Slashdot Mirror

Qtopia is available under the GPL;
http://www.trolltech.com/download/qtopia/

There is a very decent, free, Linux Desktop Sync software for the Zaurus called Qtopia by TrollTech

IMHO, the problem with Swing is mostly that it is horribly overengineered and, frankly, that the implementation sucks. It's all in src.jar - read it and tell me if you would hire someone who would present that piece of crap as their prior experience.

Go here for more info. Droooooooooooooool. ;-)

The own 5.8% of Trolltech. The majority interest is held by employees, with 71%. Refrence here

I didn't believe Trolltech was held by Canopy and so I went to Trolltech's site to prove you wrong. No mention of Canopy there. But I also went to Canopy's website and on their front page the list all groups in order with Trolltech in the lower right. *ack*

Considering Canopy owns 39 companies, I am a bit more concerned about the law suit. I'm sure these guys are quite aggressive (otherwise they wouldn't be where they are today).

Canopy owns 5.8% of trolltech.

Not ownership.

Safari has an emulation layer to make signals and slots work with khtml. I wouldn't say it is based on Trolltech's Qt.

And even if Canopy goes nuts, there is the Trolltech/KDE agreement. Nobody can do anything about that.

According to Trolltech, canopy has a 5.8% stake through the heart, sorry, don't know what came over me...

See breakdown at TrollTech investors

So - yes, Virginia, they have an interest in Trolltech, and no, it's not a controlling intrest. Though maybe they could sue their way to the top?

Trolltech's shares are currently owned by employees, the Trolltech Foundation, and 5 investors with the following distribution:

Employees 71.0%
Borland 8.3%
Canopy Group 5.8%
Trolltech Foundation 5.0%
Teknoinvest 3.3%
Orkla 3.3%
Northzone Ventures 3.3%

For example: TMake 1.3 Release Notes

I couln't find a date on that page however.

Except that your model does not permit for the exchange of their information prior to the full payment for their design. As a consumer you are not permitted to know anything about their design, until they have been sufficiently compensated. You haven't shown that this model is superior.

The information as a service model is better for consumers and it is proven. Check Linux vs Windows

1. Demonstrate that "Linux vs Windows" is an example of the aforementioned scenario.
2. Show that if "Linux vs Windows" is an example, that any and/or all results are applicable to all assets in an information economy.
3. As you imply for your statement to be considered a response to the aforementioned claim for proof, and imply that such proof is existent, demonstrate a proof of the economic superiority of the aforementioned model of distribution.

Linux has advanced this quickly

Linux has been in development for almost twelve years, and many parts of its userland even longer. because information has been shared between competiting companies, Redhat, Suse, and others.

Companies that also have proprietary sources of revenue.

You didn't mention some of the other names, though, that have contributed code, money, or expansive technical information like Intel, IBM, Compaq, HP, CMI, and more. Companies that have no qualms with, or outright desire to make a commodity of operating systems, or the software market altogether. Companies that rely extensively on intellectual property protections for their own sources of income. Do you see Intel or IBM calling for the removal of intellectual property protections, citing a better economic result as their motivation? Do you even see RedHat doing that?

Redhat is profiting

I really hope you can do better than this, although I would be entirely interested in an explanation as to why you believe that this is evidence demonstrating the benefits of removing intellectual property protection.

And while I think your childish obsession with comparing Windows and Linux as a means of determining the success of such a model is more than a little cliche and incredibly useless, you can always take a look at how big a failure Microsoft is in comparison to RedHat. If you could even relate RedHat to your ideology, which is rather suspect at the least, you would probably do better to find a better example.

and other companies are trying to profit

Would that be more like MandrakeSoft, or more like VA Linux Systems/VA Software?

programmers are paid to produce code, not to sell it.

The number of programmers responsible for selling, rather than producing code, is anecdotally small. Intellectual property protections are most often used in either scenario.

This does benefit the user because we get better software

Do we? This certainly seems subjective to me. It hardly matters, however. It also doesn't lend any support to your ideology.

the wheel isnt constantly reinvented

The is constantly reinvented, on this planet where is your

The Qt Free Edition is provided under both the Q Public License ("QPL") and the GPL.

Next time you troll, at least don't make it so fucking obvious, you just look like a moron this way.

Frankly, I don't really see the point. I use a phone to make phone calls. (Duh!) OK, I do use SMS a bit, too.

But let's face it, prodding at that kind of keypad with an index finger is not a convenient user interface.

