Slashdot Mirror
"KDE 2.0 Development" Is Online (And OPL)
kupolu writes: "'KDE 2.0 Development,' a new book being published under the Open Publication License, is now available in full online. Another example of Open-ness at work. A quote from the story says, 'Since the book is released under the Open Publication License, it may be modified and redistributed online, which means that the book can be maintained (fixed, updated, expanded etc.) in the style of a free software project. In this spirit, volunteer translation of the book into five other languages has already begun.'" The book seems to be written in a nice, straightforward way. It starts off by explaining the motivations of the KDE project, but the bulk of the book is a combination of explanations and code examples covering everything from KParts to Mesa and OpenGL to multimedia integration. Happily, this book also serves in part as a user advocate -- programmers are reminded about the importance of readable dialogues and system responsiveness. You can go straight to the book, or check out the excellent andamooka project, which hosts the online version of this soon-available-in-print book.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Tell ya what, the day Gnome looks as good as KDE2 is the day I start using it. Right now, it's ugly. It's far better looking than nasty old CDE, but it's got a long way to go until it looks like something I want on my desktop. Yes, I am into pretty GUIs. If I just wanted functionality, I would use CDE. But both are ugly, almost depressing in the long-term view. I want something that makes my day more interesting, and something that makes my friends go "Wow, check that out, that's cool. What are you using?" I have not had KDE2 crash once in the last two weeks I've been using it. Konqueror has been pretty solid, but it freaks out on things like my.yahoo.com, I've still not been able to get it to load that site. But, it's very promising.
What I was attmepting to do was provide my perspective on QT/KDE. If I'm not allowed to post MY OPINION on why something sucks, then /. is pointless.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
It has been RMS-certified Free for more than a year. It has been under the GPL for a month. You guys got everything you said you wanted. So why are you still bitching? Two or three years ago your group should have been HONEST and said that nothing that Trolltech would do could satisfy you...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Start pricing out professinal grade cross-platform development tools. Qt is a long ways away from being expensive.
But you are right that it is too expensive for "casual" use. Perhaps they should offer a much cheaper version for non-commercial developers, perhaps similar to the educational program.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
KDE2 still crashes every few hours and they're writing docu?
Proper software engineering says that the documentation should be finished before releasing the software. I hardly think that they're early. Hell, they're late! But in any case, KDE is not crashing on my box (Slackware 7.1). I find it extremely stable. KOffice has a ways to go, but the rest of the standard KDE2 is quite nice.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Oh my god! There's a corpse on my desk!
Okay, all you trolls go home. Nobody's dead, there's no blood on the highway. Not even a banged shin. KDE2 is staying on my desktop. I don't give a shit what Sun says. They aren't my master.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If you're just a user, it doesn't make any difference. If you're a developer, you can STILL use KDE without having to program for it. I don't like GTK, but I still use GIMP, AbiWord, XMMS and others.
All philosophical issues have evaporated: you can use it under the GPL if software under other licenses are distasteful to use. The aesthetics issue is gone: several OS-emulating widget themes are standard, other themes can be written, KDE has written a bunch of their own, you can use the KDE themes to create your own without having to know programming. Performance is equal to GTK: it always has been, but most distros ship the default build, so build it for multithreading and with -fno-exceptions and it's damn fast!
So the difference is the same as that between pizzas and calzones. There are some people who like pizza but hate calzones. Go figure...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I fully expect Qt to come down in price for Closed Source use in the future, but before it does there needs to be another revenue source. The alternative revenues commonly cited just don't work for Qt. Charging for support is ludicrous: their customer is precisely that type that needs little support, and the library itself has wonderful documentation and and excellent mailing list. To base their revenue on support is to encourage them to ship a product that *needs* support. And giving it away then begging for donations (or kickbacks from Redhat) just isn't realistic.
I do see some movement in the way of alternate revenue streams though. Opera and Kylix both paid good money for Trolltech services. As desktop unices become more common, this revenue will grow. And I see that they are looking into the proprietary add-on market for Qt modules.
But in the end, I still see this huge fact staring out from the window of reality: people who are charging money for their own software are bitching that Trolltech is doing the same. Although the shareware writers may be left out in the cold, it is more than affordable for the vast majority of commercial developers. Go ask your auto mechanic what his tools cost.
I think in the current environment, choosing GPL for something as fundamental as a GUI library is, ultimately, harmful to the goals of free software.
I fully agree. But Qt is not under the GPL. It is under the GPL *and* the QPL.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You misunderstand me! I called no one evil! I'll leave the moralizing name calling to the stallmanistas...
:-)
There's nothing wrong in bitching. Hell, I bitch sometimes myself
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
No, no, no! A free Windows port would kill TrollTech. TT (judging from the outside, Qt's API, for instance--which is the best I've used) assembled a great team of programmers and is paying them to work on the free version of Qt by letting the corporations that can afford it pay for a Windows version
Yes, but that only applies if you assume that the majority of people buying the licenses would release their code under the GPL, which isn't likely. What it would do, however, is bring a large amount of Free software to Windows.
