No one seemed to care about Gnome fragmenting the Linux Desktop back then, because it had 'the right license'.
It was, however, one of the reasons most big-house commercial software was not ported and sold in Linux versions, and sent Linux into a black hole of license fundamentalists until Ubuntu changed that.
Why this point of view? Because I believe that the best possible computing platform from a technical point of view (the most efficient, better designed, etc) is a combination of both an open source foundation and the possibility of open source and closed source applications on top of it.
It was, however, one of the reasons most big-house commercial software was not ported and sold in Linux versions, and sent Linux into a black hole of license fundamentalists until Ubuntu changed that.
Why this point of view? Because I believe that the best possible computing platform from a technical point of view (the most efficient, better designed, etc) is a combination of both an open source foundation and the possibility of open source and closed source applications on top of it.