Frankly, I don't really see the point. I walk when I want to make journeys. I can carry things in my hands. Lets face it, pushing on the handles of that 'cart' thing with the 'wheels' on is not a convenient user interface... and who needs this newfangled fire stuff to keep warm? It's usually more convenient to just run around in circles for a bit.

Come on, guy. In your pockets at this moment you probably have three or four different devices (watch, PDA, phone, GPS, MP3 player, radio, camera, whatever) which have different incompatible batteries and need different incompatible chargers and plug into different incompatible incompatible accessories. So when you go anywhere you have to take this huge mess of kit. And at the end of it none of them are as good as a proper computer.

It does not have to be like this. You don't need half a dozen different information appliances with half a dozen different kinds of radio comms. You need one. It can't use (just) 802.11x, that's too energy-hungry, and it can't use (just) bluetooth, that's too short range. But it can just use GSM or GPRS. Yes, OK, the user interfaces still need some work (although I think QTopia is mostly fine); but we're getting very close to one mobile information device for all purposes. It's got to be good news.

As the copyright holder, you can change the license any time you want. You can start it as GPL when it's in-house, and change the license later if you want to sell it outside of your company.

Not so with QT. Can't remeber the exact terms, but that procedure is explicitly forbidden. If you start it as a GPL project using QT, you can't just change license. You have to buy the QT license and develop a new app from scratch.

Use the Qt Commercial License to ... [b]uild software that is not sold, but that advances the business goals of a commercial enterprise.

Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Standard 2003 - $109. (About $95 if you shop around.)

Trolltech's QT library for one platform - $480.

Win32 is not that terrible, especially compared to X. Yes, it's not quite click-and-play, but with a little experience Win32 is easy to find your way around. The documentation and examples are second-to-none.

For Christ's sake - if the API isn't free nobody will write anything commercial for it. It's that fucking simple. Forcing someone into a choice of licence for their end-product because of a choice of GUI API is retardedly counterproductive.

How much of a fuss would people be making if Microsoft Visual C's EULA dictates how you use, licence and distribute programs generated by the compiler? The sooner someone re-writes KDE to not use QT the better.

PS: Check out The Fox Toolkit if you haven't seen it. Cross-platform and quite unencumbered.

"You get the entire Microsoft Enterprise developer suite for less money than a Qt developer license."

Win32api, MFC, com/dcom is a nightmarish piece of crap. May god help you if you have to develop software with it. .NET and its proprietary libraries are leeps and bounds better but I have not tested them out.

Swing is good for general programming or jsp's but your apps are limited to java.

Carbon/coca is ok but its limited to the mac platform. WxWindows/GTK is a great cross platform gui toolkit but its limited to mainly gui development.

QT is the best api out there for gui development. But its not its main strength.

QT has classes for gui's, database access, 3d graphics with opengl integration, 2d graphics for video and 2d graphics development, networking, xml, and it even has pda portability! Its a suite of api's and it provides a great value.

Its worth every penny if you are a professional developer or a corporation who develops software. If you think its expensive have you ever scanned the price of third party api's? Rogue wave is expesnive and many companies charge $1,000 per user for just a networking specific or pda specific set of api's! QT offers not a specific set but a whole suite. The gui example shows how much time can be saved with QT also. This is important because programmers are expensive not to mention bugtracking eats into deadlines.

QT not only serves a market for cross platform development, but it also saves money for alot of companies and professional software contracters. I heard stories of WIndows only developers using QT becase MFC and the win32api sucked so bad and just took to much time to get anything done. The few grand spent paid itself back.

There are alot of free api's to use of course and part of QT is free for non professional development. However QT is really not that expensive compared to the competion and quite good. You really get a good value. Not to mention companies like SCO (vomit) charge over $1,000 for their own 1980's ms C compiler and gnu tools.

"You get the entire Microsoft Enterprise developer suite for less money than a Qt developer license."

Win32api, MFC, com/dcom is a nightmarish piece of crap. May god help you if you have to develop software with it. .NET and its proprietary libraries are leeps and bounds better but I have not tested them out.

Swing is good for general programming or jsp's but your apps are limited to java.

Carbon/coca is ok but its limited to the mac platform. WxWindows/GTK is a great cross platform gui toolkit but its limited to mainly gui development.

QT is the best api out there for gui development. But its not its main strength.

QT has classes for gui's, database access, 3d graphics with opengl integration, 2d graphics for video and 2d graphics development, networking, xml, and it even has pda portability! Its a suite of api's and it provides a great value.

