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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
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?
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.
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. --
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.