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Interview With Trolltech's CEO and CTO Eirik Eng
jlp2097 writes "There is a great and lengthy interview at the The Dot with Eirik Eng, CEO of Trolltech, and Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project and CTO of Trolltech. They talk about the recent X(Free86) trouble, accessibility in QT, Trolltech's finances, Qtopia, the OS X Port and a GPL'd Windows QT - it's probably not going to happen. And, did you know that Qt is pronounced 'Cute' by its creators?"
The second link is bad ... Looks like the author forgot the http:// or something.
At work, we went through a phase once of calling people who were doing X "X-boy". E.g., I was doing some email stuff, so people called me "email-boy". Well, one programmer was learning Qt, and as he left one evening, someone called out "Goodnight, cutie-boy!". Man, was his face red when he realized what that sounded like. :-)
I also heard that GTK is pronounced "Gittuk" by the gnome hackers...
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Another project where the creators don't event know how to pronounce the name of the project? I run into this all the time.
First, mod check--Hello? Funny? I don't really believe it--maybe I'll get to meta-mod it!
Second, I think of this as a strength--if your personal tastes don't lie within QT, you can still use something else. If you don't like VB or VC, then you are stuck with one or two alternatives in Winland.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I think your correct, Cutie is correct. I think the editor made a typo.
yeah, well I have always prounced the CX domain SEX so I am wary of your sig.
Hello this is TrollTech, and we pronounce QT as "Cute"
a la Linux
Someone's going to mention it, so ...
PF: Somebody mentioned that the Canopy Group & SCO owns some parts of Trolltech.
ME: Sorry, we don't have any influence on them.
PF: Do they have any influence on you?
ME: Not really. They have a 5.7% stake in Trolltech
This is completely believable -- Trolltech doesn't really fit into Canopy's current legal strategy, and there's unlikely that there's any "influence" going on there.
However, you can be sure that Canopy has access to Trolltech's customer lists -- If you have purchased Qt with the intent of doing (say) a large internal Linux deployment, don't be surprised when SCO comes knocking and asking for fees.
While I agree with what you're saying, I do have to say that companies like Sun have a point. They simply can't embrace a toolkit like QT without forcing their customers into unexpected costs. QT is far superior to GTK (although Sun is helping GTK catch up), but the Unix companies already did this once with Motif. They're unlikely to do it again.
That being said, TrollTech should continue to serve their customers and develop a great product. Those who are willing to absorb the costs of QT will find themselves with a great product.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
wxWidgets has a huge following because it is truly cross-platform, with the same [free] licensing.
I would be using Qt/PyQt if it had a non-commercial (or preferably GPL) Windows license, but for now I'm stuck with wxPython - which really isn't as nice as Qt, although sometimes looks better due to native LnF.
I don't see the point of having GPL Linux *and Mac* versions without Windows, just because of the lame excuse "well Windows isn't GPL", it really bugs me, I don't want to write free software that won't work on Windows (and I'm far from a M$ advocate).
MacOSX isn't OSS, it's proprietary Apple stuff that they hacked on top of an OSS OS, so come up with another excuse TT....
And before anyone mentions the non-commercial Qt with the book - that is a very limited version (personal use, non-ditributable), doesn't work with PyQt, and is out-of-date already.
Argh, rant over!
#include <sig.h>
As one of the primary graphic toolsets for Linux, and the choice of many distributions, QT being commercial/GPL is a hinderance to commercial software for Linux. It provides a "toll booth" by forcing all non-free applications to pay a fee to distribute these applications. This forces non-free developers to charge more to pay for these fees, as well as stopping closed-source "freeware." Since KDE is used so widely and known to many as the linux desktop, it makes sense to have a LGPL QT implementation. The GPL should keep applications free, but drastically hinders adoptation as a standard for use in all applications.
I feel much relieved now...
There seems to be no undisputed linux anything. This can be a good thing because it encourages competition and allows people to go in different directions, but it also has the detrimental effect of not having any project be the best it could be because it doesn't have the entire community working on it.
_____
Thank you.
Nice try : a failed pre-emptive strike, though.