Its worth every penny if you are a professional developer or a corporation who develops software. If you think its expensive have you ever scanned the price of third party api's? Rogue wave is expesnive and many companies charge $1,000 per user for just a networking specific or pda specific set of api's! QT offers not a specific set but a whole suite. The gui example shows how much time can be saved with QT also. This is important because programmers are expensive not to mention bugtracking eats into deadlines.

QT not only serves a market for cross platform development, but it also saves money for alot of companies and professional software contracters. I heard stories of WIndows only developers using QT becase MFC and the win32api sucked so bad and just took to much time to get anything done. The few grand spent paid itself back.

There are alot of free api's to use of course and part of QT is free for non professional development. However QT is really not that expensive compared to the competion and quite good. You really get a good value. Not to mention companies like SCO (vomit) charge over $1,000 for their own 1980's ms C compiler and gnu tools.

It is true that TrollTech controls who can write closed-source applications for KDE, but they have no control over open-source applications for KDE, or KDE itself. In addition, AFAIK they have never prevented anyone from buying a QT license that wanted one. That would be stupid of them, since they would only be denying themselves revenue. It is not true that SCO controls TrollTech. TrollTech is its own company, not controlled by anyone, and it is fully committed to supporting open-source software.

That's not about OSS, that's the way the industry has always gone. Developers (and software companies) have been being put out of jobs since long before OSS came into the spotlight. There used to be a competitive market in word processors for MS platforms. Now, all those companies that made those products are nothing but a dim rememberance. Remember Stacker? Remember Borland? Remember DRI?

Or, on a more personal note, I once worked for a company that made PC-based point-of-sale systems; we charged a couple of thousand dollars, but that included updates and support. We were very competitive in the market at that time. Then along came a company that sold a competitive product for a couple of hundred bucks (with no support or updates, of course), and our company took a major hit, and had to lay off most of the workforce (including me). But that's just standard free-market capitalism -- offer what appears to be a better product and/or what appears to be a better price, and steal your competitors' customers, maybe even put them out of business.

As for OSS, companies like Trolltech or Sleepycat are using it as a competitive advantage. And last I heard, competition was supposed to be good for the world economy! Of course, it can be painful for individuals who find themselves being out-competed (see last paragraph), but it's still overall a good thing.

The thing you're complaining about has nothing to do with OSS per se; OSS is simply a sign that software is moving from being an expensive specialty market with high margins to being a large commodity market with razor-thin margins. Overall, I think that's a good thing, even though there's obviously going to be a lot of disruption involved.

Finally, consider my first job as a software developer: I got a contract to write a quicksort for a new machine. Nowadays, quicksort is included in the standard C library. Let us take a moment to weep for all those poor software developers who no longer have an opportunity to make money writing quicksort. And then let us move back to the realm of sanity. I don't want to write quicksorts for the rest of my life. I'm tired of re-inventing wheels, just because the older wheels are all proprietary. If you can't find some productive arena to apply your expertise, then maybe you are in the wrong business. Software developers aren't owed a living any more than buggy-whip manufacturers are. When the market moves on, it's time to move with it.

this is beginning to look like clean Qt/C++ code...
Especially the iterators, etc.
Are Sun "inventing" an "interpreted" C++ ?

So here's the stupid question: why didn't (or hasn't) someone build a graphical syb-system that's modular?

At what level? SDL? GGI? GTK? Qt? wxWindows? KPart? Six of one, half a dozen of the other, perhaps you're spoilt for choice?

Sounds like version of Qt but with a much heavier emphasis on the game side of development (Qt doesn't do DirectX last I checked --- "only" OpenGL which is only available as part of its Enterprise Edition, according to Assistant for Qt 3.0.5). Still, it doesn't run on Linux, which does me absolutely no good since all my work focusses around doing real time digital video processing under Linux. b~

I don't know of a bank or credit card company that has opened up their software.

Here's one. I'm not saying this is the norm, but it has happened. More importantly, it will continue happening.

I agree with your point, though. You can't always find GPL's apps where you want them. Personally, I still prefer them, if they are available. Not only can I see the source code, but a lot of other people can too. And yes, I do occasionally look at source code, and tweak a fiddly bit here or there. More importantly to me, however, is that GPL's software doesn't tie me to a particular vendor's product. What happens when the company that makes SuperApp goes out of business? What happens when said company gets greedy, and quadrulples the charge for the next upgrade? What happens when you don't want to upgrade, but are forced to, because a security flaw has been found that the company no longer cares to fix? What if the programmer who did all the work at said company leaves and would like to continue building on his own work?

