Red Hat didn't "create" GNOME (although they were one of it's earliest and strongest supporters), SuSe didn't "save" KDE (in fact, them signing a license with Microsoft had more to do with their Novell deal), KDE isn't "German", and Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift considering it came out 5 years later.
GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers and a desire to have a more cohesive/user friendly experience a la Mac OS.
> * It was started by a German living in Germany while a student at a German university
Even at the time, he wasn't a sole contributor. He posted to a Usenet board and gathered interest of a multinational group before commencing. Today, it's even harder to make that argument considering the minority of KWin, Plasma, etc commits come from Germans (or even Western Europeans).
> * Its current-day non-profit backing org[1] - which owns the KDE trademark and represents it in legal matters - is headquartered in Berlin.
Sure, KDE EV is German. And both the Linux Foundation and FSF are headquartered in the US...yet you would probably take umbrage with GNU/Linux being called "American" for that reason. You have to incorporate somewhere and it's probably going to be somewhere in North America or the EU.
(And it was SuSE, now just SUSE. When attempting to rebut, attention to detail is paramount.)
> Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift
[[Citation needed]]
> considering it came out 5 years later.
How long do you think this stuff takes?
> GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers
[[Citation needed]]
Or at least wanted. I'd like to know. I've met with the team, at their invitation and expense, and asked them personally, and I still didn't get a straight, coherent answer.
> a desire to have a more cohesive/user friendly experience a la Mac OS.
> > Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift
>
> [[Citation needed]]
You made that claim, it's on you to prove your claim. Instead, you claim something and pretend it is true unless someone provides proof about a claim that just isn't true.
> > GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers
>
> [[Citation needed]]
A release team member mentions that this is true. What more do you need? I was also a release team member for 10+ years. I've never heard of anything like what you claimed. I spoke to loads of people. Further, you're confusing GNOME 3 with gnome-shell. Also, GNOME 3 took ages to come out while you're pretending it was something quickly developed.
Lastly, GNOME classic. As shipped with RHEL 7. GNOME 3 with a more classical interface. Meaning, pretty close to GNOME 3.
Either way, it doesn't really matter. RHEL 6 was released in 2010 with a traditional menu for starting applications, long after the alleged cutoff date that, according to the article, should have made this impossible.
That was one of the few (only?) patents that MS actually admitted to.
Balmer made a bunch of really vague public threats where he refused to be drawn on which patents Linux (not Gnome, or KDE, or Gnome or KDE using distros specifically) he implied were infringing, most of which never materialised into any court cases or patent deals. Did they enter any other deals than the Novell deal, which involved MS paying Novell 11x what Novell paid MS?
GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers and a desire to have a more cohesive/user friendly experience a la Mac OS.