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Trolltech Plans GPL Release For Qt/Mac
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."
Who else finds it amusing that both the 1.0 version of Safari (Apple's port of Konquerer, to oversimplify a bit), and the GPLed Qt (a framework to let you run plain old Konquerer on OSX with aqua widgets), are both likely going to be released at the same conference by different companies?
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
...and in apple, there are designated places where one expects to find things like "Quit", and "Preferences", that are likely different on other platforms. I think apple did this on purpose, but it makes writing cross-platorm gui apps annoying because the mac version will always be a bit different. I mean you might get around it with compiler directives, or something like that, but it has to be considered.
You say
This truly is wonderful news! There are a large number of client applications that use Qt for display rendering that really aren't fundamentally X11 applications.
Several of these applications are used daily by our engineering team.
Having a native (or at least X11-free) version of these tools is a real bonus for us; but in particular, it's a bonus for the less sophisticated users that would benefit from using applications as though they were OS/X native applications.
Think about CEO or tech support people who don't (won't) want to run X11 just in order to look at that packet trace or 'jiggle that SNMP MIB'.
I, for one, look forward to this, and will happily help port a few key applications to the Darwin / OS X platform.
This, and portage all in one week! Good News For All!
In a lot of ways, I wonder why frameworks don't deal with a meta-structure and then arrange menus to fit the platform. Admitially, a lot of resources are unique to a platform (icons of different sizes), but everyone has "preferences", customize the toolbar, copy / paste, find, program specific, application level (quit), and file level (open, close, etc.). Assign location at a "higher level" and let the framework do it jobs for the machine.
Is that KDE's KOffice suite has been ported to Mac OS X using QT/Mac. That means we have a free, good looking, and relatively feature full office suite on the Macintosh, and KDE may get even more help with the suite from Mac developers.
On a side note, I've been waiting for a good C++ development library for Mac OS X. Cocoa is nice, but I'm not so good with Obj C yet, and QT may be just the thing I'm looking for. It'll work on Windows and Linux as well, so that's an added bonus. I'd also like to see Cocoa bindings for C++
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Trolltech is a high-potential company with a bright future. The QT toolkit is the best thing around for clean fast and portable progamming. Trolltech is right to push QT to permeate across the world to reap its profits; they deserve it.
QT has given Linux alot. KDE became so big that GNOME had to be created as a free alternative before QT/X11 became GPLed. Now the Apple port will not only help apple applications, they will help Linux applications giving them more weight. Theres suddenly another big reason to shift your entire software project to QT despite any costs.
My only gripe is the really high license cost for a student. Ive built several applications in win32 but cant use them afer the 30 days. They relied heavily on printing so I couldnt port them to Linux. I even offered developers with the license to compile them for me for a small fee. I hope Trolltech sees this and if they really want to hide their code from pirates, provide a compilation service at a much lower cost for projects with low earning potential or value. I dont mind being the Toronto office manager of compilation services at all. Will even code for food(hey its 2003, not 1998)
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Of course it's quite clear what we will see - some kind of marrying of KDE and Apple like we've all vaguely been trying to do with Fink/OpenDarwin and X11. Unsurprising, seeing as there's been all that Apple contribution to KHTML over the past few months.
There will, of course, be X11 seamlessly integrated into the OS, and KDE apps will run, in beautiful native Aqua, just as any other Aqua app, with an icon in the dock (maybe blocky à la Classic, but still).
Geeks will of course adore it, and as professed by Apple's marketing for OS X, geeks are one of their target user bases.
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.
iqu
One thing that bears thinking about, however, is whether this release will drive the world of free software to be more and more Mac driven, and at least somewhat less Linux driven. It's fairly apparent that Safari is the driving force behind KHTML now -- with this release, will OSX become the driving force behind other elements of KDE? What will this mean for Linux?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1