And to those who say GPL advocates promote starving programmers: Bah Humbug. People do make money w/ GPL'd software. See Trolltech, for example. In their case, they leverage people's desire to produce proprietary code to fund the development of GPL'd software.

I still rely on a proprietary application or two, but by and large I've been able to transition to doing almost everything I need to do using free software. I made this transition specifically to avoid the traps and pitfalls of using proprietary software. So to me, "it runs on Linux" is no reason to use a program. Even if it's a useful program, I'll search high and low for an alternative. Even if an open source alternative is not as featurful, if it meets my needs, in the long run I find I avoid a lot of headaches.

Heck if I know. However, you can install the usbdnet module, as described here, then grab the Qtopia desktop environment from trolltech.com/qtopia, then you're set. This should work for any distro, not just SuSE. If you have a Zaurus, I'm really surprised you didn't find this information via Google and try it out months ago.

I'm happy that for us pascal junkies, that pascal is finally becoming available for OS X. What would really be impressive, however, would be if Borland got it's act together and released the Delphi Kylix toolkit

Kylix is already a great cross-platform tool for Windows and Linux Object Oriented Pascal development. Making it available for Macs would make it definitely more competitive with the QT toolkit which is cross platform for Windows, Linux and OS X!

So to make a long rant short, I'm not jumping for joy just yet.

The group that controls SCO has a 5.8% share in TrollTech. They do not in any way control the company. Even by the usual standards of anti-Qt/KDE FUD, claiming they have any significant connection to SCO is pretty weak.

TrollTech is not owned by Canopy Group. Canopy Group has merely invested in them. So has Borland (8.3%), Teknoinvest (3.3%), Orkla (3.3%), and Northzone Ventures (3.3%), for that matter. TrollTech's employees apparently hold 71% of the stock for the company, so some of that could be held by Canopy Group members that happen to be employed by Troll, but it's hard to say the same can't true about Borland, or any of the other investors.

INAFE (I am not a financial expert) but there must be some differance between Trolltech and SCO/Caldera given the large differance in investment by Canopy.

Canopy owns only 5.8% of Trolltech. On the other hand they own 46.2% of SCO (plus 93% of the company owned by C?Os is owned by ex-Canopy managers - Ralph J. Yarro III & Darcy Mott)

Ah, so friend Google, who are the the Canopy Group? Aha. Ray Noorda. http://www.canopy.com

Ok, so here is some "blah" from their web site....

Canopy Group Overview :: Canopy Group has been categorized as a technology accelerator and a dynamic operating company. Funding and influencing emerging technologies and then providing shareable management resources across its portfolio of companies is what Canopy Group does best. Originally founded in 1995, Canopy Group continues to operate by founder Ray Noorda's vision of "co-opetition," where synergies across the portfolio are optimized at the same time that each company develops independent market success.

ie. Hit any in the Canopy Group and you hit'em all. ie. If SCO makes a sucess of this, the rest will share the "management resource".

So who is in the Canopy Group?

