It was GPL (or pay license) to start with. I believe you mean you wonder if it had been LGPL to start with. Subtle, yet enormous difference for a library.<p>As to the speculation, I don&#x27;t know. Special preprocessing phases to extend C++ are odd. The signals and sockets paradigm is a mixed bag. Plus there are serious trade offs to the entire application framework vs a library choices in the first place. On the other hand, the runtime type system and heavily stylized macro style of GTK&#x27;s gobject system was certainly an odd duck to say the least.<p>Personally, between the web, mobile, &quot;modern&quot; UX&#x2F;UI ideas, desktops that want to be tablets, etc, I think the 20-30 years of GUI exploration is coming up very empty handed. Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever.<p>Where things are going from here?