>>>Or were you just being a pain in the ass for the sake of it?

The "sake of it" sounds like a perfectly good reason to not submit to a warrantless search. You might also consider that cooperative reasonable people are indebted to cranky sons of bitches to initiate change in society. You don't have to be cranky about everything, in fact you can be perfectly normal about most things and cranky and intolerant only on your personal favorite issue. For me, it's data protection, I'm polite but a real pain in the ass to companies that try to collect excessive data. This guys gig is warrantless searching, good for him, I don't think I would have stuck to my guns in that situation.

I can't help asking, what (if anything) did you do to keep your system running in light of the chunky scaling requirements? As an aside, it would be nice to see some "recipes" from the Postgresql developers on how to make your installation scale under different types of usage profile.I haven't seen anything like this around.

I hope you'll take it as a compliment when I say that I've never considered the usability of the system activity applet. I suppose I don't use it very often but across many different linux installs and many different KDE versions, it just works and doesn't give any nasty surprises. It's possible that this is a rare case of a software project being *done*.

I think people are being a little harsh on the submitter, they may just not know. Here's a quick summary:

• Qt: Until being bought out by Nokia, their core business was licensing Qt commercially so it would have been a sound enough bet for closed source development (a little expensive maybe). For open source, it's GPL so no issue there. At this stage though, I'd be a little nervous if I had bet the company on Qt.
• GTK+: The toolkit that underlies Gnome is licensed under LGPL. This means it's permitted to create/distribute closed source apps which use GTK so the only question is whether you like the toolkit. GTK is written in C and not everyone like the approach that it has taken.
• GTKMM is a C++ wrapper for GTK+, also licensed under LGPL so it's good for commercial and open source

Obviously, there's Java but that's a different day's flamewar. It would have been nice if Miguel had not diverted his considerable abilities into something which I think will end badly (mono) but the Gtk and Gnome projects continue without him so there's no danger of these becoming evolutionary dead-ends due to mono. There's also the Fox toolkit (http://www.fox-toolkit.org/) which is used in the amazing rezound (http://rezound.sourceforge.net/) and WxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/). Both of these support multiple platforms and are licensed under LGPL.