• Altiris--Intuitive Manageability. A complete line of web-enabled IT solutions used in managing the corporate IT resource lifecycle.
• AvenueMe--Personal Desktop Shopping. Select and deliver special offers and gift ideas tailored to your interests and gift-giving needs with Desktop Personal Shopper.
• Axiom Press--CultureGrams and More. CultureGrams and other publications focused on serving the needs of elementary, secondary, and collegiate educators and their students.
• Center 7--Host, Manage, Succeed. Managed hosting solutions and painless enterprise management with rapid-deployment solutions.
• Cerberian--Powering Internet-Enabled Products and Services. Internet management solutions that help businesses improve productivity, free up bandwidth, and control Internet access.
• ClearstoneHealth--Improving Healthcare. Technologies to improve healthcare through e-training.
• Cogito--Harness the Power of Your Knowledge. Making knowledge management the essential productivity tool in organizations with complex information systems.
• Communitect--Intelligent Mobile Messaging. Meeting the needs of an increasingly mobile population with simple-yet-powerful mobile management that delivers personal enterprise data to any mobile device
• DataCyrstal--Rapid Indexing of Video Content. Providing flexible solutions for advanced video analysis.
• DeviceLogics--Providing DOS-based solutions.
• Digital Harbor--Correlate, Collaborate, Cross Boundaries. Business front office integration that puts the focus on people, not infrastructure.
• DirectPointe--Managing Your Technology. Enabling businesses to leverage technology by making it simple, manageable, and affordable and allowing you to focus on managing your business.
• EBIZ--We're About Solutions. Providing multi-faceted computing solutions to customers nationwide.
• FatPipe--Low Cost, Highly Redundant Internet Access. Leading-edge technology that provides highly redundant, reliable, and high-speed Internet access for deploying mission critical applications over wide area networks.
• Geolux Communications-Enlightening The World. Geolux provides both enriching content and the learning platform to deliver it.
• Global Mechanical Monitoring
• Helius--Satellite Powered IP Networks.Efficient, secure, and reliable delivery of broadband IP over satellites and local area networks.
• HomePipeline
• iArchives--A New Page in Information Retrieval. The software application that makes finding the valuable details in your data almost effortless.
• Industrial Training Zone--Interactive Industrial Training. Content designed specifically for apprentices and technicians who lack the specialized training required to troubleshoot complex systems utilizing motion control devices.
• JanusLogix--Elevate, Integrate, Generate. Generating a new game by building a web services nanosystem that allows any application service to integrate, elevate, or generate application functionality.
• Linux Networx--Powerful Cluster Technology. Simplied cluster computing, with an end-to-end approach that makes cluster technology more powerful and easy to use for commercial and scientific high performance computing
• Luxul--The Wireless Wave. Patented solutions for indoor, outdoor, fixed, and mobile wireless computing.
• MaxStream--Smart, Wireless Connections. Wireless OEM modules and stand-alone radio modems that provide long range, low power, and advanced networking capabilities
• Mixerz, First Thursday is a national network of member entreprenuers, executives and investors. The organization provides a regular forum for the exchange of ideas, the formation of strategic partnerships, and the fostering of business relationships.
• Mi-Co--Handwritten forms for Mobile Professionals. Innovative end-to-end solutions enabling the wireless capture, storage, communication, and use of forms-based and free-form handwritten data.
• MTI--Innovations in Enterprise Storage. Reliable, integrated, enterprise-wide online storage and backup solutions for customers requiring mission-critical, high-performance storage.
• MyFamily.com--Connecting Families and Generations. The leading network and largest of its kind for connecting families and generations on the Web.
• North Face Learning--We provide students with a high aptitude for computer science a better, faster, and cheaper way to earn a degree.
• Perimeter Labs--Secure Data Solutions. Inventing and bringing to market information security technologies
• Planet Earth Tools--Compact, Versatile, and Powerful. Award-winning, patented handheld tool technologies.
• Power Innovations--The Standard for Perfect, Dependable Power. Committed to total power independence with alternative means of generation, energy storage, conversion, and management of perfect power
• SCO--Smarter. Better. Faster. Providing software solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses and replicated branch offices
• Smart Chip Technologies--Loyalty Program Management. Patent protected loyalty application for use in the smart card and wireless environment.
• SurfChina--Enabling eBusiness. Developing business solutions that help Chinese companies participate in global eBusiness.
• TrollTech--Software that Makes Sense. Enabling professional, efficient, portable and maintainable GUI applications quickly and easily.
• Tuglet--Marketing Powertools. Providing useful web-based communication tools for corporate marketing professionals and home based or small business people.
• Vultus--The Look of Web Services. Delivering web apps that are feature-rich, cost effective and platform independent
• WrenchHead--Automotive Operations Solutions. Providing innovative technology and services to the Automotive Market to further lower operating costs, enhance profitability, and accelerate growth

Oooh looky looky, Trolltech! So when are they going to be forced to sue for $1bn?

Ironically just recently there had been much rejoicing over the headline, now prominently featured on Trolltech's website: "IBM Pervasive Chooses Trolltech's Qt/Embedded and Qtopia for its New Embedded Linux Reference Platform".

I have worked with Qt before, and I must say that it's one of the nicest C++ toolkits I've ever worked with. The documentation is second to none (check it out: http://doc.trolltech.com/3.1/index.html), but...

Right now, I'm working on a closed source project. I am just about to rewrite the entire thing in C++ (the current version was written by someone else in VB6, and the source has no documentation, and sparse comments, and some of the worst code and logic I've ever seen), and so I was given the task to choose what libraries the new version was going to use. I wanted to use Qt, which I had experience with and was very happy with, but its cost is prohibiting. In the end, I had to choose wxWindows due to costs (I refuse to touch MFC, even with a long stick.)

I cannot agree with you more. At the very least, Trolltech should reduce their pricing on Qt significantly to make it at all viable to closed source developers. It doesn't matter how well made it is, its price can't be justified.

Qt is under the GPL. GTK+ is under the LGPL. This is important to me in my "commerical software developer" mode. If a Linux desktop is to succeed in the long run, it must allow third party developers to create applications for the desktop. It actually costs more to use Qt in a closed source app then it does to write a closed source app for Windows -- including the OS costs.

