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Trolltech Plans GPL Release For Qt/Mac

Posted by timothy on from the not-just-kde dept.

michae1m writes "Trolltech today announced that Qt/Mac will be released under the GPL (GNU General Public License) at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2003 in San Francisco on June 23rd (http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/announcements/0 0000129.html). For some screenshots check out dot.kde.org/1055852609. This means many X11 Qt apps will be easily rebuilt for OS X without requiring X11, very cool."

10 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Not only is it good for Apple by dbrutus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's good for the projects. Free software gets introduced to an entirely new clientle, the kind of end user that is exactly what the OSS movement needs, one that is uber picky about UI, is very loud about it, and will nag and complain until the UI is fixed.

    *That's* what's been missing from Open Source and it's arriving not a moment too soon.

    1. Re:Not only is it good for Apple by gnuadam · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Good point, except that the ui for the mac and for linux are likely to still be a bit different. Things like the "master" menu bar, and the dock are unique to mac, and so the version a mac user uses will likely still be different than the x version...

      That said, things can only get better...

      --
      You say :wq, I say ZZ. Why can't we all just get along?
    2. Re:Not only is it good for Apple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think apple did this on purpose

      Yes, they did, but the short answer is that Apple has been doing it longer than anybody else. Any time somebody creates a new windows-and-mouse interface, you have to ask yourself, "Why did they choose to be different from the Mac way here?" Often the answer is, "To be like Windows," but that just raises the question of why did Microsoft choose to be different from the Mac?

    3. Re:Not only is it good for Apple by dbrutus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually there is something called objective C++ which you might not be aware of which should allow you to take advantage of all sorts of Mac OS X goodies in otherwise C++ files.

      I think that QT is not the wrong answer but rather the right answer to a question you aren't considering. There's likely to be a market for it for people who want Mac programs and QT software to reside on the same machine. Not having to have the overhead of X11 is a real plus and should be viewed that way.

    4. Re:Not only is it good for Apple by dbrutus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What was transplanted into what *is* a distinct fight within Apple right now but each distinct body part (BSD, Java, Mac UI, NeXT UI, Applescript, etc) seems to be melding into a new, cohesive whole.

      An example, on Mac OS X hints I saw how to create a software airport bridge that turns on at logon. The fellow was a unix hacker and got stock libraries, recompiled them and tweaked until he was happy. I look at that and say, hmmm, why not just run a login applescript to do the same thing (even if the app is not normally scriptable, UI scripting is out and you can script just about anything now).

      I suspect that a lot of the features that were marked missing in 10.0 are no longer missing at 10.2. I expect the list to grow shorter as time goes on and 10.3 etc are released. At the same time I expect that UI advances like the services menu will improve and provide an overall *better* experience than classic MACOS. So where are we? I agree that we're overall better but even the down side isn't as gloomy as you paint. Apple has to wow with new product as it backfills bringing over old classic OS features it couldn't get to in time for 10.0. This slows the process down but it's a temporary price for an astounding OS transition.

  2. KOffice vs. MS Office v. X by theolein · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am just speculating here, but this does open a path of thought for me in that Apple might have encouraged this action by Trolltech (wider audience, more traction in corporations, more traction amongst consumers etc). Apple's use of KHTML in Safari may very well a sign of things to come in the other area where Apple has been dependant on Microsoft: Office.

    Quite a few people wondered why Apple went with KHTML instead of Gecko in developing a new browser and I think the answer was proabably because of the companies involved - Trolltech is not AOL/Netscape -, and that KHTML is much more lightweight than geckko could ever be, thereby giving Apple the same ability to offer developers the same HTML rendering API on the Mac as MS has done with IE on Windows. Apple could very well be considering doing the same thing with KOffice.

    KOffice is way behind OpenOffice in terms of maturity and features, but KHTML was also behind Gecko in terms of standards support until Apple developers started adding to it. I think Apple's developers would very well be capable of adding the features to KOffice that it lacked, including MS Office document support. They might do this in a manner similar to what they've done with KHTML and webcore: creating "Office" i.e. word processing, spreadsheet and presentation API's, giving these back to the community and creating a closed product ala Safari that would be based on them.

    This is wild speculation, but many people have wondered why Apple has done almost nothing Appleworks since OSX entered the scene. I don't think it was only fear of MS cutting off Office for the Mac that prompted this.

    1. Re:KOffice vs. MS Office v. X by bsharitt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Even if Apple doesn't officially endorse KOffice, just having it there is a big help in itself.

  3. Re:Apple and KDE by dadragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It will be very interesting to see what happens to GTK now. I was just really starting to love some of GNOME's eye candy, but QT/Mac has the edge, I feel.

    GTK > QT for commercial development. The reason is cost. GTK is LGPL, so you can link commercial stuff to it without a problem. QT is GPL, so you need to get a licence to use it commercially.

    The Mac is a very commercial oriented platform, just like windows, so commercial development may well decide GTK is the way to go.

    --
    God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
  4. IS trolltech IP still owned by SCO? by goombah99 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    at one point, recently, SCO owned trolltech. they wrote off the organization but did they write off the IP? Might want to think about that before using Qt

    see this article in Forbes. They point out that SCO's parent comapny has twice before bought small compaines (e.g. SCO) then sued larger ones for the IP. For example they sued Microsoft and won. They sued another company that settled. Now they are suing IBM and will probably win even if no one in the linux world can beleive it. They owned troll tech: the SCO kiss of death of IP legitimacy.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  5. Re:What's more exciting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You can send messages similarly in raw C++ using libsigc.

    A better criticism would have been that ObjC supports dynamic dispatch which in a liberal sense allows run time introspection, manipulation and use of methods an object provides. Java provides the same power with the reflection API. And dynamic dispatch is something dylan advocates like to brag about.

    Raw C++ doesn't provide dynamic dispatch capabilites, and neither does libsig being C++ based. But Qt use the meta object compiler (moc) and Q_OBJECT to extend C++ adding dynamic dispatch capabilities such as runtime introspection of 'properties'.

    This is useful for doing things like taking an xml user interface file and creating a dialog (ala QWidgetFactory::create). ObjC does something similar with .nib files.

    There are some techniques ObjC provides that Qt/C++ do not, such as runtime manipulation of an objects class hierarchy, but these generally aren't useful and aren't discussed much.