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Qt Released For OS X
AxsDeny writes: "It looks like Macslash is also reporting this, but Trolltech is now offering Qt for OS X. Long live cross platform development." Doesn't look like there's a Free version, but there is a non-commerical license called the "Qt Academic License," which "Allows schools and universities to acquire and use Qt for free in relevant courses."
To a good article at Kuro5hin.
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I just have to point out that Qt really is the most excellent toolkit I've ever used, for any platform (and the fact that it runs on all major platforms is a huge bonus). It's sanely designed and it really is a pleasure to use. I'm not a big fan of C++, generally preferring C for most stuff, but Qt makes using C++ more than worth it.
:)
I just can't comprehend why anybody uses GTK these days
... I just wish they didn't charge so _much_. Never having been a free software zealot, I don't mind paying for software that's truly useful, as this certainly is. But as a starving student, I just can't pay the kind of prices they're charging. I didn't see anything in their academic license section about prices available to individual students. The excellent student prices available on Metrowerks products are one of the main reasons I've stuck with CodeWarrior as my primary dev environment for so long, even though I haven't been wild about their more recent releases in a number of other ways.
...
It would be great if TrollTech learned this lesson. Remember, today's poor CS students are tomorrow's pro developers
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You can write a GPL app and link it to non-free applications. What you cannot do is link to a GLPed library and release it with a non-free (well, non GPL) license. If the library is written under the LGPL you -can- link a non-GPL application to the LGPL library though.
If your above stated take on the license was true it would be impossible to write a GPLed application for any OS which isn't GPLed from the ground up. You can write a GPL app for Win32 or Solaris, right? Last I checked their standard C library wasn't GPL.
Actually, they say it's because a GPL application cannot be linked to a closed source library. They say if you want to link your GPL app to Qt/Noncommercial, then you need to include an exception-clause in your license (this is similar to what Linus does to allow commercial dev on Linux. read the Linux license sometime, it's not pure GPL).
And no, you can't get around this by using the commercial Qt. You aren't allowed to redistribute the source with that either.
However, IMO this is a strange necessity. I've seen some MFC windows apps claiming to be GPL. After reading this thing about Qt though, I wonder if that is even possible. MFC is closed source. Hell, so is Windows. Does that mean that pure GPL applications on Windows are impossible? That any GPL Windows app is actually GPL-with-exception by default?
Technicalities aside, if someone releases a GPL MFC app, you are _not_ allowed to make modifications unless you have a valid MSVC++ license. Granted, you can get MSVC loads cheaper than Qt, but it's the same principle.
Anyway, all I'm saying is Qt on Windows is no less evil than MFC when it comes to GPL. It's just more expensive (but then, it's also way better).
I've got a biggish Win32 program and wonder about moving it to Qt. How big an effort?
:)
Qt is quite a bit different from MFC, and I think porting would be more effort than simply rewriting it in Qt.
Any performance hits / gotchas?
Not really... don't pay any attention to the AC trolls who bitch and moan about moc (Qt's preprocessor)... it lets you do some really neat stuff that you simply can't do with normal callbacks. As for performance, I haven't noticed any speed hits using Qt as opposed to MFC.
Any features that we'll lose?
Nope. Anything that Qt doesn't support is EXTREMELY easy to add yourself... Qt is designed in such a way that subclassing a widget to add new features is a breeze, so you can make any widget do anything you want.
Qt also provides tons of utility classes, which make it simple to do stuff like asynchronous socket/file i/o and so on. It rocks.
Want to stop being dependent on MS before they collapse!
Heheh. Good plan
Reminds me of "Hey, the first one is on me, buddy." Seriously, working in the commercial world, these academic licenses are really tiring: companies get students hooked on some piece of software in the hope that they will then enter the workforce and demand that their employers buy their overpriced commercial software, even when good open source alternatives are available. I hope more and more employers will refuse to fall into this trap: someone who has experience with a costly commercial package where a free alternative is available simply lacks the relevant experience for the job and needs to be retrained.
Matlab is a huge offender in the engineering world (almost free for students, thousands of dollars in the real world). Qt doesn't seem much different.
My message to universities (as well as open source developers): if you want a cross-platform C++ toolkit, use wxWindows or FLTK; they are good enough. And if you think it needs improvements, make those improvements student projects and contribute them.