Slashdot Mirror
Trolltech Discontinue Non-Commercial Qt
An anonymous reader submits "Trolltech has quietly discontinued their non-commercial version of Qt for Windows. This eliminates Qt as a choice for those wanting to develop free multi-platform software." Actually, according to the linked page, "if you write Free software (Open Source software covered by the GPL) you are welcome to download and use the Free Edition of Qt," and Trolltech points out that one can buy the current edition of Qt -- seems fair enough.
Qt/Free on Windows was decreasingly useful .. it was a crufty old binary-only Qt 2.3, which is quite aged when you consider that Qt is up to 3.2.x. Being pre-3.0 there were notable differences between it and more 'modern' Qt versions.
By the way, you can still do Free (as in GPL) software development cross-platform on Qt, between X11 and Mac OS X.
There is also now a visual editor which should make development much easier.
Check it out at http://www.eclipse.org
Oz
The wxWindows license is LGPL with an exception to allow static linking and binary-only distribution without extra source distribution burdens. This is nice when you want to tweak a platform's behavior at the toolkit layer.
Technically the wxWindows license is LGPL with exceptions. The exceptions make people like me happy (*), while still keeping the source under strict GPL.
There is one significant problem that still affects wxWindows and that is that many Linux based PDAs use Qtopia which is based on QT and the QT license. This makes it difficult to do wxWindows for the Zaurus etc.
(*) My code is under an open source license, just not the GPL. Consequently I wouldn't be able to use GPL stuff although I would be able to use LGPL stuff
Look here. Trolltech is not a "Canopy Company". The Canopy Group owns 4.1% of Trolltech shares. Borland owns 8.3%--is Trolltech then a "Borland Company"? The employees own nearly 64.7%--is Trolltech then an "Employee Company"?
Do you see how fucking inane your claim is?
It needs to be mentioned that this doesnt not affect the GPL version of Qt, as used for KDE and never can. Its been said, and said over again. Go here to find out why:
p
http://kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.ph
www.paragui.org (follow the link to savannah)
....
The market for cross-platform toolkits is wiiiiide open, and there's a lot of ground to be covered. ParaGUI (on top of SDL) is not such a bad choice
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This is probably what you're referring to - an attempt to port the GPL version of Qt 3 to Win32.
Yup folks, I've been trying it out the last few days, and the port of Qt/X11 to Qt/Windows (and is thus GPL'd) is almost done, and has progressed a lot over the past few months. Most of the graphical parts are done (replacing the x11 dependant parts of Qt with win32/GDI equivalents.)
What's not done yet is replacing the non-GUI parts- e.g, moving from the "_unix" files and writing win32 equivalents. Thus it currently requires cygwin (but no X11).
There are some screenshots here. Source is available there too.
The Win32 GTK 1.x port had lots of serious issues. However, I haven't noticed any serious issues with the GTK 2 port (which is used by just about all the win32 gtk apps except the stable version of the gimp). Care to elaborate?
Actually, the whole Non-Commercial version was an experiment in making Qt/Windows more accessable to free software developers. It was not intended as a bait-and-switch. Trolltech was very hesitant about releasing their flagship product for free on Windows (probably their biggest source of income), so in mid-2001, around the time Qt 3.0 was in the beta phase, they released a non-commercial version of Qt 2.x for Windows. The plan was that if their sales started to drop (implying that companies were freeloading off of the non-commercial version instead of buying licenses like they were supposed to), then in a few months they would release Qt 3.0, thus obsoleting the non-commercial version. In other words, by timing the release around that of Qt 3.0, they had an 'easy out' to prevent much harm if the move was a mistake.
:)
Well, guess what? It was a mistake. The sales data came in, and indeed they lost a bunch of money. Qt/Non-commercial was effectively dead later that year. I'd say the fact that they were even letting people download it through 2003 was just to be nice. There is very little reason for them to continue hosting a file they never update. Someone else can take over that job now.