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Novell Desktop To Standardize On Qt [updated]
Balinares writes "NewsForge reports that Novell has settled for Qt as its Linux desktop development environment, casting more light on their strategy to unify KDE and GNOME. This ought to be interesting. The prospect of using Mono to code against Qt makes me drool in advance. Maybe programming will suck no longer!" Update: 03/30 00:01 GMT by T : Sounds like that story doesn't quite hold water; Nat Friedman writes in this Slashdot comment that "We have not decided that we are standardizing on Qt for the desktop. ... We support development with a variety of toolkits, and our internal development is done using the right tool for the right problem. This includes Qt, Gtk, VCL, XUL and others, depending on the application."
You mean the GPL?
The prospect of using Mono to code against Qt makes me drool in advance.
Boy, you really need to get out more.
I'm pretty sure you can use QT with all your GPL stuff all you want.
Given that Qt is available under the GPL itself, it's an absolute certainty you can use Qt in a GPLed project.
Hey, if programming were easy, people would do it for free.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
No. Qt hasn't had annoying license restrictions in years, as it was released under the GPL four years ago, allowing for such projects as a GPL'd Qt3/Win32.
Somehow, this is still news to people...
I can say that there is nothing easier outside of web development. I am an old MFC programmer. I am often lost in developing Qt apps, but I am very comforatable with that because the documentation is copius cnad clear. Whats more is it is soooooooo well thought out. It makes MFC look like the crap that it is (C++ wrappers for C objects). Learning Qt is like learning to walk the right way. It's amazingly simple. I will always request that Qt be used regardless of platform in future jobs.
Now the license is different. I often wish there was a small-business or starting-business license, but this is only pertanant if you are going commercial work. for GPL work it is completely free.
Right now I'm doing some advanced work with QSA (Javascripted Qt apps) It is easy and cross platform. I can now replace a browser (and the rendering issues with a user interface file (loaded at run-time) and ECMA script code (platform indep. cause we run on various architectures with limited space, whose list may change at any time)
The Troll Tech stuff is top notch.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Hmm. I hope you mean free as in speech not as in beer because otherwise that's not much of an argument.
The point of "free" software is that it is open for perusal, poking, sharing, etc. not that it's gratis so you don't have to pay for it. Granted because of the first the gratis part is often the case but the mentality that free speech software MUST mean free beer software is just wrong.
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
It costs nothing to develop business applications qith the QT toolkit. The only requirement is that if you use the $0.00 license(GPL) the app must be GPL. It really isn't much to ask.
The fact that Novell is going to use QT is very telling. Novell is a software corporation whose existence past, present and future relies on selling software. That means that while they will throw the open source community a GPLed bone (Yast, Evolution) they will also offer up lots of closed source applications and some will be QT based.
Novell is not afraid of having to pay a very reasonable licensing cost for commercial development and neither are most other software companies. They already pay licensing for MS Visual DEs, Borland DEs and probably many others. Paying for a QT license is a minor cost of doing business and it will not deter any serious software house.
I personally have been hoping for a while now something like this would happen for the Linux desktop. It's going to take a corporation to step up and unify this effort in order to gain mass acceptance. I'm sure there will be some grumbling in the community, but open source is open so feel free to customize to your hearts content if you don't like it. Most people don't want to have to go to this effor though.
The only potential problem I see is Trolltech's insistance on license fees for commercial development. Not that this is any different in the Windows world, but it'd be nice to give ISVs a completely royalty free solution. I'd like to see Novell take that $50 million that IBM gave them and purchase TT outright and put Qt under a more liberal open license. The wording on the KDE Free Qt clause seems a bit unclear to me. Does Qt get automatically BSD'ed when any company buys Trolltech. What if the purchasing company doesn't make the license any more closed that currently, does that have an effect.
Anyway, I've never understood the reasons people chose to write a whole desktop environment in straight C. C++ just seems a far more natural fit. I've looked over both GNOME and KDE fairly extensively, and there is no doubt in my mind that KDE has a cleaner code base and architecture. With all the "higher level language" rumblings going on in the GNOME community, I suspect that those developers are hitting a brick wall in terms of where they want to go and what the current code is capable of becoming. That sort of thing isn't happening in the KDE world, so I think that speaks volumes.
