Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

It reads like a shrug, but it’s really a thesis about how open-source communities survive: not by crowning a winner, but by tolerating (even needing) parallel tribes. Miguel de Icaza frames the Gnome vs. KDE “desktop war” as a false choice, and that’s the tell. He’s sidestepping ideology in favor of ecology. Two codebases aren’t redundancy; they’re resilience.

The line’s careful impersonality - “we cannot choose” - shifts the argument away from taste and toward stewardship. In the late-1990s/early-2000s Linux desktop push, picking one environment would have meant consolidating power, standardizing toolkits, and implicitly declaring one set of design values “correct.” KDE carried early momentum and polish, but it was entangled with Qt’s licensing politics at the time; Gnome positioned itself as a freer stack. De Icaza’s move is to treat that tension as productive rather than poisonous: different desktops attract different kinds of contributors, different hardware targets, different UI philosophies, different corporate sponsors.

The subtext is diplomatic but not neutral. “Because there’s users” is a moral claim disguised as a practical one: user communities create obligations. In open source, legitimacy isn’t granted by a CEO; it’s earned through adoption, contribution, and the messy fact that people already built their workflows around a given platform. De Icaza isn’t blessing fragmentation so much as warning that forced unity can be a kind of violence - political, technical, and cultural - that Linux can’t afford if it wants to grow.