Thats $1,079 for Visual Studio Professional and $299 for Windows XP Professional, coming to a total of $1378 for both the operating system and the complete Visual Studio Professional toolset. Qt costs $1550 for the developer kit. (That price is only to develop Qt/X11 apps - you do not get portability to Windows and Mac for that price. All three costs $3100 for a single developer.)

So, total cost to develop a GUI application for Windows: $1378. Total cost to develop a GUI application for KDE: $1550 + cost of OS. Cost to develop GTK+ applications: $0 for development kit, which comes with most Linux distributions. All prices come with no vendor support.

So - as a commerical software developer - which platform is the easiest to deal with? I don't know, actually. It depends on the documentation - MS documentation is (mostly) complete, if not totally accurate. I've only tried programming for GTK+ before, and unless things have changed with the 2.2 release since the 1.2 release, the documentation, while there, is very difficult to understand. I would hope that Trolltech's documentation is better, but I don't know...

While most (vocal) Slashdotters seem to be against the idea of closed source applications "poluting" the open sourceity of their desktop (except where games are concerned...), for Linux to actually be even a potential platform for users to use instead of Windows, the cost for the development tools for clsoed source authors must be far lower than the Windows tools. Closed source developers "know" how to write software for Windows. Why pay $1550 to develop for what is basically an unknown?

Also don't forget that the prices listed are for one user - MS and Qt offer bulk licensing, but even $1000 x 5 is still more than $80 x 5 (assuming $76 for the distro + $1 x 4 for CD-R copies of said distro). Don't forget what Stve Balmer said: "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"

He may have looked like a retarded monkey while saying it (and can someone please buy that man some anti-persperant?), but he has a point - without developer backing, a desktop cannot succeed. If developers will create software for your desktop, it will help increase the potential userbase of the desktop. Gtk+ is a much cheaper platform to develop for, simply because of its licensing.

That is my concern with KDE's licensing - that KDE may be forcing the larger developer community away through its use of Qt. Although feel free to prove me wrong :)

I just checked, it is available.

The non-commerical Qt version comes with two licenses, the GPL and the QPL. The GPL allows you to write GPL applications, the QPL allows you to write applications under many other open source licenses. So you can license your application under e.g. a BSD license and still use Qt.

TrollTech has an annotated version of the QPL online, it's worth a read.

2) Can I write a closed source program in KDE without having to pay QT 1500 USD? NOT LIKELY....
No, you probably couldn't. But that hasn't stopped Adobe , amongst others has it? Could it be that QT's flexibility, solid design, and ease of use make sound business sense to non-hobbyist developers? Could it be that these same qualities are what originally attracted the KDE developers?
Sun may back GNOME, but they've made so many bad judgement calls in the past that I wonder if GNOME wasn't just another...

Terms of use
Developing and distributing applications
Private users may use the Qt non-commercial edition in a non-commercial setting to produce non-commercial applications.

A non-commercial setting means that you must not use the package in the course of your employment or whilst engaged in activities that will be compensated. A non-commercial application is an application that cannot be sold, leased, rented or otherwise distributed for recompense.

Private users may distribute the applications they develop as free software, i.e. they must distribute their software free of charge, include the complete source code and pass on to their users the right to copy and modify the software under the same terms.

Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.

...and...

The (GNU GPL) has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace, so don't complain to us if nobody wants to pay a billion dollars for a copy.

A simple way to meet these requirements is to use one of the well-established open source licenses for your code. Add a file containing the license text to your source package and a short copyright notice to every source file. See http://www.opensource.org for information on free software licensing and for a list of approved licenses. Note that although the license requires that you provide the source code, you may also include an executable version of your software for the convenience of your users.

> Is there any programmers out there who have some real experience?

I have no experience of the embedded version of Qt, so keep in mind I'm talking about the X11/Windows library here.

In three words: it fucking rocks.

Qt is simply the single best designed piece of software I have -ever- seen. While it sets out for a huge task, being a completely self-sufficient C++ framework, a multiplatform one at that (and it can indeed easily replace the entire MFC), the class hierarchy is extremely clean, and it's very easy to get the hang of it. Actually, the entire documentation is absolutely excellent, clear and very well cross-referenced. I've never stayed stuck while looking for some info in there (quite unlike the MSDN documentation!). Go take a peek, someday.

One of the nice things with Qt is, if you need to do some basic task, Qt makes it trivial. Reading a file line by line is an example I was confronted to just today: using the MFC's idea of files, it's tedious at best -- gotta do the nitty gritty job manually. Wasted time. Using Qt, it's, well, trivial.

