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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."
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.
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
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!
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
i guess that answers my question...how ironic.
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
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.
I've spent the last 4 months porting a fair amount (> 15 kloc) of qt code to std c++ on the backend (removing *all* qt, and writing my own classes that map to qt's classes where needed) and rewriting the gui in native cocoa/objective-c.
:P
And now I discover it was completely unnecessary!
Arg!
( on the other hand, it's been a good experience. cocoa is a beautiful API, and rewriting the backend in pure c++/stl has actually improved it, since the stl is really, *really* quite good. )
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
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
I don't know, but I would guess not. More likely, Qt is ported on top of coregraphics. Qt has never used native widgets, preferring to render widgets itself.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
All along we've been hearing all these _rumors_ about the WWDC being so big because of the 970, but now we know the _truth_, which is that Qt/Mac will be released under the GPL. Now I'm going to get my plane tickets ASAP!
I assume that OS X 1.3 will now be released under the GPL as well.
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.
Untrue. Both Cocoa and Carbon are built "on top" of a layer called "Core Foundation" - that's the "CF" in CFUserDefaults, CFString, CFDictionary, and many other low-level constructs.
That is true. But CoreFoundation only goes so far; there are still certain things, such as most UI controls, which are still implemented using two totally different codebases for Cocoa and Carbon. Apple is working on unifying these; that is what I meant when I said that Cocoa is being reimplemented on top of Carbon. In the process they're cleaning up much of the Carbon stuff too; they have to, in order to make sure that Cocoa still works as before.
As an example of this, take Carbon's new HIView system, which it now uses for implementing button controls. This is, in fact, considered part of Carbon, not CoreFoundation. Jaguar's Cocoa implementation of things like NSButton now layer on top of Carbon's HIView.