Good luck Novell, you've got at least one supporter here.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
No, GTK is licensed using the LGPL license. Meaning that you can develop GPL software with it and commercial software without paying a dime.
We're not really sure where the rumor came from that Novell is standardizing on Qt as its desktop platform. Chris Stone said no such thing during his keynote; the video for the keynote is available here:
http://www.novell.com/brainshare/keynotes2004.h
Novell supports GNOME and KDE, Qt and Gtk. We have not decided that we are standardizing on Qt for the desktop. First of all, most software developed for the Linux desktop is developed by the broader community, and Novell could never impose a standard platform on the community at large. We support development with a variety of toolkits, and our internal development is done using the right tool for the right problem. This includes Qt, Gtk, VCL, XUL and others, depending on the application.
We do not regard the variety of toolkits and platforms in the Linux world as a problem, as long as there are standards and shared code which allow applications to work together.
And frankly, today's Linux toolkits and platforms are one of the least interesting topics on the Linux desktop today. The important issues for this industry and market are our opportunity to innovate in information management and collaboration, improving interoperability with Windows users and services, bringing more ISVs and developers to the Linux platform, enhancing the usability and consistency of the various components that make up the desktop, enabling Windows migration with tools and training and documentation, and creating a manageable Linux desktop to enable large-scale deployments.
We see freedesktop.org as one of the most important and central elements of the Linux desktop for the next several years. The desktop today is made up of a number of components, including OpenOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, and of course GNOME and KDE. Over time we hope to work with freedesktop.org to unify the key interfaces and functionality of these components, to improve integration for users and provide a common open
source desktop platform.
Nat Friedman
Novell/SUSE Linux Desktop Lead
Bullshit. I've watched that keynote from Novell's website. (and you can too) All he said is that SuSE 9.1 will be getting a QT-based Openoffice. THAT IS ALL. nothing more. The journalist completely missinterpreted this, saying that SuSE is going to standardize on QT. It's all a missunderstanding.
Life is offtopic.
As Nat has posted elsewhere, the Heise article is wrong.
My team and other teams within Novell continue to
develop and use Gtk as their toolkit (recently
open sourced Simias/iFolder for instance) and
all of the Mono GUI development tools.
The only use of Qt that am aware of today
is SUSE's recently open sourced YAST.
Btw, if you have been following my posts on
my blog and on the desktop-devel-list, you will
know that my feeling is that all of the existing
toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will
become obsolete and we need to start looking
at the next generation toolkit system.
Miguel
Oh, pity the poor proprietary software company! All they ask is that someone give them a first-class GUI toolkit at no cost, and with no strings attached! Is that so much to ask?
Please. Cry me a river. Trolltech spent a huge investment on making Qt the best cross-platform GUI toolkit available anywhere. I think they're decision to provide a GPL'd version was an incredibly noble thing for them to do (althogh in truth, they do get a lot out of it in return, especially through their relationship with KDE). My hat is off to Trolltech.
Do you not see the hypocrisy in demanding that one software company (TT) must give away its product for free so that other companies can profit from the work? How does that make any kind of sense?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Use GNOME/Gtk, because you can USE Gtk as much as you want for COMMERCIAL development without paying anything.
Don't use KDE/Qt, because you can only develop FREE software using it, otherwise it costs money.
So.. NOW KDE/Qt is the champion of free software, whereas GNOME/Gtk is for the COMMERCIAL (and apparently not so evil after all) PROPRIETARY closed source solutions.
You make me laugh!
If GNOME/Gtk is REALLY a friend, let's see them place everything under GPL (for true software protection) rather than the LGPL.
What's the big deal about support Qt is you use the toolkit? Yep.. it's commercial...and if you use it for commercial development, it costs money... so?? Is someone suggesting their software business plan is only to sell like 10 copies of their software, so they can't afford to by a real development license?? Just seems weird.
I was going to moderate, but this is driving me insane. There are just too many posts like this. How is $1000 "locking out" single developers who intend to sell closed-source licenses? Even for sole proprietorships $1K is nothing special. Besides, you are talking about selling closed-source software, which by definition requires other people to pay you money per license, but somehow you think TrollTech is a fiend for wanting to do the same thing. If you want to be open, TrollTech is right there with you.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Well, it appears that it was actually SuSE, with their Trolltech connections, that took over Novell, and not the other way around.