:
More specific questions remain
The real questions are
1) What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors? Sorry, sitting on the board means "influence".
2) What is financial relationship between SCO/Canopy and Trolltech? Specificly: does Trolltech owe money to SCO/Canopy, does Canopy have contractual rights to seats on the board? Does SCO/Canopy have warrants or other agreements to take control of Trolltech later?
Sadly, a QT standard on Linux DOES fit into Canopy's strategy for market share. Especially if they can invoke ownership or control of Trolltech on a later date.
If I am not wrong you need to buy seperate s/w for that kind of thing in windows . ( windows users correct me if I am wrong).
Besides adding accessibility features makes KDE very much a candidate for use in Govt. work and any other place where accessibility features are a must.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I like to pronounce FAQ as Fa-Q
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
I am a developer who believes in cross-platform development. However, I do most of my development in a Windows environment. I write code in Windows, test in Windows, and release it from Windows, and everything I've worked on is OSS. However, according to Trolltech, I don't exist. Why do they assume that because the OS I happen to develop on isn't open source there isn't an open source community in that niche? They comment that most Windows users perfer shareware, however, that is not the case. I find that there are a number of Windows users who are wanting to use open source programs for their own work and yet here Qt is preventing us from using their tools because they feel the users aren't there. I find this an unfortunate development.
A little learning never hurt anyone.
> a GPL'd Windows QT - it's probably not going to happen.
Well, sort of. At the very least, it won't be done with Trolltech's support.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I hear that... I'm just now starting to work on a project I'm coding in Python. I'd love to use PyQT, but one of my reasons for using Python is the portability. Why the hell would I choose a a cross-platform windowing API that is free (for non-commercial) for all but the OS family with the largest market share?
Yes, yes, it's their code and they can choose to do whatever they want with it. Well, I'll choose to use wxWindows instead...
It just kills me that they justify their GPL'd releases for Linux and MacOS X by helping the Free software community and yet it appears to be a completely alien idea to them (according to the interview) that just maybe there are some GPL developers out there that want to release software that runs on MS Windows.
" just because of the lame excuse "well Windows isn't GPL""
That's _NOT_ the reason they give. The reason they gave is that too many commercial companies used the GPL version of the library in their commercial software instead of using the pricy commercial version of the library, and they said it's impossible to go and sue all of them.
^_^
Let the world vote - which scandiavian country is best on open source? Norway (Qt), Sweden (Mysql) or perhaps Finland (you know who...). What is Denmark doing, btw...?
Qt has a non-commercial windows license. It is basically the GPL with the added restriction that you cannot use it at your place of employment. That sounds reasonable. Hack stuff together as a hobby if you want, but if you need Qt at work, your employer should buy a license for it.
I got a copy of Qt with the book "C++ Programming with Qt3"
It looks pretty slick. I won't use it at work but everything else is fair game.
More music, fewer hits
Isn't the idea of Qt to avaid the proprietary aspects of OS X, which would be the interface. If it runs similarly on the "free" version, isn't it free from the proprietary aspects? Similar to the comments on Java earlier today, if the code is tied to non-free parts of the OS, then the tools cannot be free, and the potential forr costs being incured by TrollTech are a possibility.
Yeah right. Linux also won't get a widespread adoption because it uses same predatory licence...
BTW, licence didn't stop Opera from using QT on Linux. I haven't heard about any popular commercial GTK-software...
"EE (laughing): As some people mentioned on the dot, it has partly to do with finances, sales and Trolltech's business model. Another point is the fact that Windows is a closed source Operating System. There is no community for Free Software development under Windows."
n Office
Well it sure as hell will not evolve using QT! This is just a load of monkey muffins. I use
Eclipse
Netbeans
FireFox
Thunderbird
Ope
Perl
Python
DevCpp
GCC
and MySql on my windows box. No free software comunity by butt.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No widespread use in Linux? Last I checked, KDE uses QT. How many Linux distributions distribute KDE? Probably all the major ones.
What real reasons are there for QT to change it's licensing for the Windows platform? The interview clearly states why they won't. Your logic makes no sense to me. Someone who embraces the predatory licensing of MS-Windows will be afraid of the licensing of non-Free QT? I doubt it. If someone doesn't like non-Free QT license, but will tolerate MS licensing, then they have some weird conflicting views.
