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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.
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.
When Microsoft get around to Freeing Windows, perhaps TrollTech will Free the Windows version of Qt?
As another poster points out, wxWindows does a lot of the Qt stuff in the WIMP arena, and I'd like to add that systems like libSDL pretty much cover the unWIMPy, less structured stuff anyway. Having a spectrum of alternatives is good, and since the smallest disk I can buy these days without going out of my way is 40GB, I don't have a problem with installing a dozen or so sets of libraries.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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?
Look around at crossplatform OSS projects. WxWindows is much more widely used. Hell, even the Win32 GTK port is more widely used.
Also, can someone enlighten me as to why my post was flamebait?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Canopy group is delusional, what's your point? If a single-digit stake makes them a Canopy group company, than that's really grasping at straws. Linux Networx (which delivered a top-5 Linux-based supercomputer to LLNL) is also a "feature company" on Canopy's website. A search for "canopy" on their website doesn't even get any hits. Seriously, the TT -> Canopy relationship is hugely overblown.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm not saying Trolltech is obligated to make a Qt Free edition for Windows, but perhaps they should word things a bit differently on their website, along the lines of "If you write Free software for X11/Mac..." It's just plain misleading, to my thinking, to state it the way they are.
Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought. -Terry Pratchett
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
Actually, if you read what the submitter wrote, he said "free multi-platform" software. OK, I'll grant that X/11 and Mac are "multi-platform", but when those platforms make up ~7% of the market, it's nothing to brag about. Trolltech continues to aggresively deny Qt developers the ability to distribute their works to the vast majority of the computing product. After all, cross-platform Open Source software can't possibly succeed, can it?
MSRP of Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition: US$109. MSRP of Qt/Windows Professional Edition: US$1550. <sarcasm>Oh, yeah. That's fair.</sarcasm> It's really discriminatory and punitive. And it's still not Open Source. What makes them think that taking the low road like that will convince Windows devlopers to consider Qt?
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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.
Check here.
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. --
That might help even if the project won't get finished itself. Remember the Big Qt/KDE Licensing Flamewar? Seeing both Gnome and Project Harmony, a free Qt clone, being developed because many people considered the old QPL to be not acceptable for the base of a free desktop, Trolltech gave in and adopted the current dual licence scheme. With a free port to Windows, and other cross-platform toolkits being available (and getting more support, like Borland now using wxWindows after having used Qt for Kylix), they might reconsider not offering a free version for Windows themselves.
Or we can all just get along and use one of the other fine cross-platform toolkits.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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?
Trolltech is saying that there is no free lunch. It gives the source out freely to Free Software users because they receive so much from Free Software and the Open Source model. They could build a viable business model with their free software alone.
The reason why they refuse to give away their source code and add value to the Windows codebase is because they get nothing in return from them. In fact, they have to pay Microsoft for the "privilege".
It's also much more difficult to code for the Windows platform than for the standard free software *NIX platforms.
One of the reasons is the lack of reliable documentation. Sure, there are tons of documents out there on Windows, but there are too many contradictions in them. Which one is correct? Which calls may cause seg faults? Which ones will cause the entire system to fail? No one seems to know. Microsoft has a mysterious habit of presenting second-rank "experts" to the community, while hiding the first-rank and true experts from public view. This means when you go read an article written by an "expert" in the field, it is really a nice PR ploy with little or no true substance. I guess you have to pay a lot more or live on the Microsoft campus if you want access to the actual experts.
The other is the short, abrupt upgrades that totally invalidate their previous work. Imagine rewriting the entire KDE codebase every year or so because Linux and XFree86 decide to move around all their APIs and invalidate previous ones. That is what Microsoft is forcing people to do. I've experienced it first-hand from about 1997-2000, as I was writing a game based on Direct3D. How many times did the API to Direct3D experience a complete rewrite? I don't recall, but I think it was something like 4. I also had to code up from '95, to '98, and then to 2000 and NT. That was a very painful experience for me. I feel the pain of the people who are chained to their desks and forced to code for windows. You really are slaves to the whims of Redmond.
The other reason is that when they have a problem, they cannot "dig down" into the source code or the community to discover if the problem is on their end or the OS's end. When developing for Linux or *BSD, when you run into some serious problems, you can either look into the source code itself or even ask the kernel community if there is a bug there or what you are doing wrong. Such is not possible with Microsoft unless you shell out some cash and spend a lot of time speaking with phone monkeys.
If you really, really need a Windows version of Qt, and if it really is going to save you a lot of time in your project, then you should gratefully shell out the money to get a developer's version of Qt for Windows. And you can't complain that it is not open source -- neither is Windows, and yet you use that. Your money is going to hire people who really don't want to code for Windows. You will be paying to have them trained on the latest versions of windows. Not just the APIs, but the new applications as well. Your money is going to be used to purchase the latest and "greatest" windows platform for them to code, test, and build on. Your money is going to go to the phone monkey department as they call in to see if there is a bug in the Windows OS or if they are just reading the wrong version of an "expert's" analysis. Your money is going to be spent lining Bill Gate's pockets, and hire a few people who would rather be coding for Linux, in other words.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.