@scottalanmiller said:
Only so long, Gnome started doing huge damage nearly from day one. It divided the community right at the start of competing for the desktop. Hard to say if Windows NT would have gained the traction that it did if people saw a unified Linux desktop option at the time. KDE was years ahead of Windows 2000.
Very true, but if he did it for this reason, he only got rewarded now - that's quite a long time to wait
Of course, there might've been some money at an earlier stage and Novell, of course, bought Ximian - an even more brilliant ploy as it destroyed the strongest KDE distribution (SUSE) through infighting and allowed Red Hat to take the market, pushing inferior (to this day...) technology to the Linux Desktop.