[Decade]

My impression was more than a little regionalism. KDE came from Europe. GNOME came from America. Most distros that I know come from America.

In addition, Richard Stallman made lawyers nervous of KDE by claiming that using GPL libraries with Qt (which at the time was under a proprietary license with source code available via FreeQt, definitely not a FSF-approved license) meant the KDE developers had no legal right to use GPL programs at all, even after KDE and Qt were relicensed under GPL.

Stallman eventually relented and granted permission to use the FSF’s own software, but the KDE project didn’t ask for it and didn’t bother to get forgiveness from other GPL license owners. Whether they need to go through that ceremony was never tested in court. GPLv3 switched to a much more reasonable standard, just provide the source under a compatible license.

By the time the license tempest-in-a-teapot reached a conclusion, GNOME and KDE already had substantial-enough installed bases and corporate sponsors to keep going indefinitely.