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Trolltech Releases Qt 3.1
Isle writes "Trolltech has today released Qt 3.1. Qt is the C++ library behind KDE and this release means that the road is paved for the KDE 3.1 RC4 monday to become final. Here is a list of major new features. Among those are Qt Script for Applications, better integration with Mofit and an improved build system."
It's mentionned on the 3.1b1 Changelog near the end.
Microsoft is a large software house and has various different sources of income. They are using Visual Studio in house. Furthermore they are profiting from binding developers to the Windows platform.
I can imagine, they could even distribute it for free.
The distribution of Qt/X11 under the GPL leads to a greater acceptance of Qt, while preserving the most lucrative market.
How can they earn money licensing it under the LGPL? Any commercial product could use Qt without paying a single penny.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Qt has supported Xft since Qt 2.3.0. There were patches made by Keith Packard for Qt 2.2.x.
Qt 3.1 is the first with Xft2 support.
The cost for Qt might seem high, but there's a couple things to consider:
1) You get a LOT for the few thousand dollars that you spend. What would it cost you to develop the same functionality and debug it in house? I'd bet it would be at least 100 times what they charge for a developer license.
2) The cost is low compared to what you will make from commercial software developed with Qt. Say you spend $20,000 on licenses for your entire team. That would be a fairly large team for most things - not everyone on the team will need a development license. If you've got a dozen developers and you're worried about not making back enough to cover the license cost, the the market is probably too small to cover the salaries of the programmers.
3) You get portability. New platforms, new markets. If you're making an enterprise application with a GUI, you don't want to restrict yourself to just Windows. UNIX is huge in enterprise applications, and your product should run on Windows or whatever UNIX your prospective customers want to run.
4) Shareware might benefit from another library. Qt isn't for everyone, and I don't think that Trolltech is really marketing their product for people who want to sell a few copies that run only on Windows. If you're in that situation, you'd be better going with something like wxWindows or any other library that supports just the platforms you want, and don't cost so much.
In a nutshell, this market has a number of tiers. Qt has targeted the high end of the market. There are other products that might be better suited for projects that don't fit into the categories of GPL software, high-cost/low volume, or low-cost/high volume commercial software that would justify choosing Qt. Ain't freedom of choice wonderful?
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
>I still think that Qt is easily the worst thing about KDE. It supports few languages (and only C++ well)
It supports Java, Perl, C#, Objective-C and Python. That covers most of the popular ones.
>it's much slower than gtk, it's large (and brings a lot more baggage with it than I want for a simple widget set)
Gtk+ is actually quite slow and is as bloated as Qt. The speed difference is mainly in program startup and that is mostly to do with the linker.
>it fails to use the STL
You can use the STL within Qt from version 3 onwards.
>Qt lacks gtk's incredibly useful dynamic keybinding features
That has disappeared in GNOME 2.
>The licensing thing isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still frusterating.
GPL is the recommended library licence as said by http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html . It's only a problem if you want to write closed source software while freeloading on other peoples work.
After having read the previous comments I'd like to post a reply to all of you.
Trolltech is a company selling a cross platform library called Qt. It is freely available under GPL and QPL for the Unix/X11 platform. The licensing costs for other platforms are there since Trolltech tries to make money from their product.
Many claim the Qt is bloated. This is because they do not see what Qt is. Qt is not a UI toolkit, it is an entire cross platform toolkit. That is why it includes most problem areas: sockets, file system access, database access, UI and much more.
The next set of common complaints is concering the STL usage. From Qt 3.x you can use STL together with Qt. Qt does however provide its' own classes for text, values, etc. This is to provide better cross platform support, for example QString supports unicode on all platforms. The QList and other container classes contain useful extensions compared with the STL containers.
As for language dependence. In professional software development C++ is the most commonly used language and will be for quite some time. The other language bindings available are great for developers wanting to use other languages, but they do not render much (or any) revenues to trolltech and is thus not interesting.
The signal/slot architecture used in Qt is also a thing to complain about. What does it do? It makes the code more intuit and estetic. It also speeds up the development (no need to declare struct/classes to pass arguments). Qt provides good debugging support to find all the dynamic errors that can arise from this. The architecture is (now) well tested and proven to work.
To sum things up: 1) Qt is a cross platform toolkit, not only a UI toolkit, 2) Trolltech wants to make profit, noone forces them inte giving the open source community access to Qt, be grateful, 3) the signal/slot architecture works in real life even though it is not the optimal solution from a philosophical point of view.
All above is MHO. I do not mean to flame anyone!