And if we are not careful, Trolltech is going to end up controlling Linux. [We also need to consider the possibility of a backroom deal between Trolltech and Microsoft, similar to the deal between Microsoft and SCO.]
The danger, of course, is not the GPL'd version of Qt. KDE is also not a problem. Both of those are Open Source, so we don't have to worry about them, and I have no reason to talk about them.
The real danger of Trolltech is the proprietary version of Qt and the applications that depend on it.
Or, in more general terms, the danger is proprietary middleware.
Let's look at an example from history. Remember when the PC platform was open, from bottom to top? Remember when you could not only buy the hardware from any number of vendors, but there were also competing vendors for the BIOS, there was more than one windowing architecture (Gem, Geoworks, Borland's GUI libs,...), and there were dozens of development environments, and thousands of code libraries? Remember when standards were simple, when it was easy to write code to interface directly with printers, with video cards, and so on?
What happened? Microsoft introduced Windows.
After a while, Windows became an indespensible component of the PC. Applications depended on it, and hardware manufacturers had to support it. And there was only one supplier of the Windows component, namely, Microsoft.
Soon, Microsoft started using its control of Windows to make itself the winner in the applications market. And today, Microsoft (with a few accomplices) also dictates the standards for PC hardware, its BIOS, its peripherals, and its network protocols.
What was special about Windows? It was proprietary middleware!
Windows sat in the middle, in between the applications and the PC. Any applications that wanted to access PC hardware used (and became dependent on) Windows APIs. And any PC manufacturer that wanted applications had to support Windows APIs. Bill Gates once said that by controlling the APIs, he controlled the industry.
Likewise, PC users became locked in. They could replace their hardware. They could replace an application. But they couldn't replace Windows. As the PC became cheaper, Windows became more expensive, as did the Microsoft applications that Windows "encouraged" users to use.
The proprietary version of Qt is just like Windows. It is proprietary middleware. It sits between the applications and Linux. The applications that use Qt are dependent on its APIs. And if Linux wants to be able to run those applications, then it has to support Qt.
What applications are we talking about? Applications like Kylix, Hancom Office, Opera, the professional versions of Quanta and Rekall and various other TheKompany products, ATI's setup utility, Quasar Accounting, Adobe Photoshop Album, and so on. If a Linux distribution wants to be able to run those applications, then it must support the proprietary version of Qt.
So how bad is it? Has Linux been taken over by proprietary middleware, the way the PC was taken over by Windows?
In other words, Have we reached the point where the proprietary version of Qt, with its single supplier, is an indedpensible component of Linux?
If this article is correct, and Novell is standardizing on Qt as the foundation of its desktop and development environment, then things are very bad.
Others have also argued that it has become almost impossible to have Linux without proprietary Qt...
In their paper Conquering the Enterprise Desktop, a group of developers argued that Bruce Perens' UserLinux would have trouble succeeding, unless it included the Qt Library in its basic install. Were those developers just talking about the GPL'd version of Qt? No, as shown by these statements:
I'm perennially amazed that the GNOME zealots, who started out from the GNU "all software must be free" zealot camp, now argue that Qt is bad because it doesn't allow proprietary applications. (Actually, it does, if you buy a licence from Qt. Unlike, say, GNU's readline library, which was deliberately GPL'd and not LGPL'd by Stallman, who will not issue you a commercial licence.)
In fact, RMS even wrote an article on why you shouldn't use the LGPL for your next library. Without the backing RMS gave GNOME in its early days, when it was an unusable piece of crap and KDE had already hit a high-quality 1.0, it would never have got off the ground. (Remember GNOME 1.0? *shudder*) And yet the selling point now is that GNOME is more suitable to proprietary apps? I just can't figure out where all this is coming from.
If anything, Qt is a shining success story on how to make money with GPL'd software using a dual-licensing strategy. Far from continuing to vilify Troll Tech, the GNU/GNOME zealots ought to trumpet this story as a way to encourage more proprietary software companies to play nice with the linux world. (Peter Deutsch did the dual-licence thing long back with ghostscript, but he only released year-old versions of ghostscript under the GPL, and that's still the practice. Troll Tech releases current versions of Qt under GPL as well as their commercial licence.)