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.

Comments

No great loss

[lpontiac]

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.

Alternative Toolkits

[oz_ko]

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

Re:No big deal

[BrianHV]

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.

Perhaps they are waiting for the Bill?

[leonbrooks]

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.

Re:Perhaps they are waiting for the Bill?

[wcbarksdale]

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.

Re:Canopy Company

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Before the trolls start

[daaku]

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

Let them do what they want

[endrek]

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.

Re:Corrections to Timothy's $0.02

[Brandybuck]

After all, cross-platform Open Source software can't possibly succeed, can it?

How much money has GTK+ made for GNU? How much money has LGPL wxWindows made? How about plain XFree86? I'm not talking about donations from Redhat or SuSE, I'm talking about actual revenue from actual customers. Now ask yourself if that's enough to support even one full time developer?

I do wish that Trolltech would release a QPL/GPL version of Qt for Windows. But they'll still have to charge proprietary prices for proprietary development if they want to stay in business.

MSRP of Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition: US$109. MSRP of Qt/Windows Professional Edition: US$1550.

Rather than repeat the tired cliche about apples and oranges, let me merely remind you that filet mignon costs a lot more than canned tuna, yet no one complains about the discriminatory and punitive pricing of fine steaks.