write closed source software against the open source toolkit, and yes I think it's fair to say this was a big driver for commercial adoption of GTK in the late 90s to early 00s as it seemed like the better ticket for "serious" closed source software on the Linux software.
The irony is of course that today, far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader).
> far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader).
You have to use Qt if you want anything but trivial desktop software. D: If you've used modern GTK and Qt, it's obvious why.
KDE was LGPL and flirting with the idea of making money. GNOME was FOSS purist and GPL, making it a safer bet at the time.
Then again, maybe Qt is so much better today than GTK because Trolltech is a company that makes money. (It's not even close; projects are fleeing GTK for Qt, and it's the reason why every GTK app is a toy compared to a Qt alternative, like Nautilus vs. Dolphin.)