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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.
I've seen lots of grumblings about this, but lets think for a moment. Why should they be obliged to supply a windows version. Its software developed for unix. Windows is a big difference and porting to it is no fun (I know). If its not fun, why give it away for free. So they're currently only selling it. Looks like a proccess. If they don't make enough money to makeit a viable option they'll probably just dump windows support entirly. From the unix front they get lots of useage and thus advertising of a sorts, what with kde and all the related apps. But free stuff for windows using qt hasnt really caught on, so why bother supporting such a hassle. Its their work to do with as they will they were supllying a free service and it didn't work out for them don't harp on them Don't like it? the current code is gpl fork it yourself and continue developing it if you all really care the point is that probably no one cares enough and it won't happen, which is why I think they've largly abandoned it. The difference again being popularity of platform. If they stopped new release of the gpl unix versions, someone, most likely the kde group, would pick it up and keep it going.
Methinks we'll be seeing a lot more of this in future, ie: release software for free, let it become established for a few years, then discontinue the "free version" so people are, to some extent, forced to buy the commercial version.
Companies should either do free or commercial software, or both. They shouldn't establish their product as free and then start charging for it once people rely on it.
This strikes me as more of a long-term market-share strategy rather than a recent change of policy.
Well, you can do free cross-platform QT development on any platform you want, as long as that platform runs X11 and has a POSIX-like interface (and what platform doesn't, nowadays?). Now that XFree86 is available for Windows (which is awesome, BTW) it should hardly be any trouble at all to develop QT/X11 applications for Windows as well. But if you want native QT/Mac or native QT/Windows, you still have to pay.
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