What Is GNOME?
GNOME stands for the GNU Network Object Model Environment. GNU itself is an acronym, meaning GNU's Not UNIX. As with many acronyms in the UNIX world, GNU is recursive. GNOME was developed primarily in reaction to concerns with KDE's reliance on Qt. Qt did not originally have a fully Open Source license, though that has changed. Today Qt is licensed under the GPL, which is the same license used for KDE and GNOME. For more information on KDE and its history, see Chapter 3, "KDE."
Like KDE, GNOME is a full desktop, as described in Chapter 2, "Introduction to the Desktop." It provides much of the same functionality for a graphical environment that is found in other popular operating environments such as Macintosh OS or Windows 98. ...
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