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Trolltech Makes Qt/Windows Free As In Beer
drachen writes: "Trolltech has announced that Qt/Windows will now be available under a non-commercial license. To sum it up: 'Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt for evaluation purposes; and Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt on a personal basis to create free programs, and the source code must be made available.'" There's also talk of this at dot.kde.org.
The VC and OpenSource relationship has always seemed terribly weird to me. Almost all win32 ports of GNU or other OpenSource tools I have used require VC to compile. I have tried to get some of them to compile under gcc/Cygwin with luck only with a few of those supporting automake, and then only with modifications (though I haven't tried must in the last year).
The support for mingw/32 seems worse, since it doesn't have the Unix emulation layer provided by Cygwin ... but at least you don't need the Cygwin DLL!
It strikes me that there are a number of free compilers / environments out there for win32, not the least of which being gcc or Borland's C++.
Given this support, and Borland's apparent intent to support the OpenSource community with community licensing for Kylix, why are ported STILL supporting VC (especially knowing that few people have legal access to it?).
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
QT requires Microsoft Visual Studio, Apache requires Microsoft Visual Studio -- Oh, yeah, Mr. Gates must really hate these "Open Source" folks muscling in on his territory using his tools. I'll bet he cringes every time some open source developer plunks down $1079 for a copy.
So what happens to QT and Apache and the others when Bill decides to cut them off?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.