The other thing about Qt is, if you need to do something complex, Qt makes it very straightforward. For instance, yesterday, our VB programmer was trying to make a custom widget that lets you stack frames vertically, each under its own tab, and showing only one at a time. After hours of work, he got to work a simple version of it that couldn't resize, among other shortcomings. Well, it took me much less time to rapidly put together the same thing in Qt, only it worked right away without those shortcomings, could accept any kind of subwidget, and, oh, of course, could resize at will and would work right away on any platform. Keep in mind that this guy is very experienced with his tools, while I'm a relative beginner with Qt.

There are countless useful features in Qt. For instance, it doesn't duplicate data when duplication is not either required or specifically requested by the programmer. Copy a QString or a QPixmap ten times, and Qt will keep only one copy of the data in memory for all the instances. Modify one of the ten instances, and Qt will then replicate its data to modify it without touching the nine other instances.

And those guys actually license their boon of a tool under the GPL. That's almost too good to be true.

Anyway, enough rambling. If you're a programmer, do yourself a favor, and check out Qt. Even if you don't end up using it, you will likely learn quite a lot about how powerful object orientation can be when used by people who know what they are doing.

> Is there any programmers out there who have some real experience?

I have no experience of the embedded version of Qt, so keep in mind I'm talking about the X11/Windows library here.

In three words: it fucking rocks.

Qt is simply the single best designed piece of software I have -ever- seen. While it sets out for a huge task, being a completely self-sufficient C++ framework, a multiplatform one at that (and it can indeed easily replace the entire MFC), the class hierarchy is extremely clean, and it's very easy to get the hang of it. Actually, the entire documentation is absolutely excellent, clear and very well cross-referenced. I've never stayed stuck while looking for some info in there (quite unlike the MSDN documentation!). Go take a peek, someday.

One of the nice things with Qt is, if you need to do some basic task, Qt makes it trivial. Reading a file line by line is an example I was confronted to just today: using the MFC's idea of files, it's tedious at best -- gotta do the nitty gritty job manually. Wasted time. Using Qt, it's, well, trivial.

The other thing about Qt is, if you need to do something complex, Qt makes it very straightforward. For instance, yesterday, our VB programmer was trying to make a custom widget that lets you stack frames vertically, each under its own tab, and showing only one at a time. After hours of work, he got to work a simple version of it that couldn't resize, among other shortcomings. Well, it took me much less time to rapidly put together the same thing in Qt, only it worked right away without those shortcomings, could accept any kind of subwidget, and, oh, of course, could resize at will and would work right away on any platform. Keep in mind that this guy is very experienced with his tools, while I'm a relative beginner with Qt.

There are countless useful features in Qt. For instance, it doesn't duplicate data when duplication is not either required or specifically requested by the programmer. Copy a QString or a QPixmap ten times, and Qt will keep only one copy of the data in memory for all the instances. Modify one of the ten instances, and Qt will then replicate its data to modify it without touching the nine other instances.

And those guys actually license their boon of a tool under the GPL. That's almost too good to be true.

Anyway, enough rambling. If you're a programmer, do yourself a favor, and check out Qt. Even if you don't end up using it, you will likely learn quite a lot about how powerful object orientation can be when used by people who know what they are doing.

> Is there any programmers out there who have some real experience?

I have no experience of the embedded version of Qt, so keep in mind I'm talking about the X11/Windows library here.

In three words: it fucking rocks.

Qt is simply the single best designed piece of software I have -ever- seen. While it sets out for a huge task, being a completely self-sufficient C++ framework, a multiplatform one at that (and it can indeed easily replace the entire MFC), the class hierarchy is extremely clean, and it's very easy to get the hang of it. Actually, the entire documentation is absolutely excellent, clear and very well cross-referenced. I've never stayed stuck while looking for some info in there (quite unlike the MSDN documentation!). Go take a peek, someday.

One of the nice things with Qt is, if you need to do some basic task, Qt makes it trivial. Reading a file line by line is an example I was confronted to just today: using the MFC's idea of files, it's tedious at best -- gotta do the nitty gritty job manually. Wasted time. Using Qt, it's, well, trivial.

The other thing about Qt is, if you need to do something complex, Qt makes it very straightforward. For instance, yesterday, our VB programmer was trying to make a custom widget that lets you stack frames vertically, each under its own tab, and showing only one at a time. After hours of work, he got to work a simple version of it that couldn't resize, among other shortcomings. Well, it took me much less time to rapidly put together the same thing in Qt, only it worked right away without those shortcomings, could accept any kind of subwidget, and, oh, of course, could resize at will and would work right away on any platform. Keep in mind that this guy is very experienced with his tools, while I'm a relative beginner with Qt.

