GNOME and KDE share USENIX Award

2005-04-13

Miguel de Icaza today received the Software Tools User Group (STUG) award from USENIX, sharing the honor with Mattias Ettrich of KDE. The award was announced by Mike Jones, the USENIX president.

Ellie Young and her friendly staff at USENIX have organized an impressive conference that has brought 600 participants to southern California. Anaheim, home of Disneyland, has an area around Convention Way which is meticulously clean and features neatly trimmed bushes in the shape of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. USENIX regulars such as Peter Salus and Jon “Maddog” Hall could be seen holding court in the lobby of the conference hotel. Outside the hum of power lawnmowers fill the air.

In making the award to GNOME and KDE, USENIX said:
Recipients of the annual STUG award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to the reusable code-base available to all and/or the provision a significant, enabling technology directly to users in a widely-available form.

The UNIX Command-Line User Interface (CLI), while widely recognized as being efficient was often attacked by non-UNIX users as not being user friendly. While many GUIs have been added to UNIX over the years in trying to make it easier to use, these were often considered inferior to many non-UNIX GUIs. In October of 1996 and August of 1997 two projects were started to produce desktops that were easy to use, mapped to traditional UNIX philosophies and gave access to all of the underlying features that the CLI contained. While these desktops competed with each other, they also lent strength to each other and have now produced a range of applications that we collectively call KDE and GNOME.  These applications have allowed different implementations of the Unix operating system into the non-technical marketplace.  Most importantly, by embracing the concepts of Free and Open Source Software, these two desktop projects allowed for freely distributed code that allowed any distribution or software developer to utilize these graphical features. The USENIX Association would like to recognize both of these groups in creating a set of libraries, tools and applications which are portable and run across several different operating system platforms and hardware architectures.

Thanks to USENIX for providing this recognition to Miguel, Matthias and all the free desktop developers around the world.