Hear hear! I'm a huge fan of GNOME, but a few days ago I tried KDE 2.0 and was amazed to discover what kinds of things I'd taken for granted not having in GNOME. As in a good e-mail client, good file manager, good web browser, great control panel, good office set, and a generally more "together" feel. (to be fair, I miss sawfish, the panels, and the visual feel of GNOME is nicer). When Nautilus and Evolution and GNOME Office are all usable, I'll probably switch back, but until then...
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
In other words, only Sams Publishing has the right to distribute printed copies. This might sound fair enough, but it suffers from the same problem as the QPL: incompatibility with itself. If you want to merge portions of this book with portions of another, similarly licensed book from someone else, then nobody has the right to print the resulting derivative work. If a C++ book, say, was released under this license by Que, say, and you used the C++ book and the KDE book to create a derived work, "Learn C++ for KDE", then neither you nor Que nor Sams Publishing have the right to print that book.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
It's a real issue, because Microsoft uses MFC to control developers. They're scared of a good, portable, widely used GUI toolkit. That's why it's important to have one.
There's antitrust history on this, related to Borland, which had the first C++ wrapper for Windows. Symantec decided years ago that fighting Microsoft with a closed-source cross-platform SDK was hopeless, which is why they dumped Bedrock.
Open source, though, has a big advantage here. Open source doesn't go away if the vendor does. And this is something marketed to programmers, who can fix the thing. So if a free GUI toolkit for Windows gets a reasonable amount of use, it can live for a long time. An open source version may have a bigger potential market than a closed source version. The vendor may have to fund the project by selling support, but then, that's the Red Hat business model.
[Qt is] truly Free, so you can port it yourself if you want to. There's a lot of Unix-only Free software, I don't hear you moaning about how GNOME only runs on Unix.
But this means you have to do the work of porting Qt. The work of porting GTK+ is already mostly done.
Or to put it another way: Qt makes a fellow choose two out of three from the set {free software, available now, available on both Windows and POSIX+X11}. Until the WinXFree86 team figures out how to work around 16-bit code in Windows 9x GDI (XF86 pretty much works in NT), those three attributes are available in GTK+.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In the interest of speed, I downloaded the tgz file and put it on my local server. The css files are missing, resulting in
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Books have certain qualities:
Books are physical entities written on paper
Boots are set in stone, they cannot be modified
To keep on calling this a book is like calling a car a cart.
-
Qt is Free Software for Free Software, Open Source for Open Source, and Proprietary for Proprietary. What more could you want?
Instead of asking yourself if you really want to use a library under the GPL/QPL, instead ask yourself if you want to write an Open or Closed application...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Almost a year ago I posted in the midst of a KDE/GNOME flamewar that it didn't matter what KDE or Trolltech did. They will *never* be accepted by GNU and its sycophants. Now that EVERY stated objection of GNU to KDE is gone, removed, excised and exorcised, I find myself proven correct. These guys just aren't satisified with making their own decisions to use GNOME. With their warped view of freedom, they just can't stand it when people make their own decisions to use KDE.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
QT AFAIK only supports C++
Wrong. At the very least, there are a good set of bindings for Python, I believe there are also Perl bindings.
QT is only truly Free on Unix.
So? It's truly Free, so you can port it yourself if you want to. There's a lot of Unix-only Free software, I don't hear you moaning about how GNOME only runs on Unix.
GTK works fine on many platforms
QT works fine on many platforms. X is not required, either.
Does this increse my freedom as a programmer? (Can I apply skills/knowledge of this undertaking to other projects/applications/platforms?)
What makes you think that you cannot do this with QT? Trolltech also sells QT under a license that allows non-free programs to be written with QT. How does this magically remove all your knowledge of QT once you have completed a project?
Does this increase my users freedom? (Can they run in in Windows, etc?)
QT works on windows. You only need to pay for QT if you develop with it, and don't want to port it yourself.
Anybody planning to offer an open version on Windows?
The Open Publication License 1.0 covering this book can be ./configured as a free or non-free license. The base Open Publication License 1.0 is free; the OPL with either of the Section VI options is not free.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm glad to see this book come out. It seems to me that there are not nearly enough quality books on KDE & Gnome programming in general, and definitely not enough for KDE itself.
:)
In the years to come we are going to need alot of quality tools to help pull programmers out of their reliance on the HUGE pile of high-quality crutches (ie, books on how to program in VB).
The transition to a free/open software world is not going to be won on the desktop alone. The other half of the fight is going to be for the commercial programmers.
With the establishment of the Gnome foundation, I was slightly worried that KDE might slow down a little bit. Thankfully, they didnt seem to miss a beat.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game