Exactly 10 years ago, on 15th August 1997, Miguel de Icaza started his first announcement about GNOME Desktop project with this words:

Goals
We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software:

• We want the applications to have a common look and feel, and to share as many visual elements and UI concepts as possible.
• We want to use the GTK toolkit as our toolkit for writing the applications.
• We want to encourage people to contribute code and to test the code, so that the software will compile out of the box by using GNU's tools for automatic source configuration.