KDE is mostly developed by Europeans (Qt as well), Gnome (and GTK) mostly by Americans, though this has somewhat diminished over the years. The Gnome Foundation is registered in California, while KDE e.V. is a German non-profit.
KDE, in a sense, was the original free desktop.
> K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user.
Gnome could be considered an American "but-its-not-all-under-my-gpl" response.
Personally I always found glib and friends always quite ugly from a technical standpoint, and the poor documentation and support for platforms other than Linux made me move to Qt quite early on when I started.
Dunno about KDE, as i can't say i have followed it much since the whole KDE4 mess. But Gnome/GTK is looking more and more Anglo-germanic, and not in a good way...
> But Gnome/GTK is looking more and more Anglo-germanic, and not in a good way
That's weird, AFAIK KDE development is predominately German, Scandinavian and Anglo and I was under the impression that many key gnome developers were South American.
Qt has always been available under a dual license. A commercial one, and... "one intended to be open source". If you wanted to make your application open source you could use Qt, and if you wanted to keep your application proprietary you could buy a commercial Qt license.
Back when KDE was being developed (which was open source), although the Qt source was available Qt wasn't free software nor OSI compatible. Back then it was owned and developed by Trolltech ASA, a Norwegian company (it was eventually bought by Nokia). Because it wasn't considered free software nor OSI compatible, certain distributions such as Debian didn't include it in their free repository and the FSF claimed it was incompatible with the GPL. So you had to grab it from non-free. I remember compiling 1.4x myself, same with KDE. It was eventually released under the QPL which wasn't considered GPL compatible by the FSF. Eventually it was also released under the LGPL. However while all this relicensing was going on (and it took various years), GNOME was already being developed, which was taken under the wing of the FSF as the free software desktop. By the time Trolltech had released Qt under the QPL and GPL, we already had a fractured "Linux" or open source desktop.
During the early versions of GNOME and KDE (before Web 2.0) ie. KDE 1, KDE 2, KDE 3 and GNOME 1 and GNOME 2 KDE was seen as a Windows esque desktop environment with lots of bells and whistles. As you say, it had large support in Germany and SuSE. Meanwhile, GNOME was regarded as a more Apple-esque desktop environment (like OSX or macOS as its called now) and the other main large commercial Linux distribution RedHat and main competitor of SuSE had GNOME as default desktop environment. GNOME also had HIG when KDE didn't yet.
Meanwhile, as you put, GNOME's libraries were LGPL and were therefore more proprietary-friendly because it doesn't require the fee for a commercial license which Qt has. For bigger companies that might not be a large barrier of entry, and you can find an ample amount of high commercial quality applications based on Qt.
A comprehensive history is written on Wikipedia [1]
Incomplete lists of software using Qt (doesn't contain discontinued software such as e.g. Opera for Linux) [2] [3]
KDE, in a sense, was the original free desktop.
> K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user.
Gnome could be considered an American "but-its-not-all-under-my-gpl" response.
Personally I always found glib and friends always quite ugly from a technical standpoint, and the poor documentation and support for platforms other than Linux made me move to Qt quite early on when I started.