There are countless useful features in Qt. For instance, it doesn't duplicate data when duplication is not either required or specifically requested by the programmer. Copy a QString or a QPixmap ten times, and Qt will keep only one copy of the data in memory for all the instances. Modify one of the ten instances, and Qt will then replicate its data to modify it without touching the nine other instances.

And those guys actually license their boon of a tool under the GPL. That's almost too good to be true.

Anyway, enough rambling. If you're a programmer, do yourself a favor, and check out Qt. Even if you don't end up using it, you will likely learn quite a lot about how powerful object orientation can be when used by people who know what they are doing.

If you go here, you'll see that they have three licenses: a Commercial Development licence, a Commercial OEM license and a GPL Development license. So it depends on what you're planning on doing with what you build. You can't build a commercial product with the GPL license.

But I didn't know and that means there is probably a bunch of others out there too..:

Qt is a multiplatform, C++ application development framework. One source runs natively on Windows, Unix/Linux, Mac 0S X, and embedded systems.

Go here for a brief overview from Trolltech.

Pretty cool with the customization aspect.. Is there any programmers out there who have some real experience? This is pretty interesting to me, and I wouldn't mind hearing some feedback and maybe links or something. =)

is here. I can't find a picture of the device anywhere. Does anyone know whether it will run QTopia? If so, the QTopia platform (already adopted by Sharp and IBM) will be getting some useful momentum.

why is it seen as a bad thing to ANYBODY?

Grudges. KDE is based on Qt, which wasn't Software Libre when the first version of KDE was released. (Which is why GNOME was started.)

Also, as an example, I came in on the scene only five years ago, after Trolltech made Qt GPL. Oddly enough, I'm still annoyed at theKompany, because I installed Kivio on my laptop so I could build circuit diagrams on my laptop. Come to find out, I have to buy the electronic schematics before I can use them in Kivio. Granted, they have the right to charge for extraneous material(which these extra stencils are), but I find, as a (P)oor (C)ollege (S)tudent, that free as in Beer is really, really advantageous. So I'm annoyed. I was really looking forward to built-in Python scripting, and, IMO, Dia needs work before I can use it with much comfort.

For the complete set of electronics symbols, at an average of $6 per stencil set, I'd probably be paying out $60 this week. And if I wanted any other users on my laptop to be able to use those stencils, it's another $60 per person.

And, as a final answer to your question, I gaurantee you I'll get at least one down-mod for badmouthing either GNOME or KDE office components. (Though I might not get modded at all as this is a rather old article now.)

why is it seen as a bad thing to ANYBODY?

Grudges. KDE is based on Qt, which wasn't Software Libre when the first version of KDE was released. (Which is why GNOME was started.)

Also, as an example, I came in on the scene only five years ago, after Trolltech made Qt GPL. Oddly enough, I'm still annoyed at theKompany, because I installed Kivio on my laptop so I could build circuit diagrams on my laptop. Come to find out, I have to buy the electronic schematics before I can use them in Kivio. Granted, they have the right to charge for extraneous material(which these extra stencils are), but I find, as a (P)oor (C)ollege (S)tudent, that free as in Beer is really, really advantageous. So I'm annoyed. I was really looking forward to built-in Python scripting, and, IMO, Dia needs work before I can use it with much comfort.

For the complete set of electronics symbols, at an average of $6 per stencil set, I'd probably be paying out $60 this week. And if I wanted any other users on my laptop to be able to use those stencils, it's another $60 per person.

And, as a final answer to your question, I gaurantee you I'll get at least one down-mod for badmouthing either GNOME or KDE office components. (Though I might not get modded at all as this is a rather old article now.)

Point is, Trolltech only makes you pay a license if you're developing for a non-free OS. Since Linux is free, then even if you develop for KDE and release GPL stuff, and you do so commercially, you still don't pay Trolltech a license. iirc. I could be wrong about that, which would sink my whole point.

link to trolltechs faq thingy

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

It looks to me from the pictures as it the machines is running Trolltech's QTopia palmtop environment, just like the Sharp Zaurus. This is good from at least two points of view. Firstly it means it's easy to port the existing software for the Zaurus, and relatively easy to port KDE and other Qt based apps; and secondly because it means that people producing software for Linux palmtop devices get a wider market with a consistent UI look-and-feel.