Rob wrote: you should have read between the lines that I'm not very found of gnome and all that. my reasoning is simple: miguel started it just because someone told KDE was evil because Qt wasn't pure GPL at the time; then a whole wasteful effort begun to make gnome as the official gnu/fsf desktop; then come ximian; then miguel found that not.net was some kind of bethelem star. go figure why people didn't stuck with (imho) higher brained C++ and KDE just for the doctrine, go figure. :)) (what a waste of great minds) ... and what we have now? Yes, we do still have JACK and Ardour, ALSA, KDE and Linux as true high-tech, open-source, top-of-the-notch projects in the whole known universe. Go catch it, corporate-BS-savvy-boys :))) Nor do I. After all, we the guys/gals are few and numbered, but do it for the fun and love, not for the money. Bah, did I say "love" ? Ah, for you who that don't know me, I was a hardcore windows developer once before. Ah, read "once" with emphasis :) thing of the first-half-nineties, blerk! Bottom line is, and that's not an opinion, the F/OSS (r)evolution is already unstoppable. Evidence comes to that IBM knows it. Ultimately, MS knows it too. And you just got to face it now? If you stay with me, and I believe MS strategy cannot be far behind, the OS business is already a dead-end. People are in charge. If you speak BS-like, you can read: the customer is in charge. And don't reply that was RH who come original with that slogan. I do remember something of the sort from Hammer's "reengineering the corporation". Yes early nineties gone old :) Just for the topic, funny thing is, a copy of gamma's/GOF is still around here somewhere and being a mid-nineties foundation truth must be told,... I'm just an old donkey who doesn't learn new languages anymore :D Cheers. -- rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela rncbc(a)rncbc.org