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Trolltech Discontinue Non-Commercial Qt

Posted by timothy on from the tradeoffs-and-obligations dept.

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.

10 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. No great loss by lpontiac · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:No great loss by lpontiac · · Score: 3, Informative
      ut if you want native QT/Mac or native QT/Windows, you still have to pay.

      Half right. QT/Mac is available under the GPL.

  2. Alternative Toolkits by oz_ko · · Score: 5, Informative
    I think one of the best free toolkits is the eclispse swt which can build binaries for almost any platform.

    There is also now a visual editor which should make development much easier.

    Check it out at http://www.eclipse.org

    Oz

    1. Re:Alternative Toolkits by IIEFreeMan · · Score: 3, Informative

      Agreed that SWT is a great toolkit but VEP (which is the visual editor you mention I think) doesn't do SWT yet. For the moment it's Swing/AWT only.
      However it's on their roadmap to add SWT support.

  3. Re:No big deal by BrianHV · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Canopy Company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  5. Before the trolls start by daaku · · Score: 4, Informative

    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:

    http://kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

  6. Re:Perhaps they are waiting for the Bill? by wcbarksdale · · Score: 4, Informative
    Actually, I remember that being roughly their answer on an old FAQ. Their current one says more obliquely:
    Trolltech supports free software development on platforms where contributing to Free Software/Open Source development is part of the platform strategy. At the time being it does not seem natural for us to release a free edition for Qt/Windows.
  7. That's okay: Use ParaGUI instead... by torpor · · Score: 3, Informative

    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. --
  8. Port of Qt/X11-GPL to Qt/Windows almost done by fault0 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.