Your insight about the QT logo is a bit off the wall, if you ask me. read into it what you want, though.
I think you're wrong. Check out the KDE FAQ.
The correct pronunciation is Ess-Queue-Ell, according to this documentation entry:
You look at windows and Visual Basic and Visual C, those are all anyone would ever need in windows land.
Wrong. There are plenty of non-Microsoft tools available. To name a few open source or OSS-friendly tools: ActivePerl, MinGW, CygWin, Visual-MinGW, GTK+, Eclipse, Java/NetBeans, et al. I use most of those to develop Windows applications rather than Microsoft's offerings. The only thing missing is a good GUI toolkit that is open source (sorry, Java GUIs are fugly), or at least open-source compatible, and Qt fits the bill. Unfortunately, TrollTech refuses to release a free version for Windows because there is no community (bullshit) and trolls like you think Microsoft makes the only decent Windows tools (bullshit).
If projects like OpenOffice and Mozilla can have faith in Windows users and developers, why not TrollTech? TrollTech could help the OSS community make huge strides toward Linux adoption if they would help bridge the gap.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I know that some people are against having Windows versions of OSS software, but I don't agree. It is important to get Windows users to use cross-platform stuff like OOo and Mozilla. This will help prepare them to switch to another OS when the time is right for them.
The same could be said for developers. If Qt was a viable option for Windows developers then many would use it and they would be better prepared for, and more likely to switch to, another OS.
This seems like a fairly straight-forward argument, which is why many important OSS projects make a big effort to work on Windows as well as Linux. I realize though, that none of this is within TT's mandate. They are a company, not a project, so their job is to make money. Sometimes this coincides with doing what is best for the OSS and Linux communities, but I am amazed at how often this is not the case.
So, though I am a C++ developer, and I believe that Qt is much better than GTK, I'll have to side with GTK for Linux.
I was happily producing tcl/Tk apps for more than a year, until a new employee came on board. He would pronounce it "tickle". "Tickle [this]" and "Tickle [that]" without so much as an ounce of shame. It bugged me so much! I used to pronouce it "Tee-Cee-El" as much as possible just to see if he'd get the hint and *stop*. I stopped working with tcl just to stay away from the small following he'd developed who all ran around discussing better ways to "tickle" -- or whatever.
I still can't pronounce it "tickle" without feeling like I'm somehow being intimate with everyone in the room. It's all about the mental picture. At least "cute" doesn't conote a bad mental piture. I mean, come on... Have some cooth! What if someone came up with a language called BT or FK or SHT? How would you want people to pronouce those languages in a staff meeting?
Hacked? Are you an ass? Yes. Yes I believe you are truly an ass!
Hate to pea in your wheaties but Quartz, Cocoa, Java, QuickTime and more are not "hacks." I'd love to see what you consider non-hacks. Let's not even get into the contributions NeXT and now Apple is making with BSD, Mach and GCC. Shit if it wasn't for those contributions GCC would be far behind the curve. It's amazing to me how one shoots off commentary without ever being on the inside to know what the hell goes on.
What I learned working at NeXT and Apple is we seemed to have this reputation of being untouchable and overly arrogant with our developed products. Not surprising considering seeing both sides of the screen I've yet to find any other company who has even close the caliber of talent writing software that NeXT did and did infuse into Apple.
Any one who would turn down a job to learn under that Engineering team is either a complete schizophrenic or never was considered for any of those positions, in the first place.
It is clear to me how come Trolltech isn't offering a free Windows port. They want to stay in business and the Windows world has a crapload of money to purchase licenses from them. If Bill Gates suddenly went Open Source I'm sure Trolltech would follow.
Why duplicate effort?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
The Qt API is already about as easy to use as Swing anyway, and people can use QtJava if they want to use Qt. But honestly what we needed Sun to do was to increase the number of widgets in AWT rather than developing Swing. Then we could implement more AWT peers using native toolkits and everyone would be happy.
And most importantly, SWT would never have existed.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!