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."

Comments

Qt's licensing

[i_am_nitrogen]

Now, I know some people feel it's redundant to bring this up, but why does it cost so much to license Qt for commercial applications? I mean, I can buy Visual Studio for each of my developers for less than I can license Qt-X11. How does that encourage me to develop for Qt? What about shareware applications? Why not make Qt LGPL?

Re:Qt's licensing

[Yokaze]

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.

Re:Qt's licensing

[Uma Thurman]

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?

what the heck?

[tps12]

What is Slashdot doing promoting software written by trolls? It's pretty hypocritical, and it might give trolls the idea that they're welcome here. Editors, could you please cancel this story?

Re:Xft support?

[fault0]

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.

What Qt is...

[e8johan]

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!

Re:KDE on Windows, when?

[Arandir]

It's already posix compliant.

I've heard that before, but I still find it silly. There are several levels to the POSIX standards, and NT/XP meet only a few of them.

The point i was making is that QT claims to be a cross platform dev environment of which KDE is the flagship so the natural step should be cross platform KDE.

Qt does more than claim, it IS an crossplatform development environment. It's the best I have every seen. But KDE requires more than Qt. It also requires X11, since some display stuff appropriate for a desktop is not appropriate for a widget library. It also assumes a POSIX and UNIX infrastructure.

Some stuff could be ported relatively easily though. Other stuff would be impossible or would need to be rewritten from scratch. Most stuff would be inbetween, and difficult but not impossible. I can envision a Konqueror port. I cannot envision a KWin or Kicker port.

I'm an Enlightenment and plan9 user anyway. I like my desktops empty not crammed with silly little pictures.

Last time I used Enlightenment, it had more silly little pictures than KDE ever dreamed of. Of course you can make Enlightenment as bare as plan9, but you can also make KDE equally spartan.