Slashdot Mirror
A Taste of Qt 4
Karma Sucks writes "In 'A Taste of Qt 4', Trolltech reveals that it is positioning Qt 4 directly against Java. Qt 4 promises to be smaller and faster than its predecessors and there will be a boatload of new features including support for non-GUI applications and accessibility under Linux using Sun's ATK. More controversial is the introduction of a new and elegant foreach construct. Incidentally, for those still opposed to Qt's moc preprocessor, Havoc has some interesting comments. It is possible the idea will be adapted to provide GObject introspection in the future."
"Trolltech reveals that it is positioning Qt 4 directly against Java."
And what about Mono?
Arnie, is that you?
Real contender for what exactly ? You rule things out in a way suggesting that one thing can do everything.
Java works very well on server side. It doesn't work very well client side. Its horses for courses.
When KDE released version 3.2, there was a noticable speed improvment for most users. Will we get to see another good speed boost when/if KDE moves to QT4? Here's hoping.
*twitch*
Ain't it neat how the trolls have their own tech company?
qt 6.5 has been out for a while now.
I'm not a developer, I'm just a KDE user. I fail to see how there's anything revolutionary in here for me, or the other users. After all, software isn't just for the developers.
While you may not realise the benefits straight away, software being easier to develop means more, higher quality apps for everybody.
If it's better for developers, then it will be better for you (or should be).
I thought we had come to the conclusion that since Sun "sold out" to Microsoft, that Java was therefore "dead" ... didn't we? And now these guys come along and ... wait ... Trolltech ...?
Nevermind, it makes sense now.
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
Any time a program gets smaller (disk footprint or memory footprint) and/or faster, it helps the end user. The machine will operate more smoothly, for one thing. Of course, people only notice when their computer runs slower, but almost never when it's faster.
That'll be great to be writing servlets and jsp's in C++. *cough*
This should be obvious.
If the new Qt toolkit gives developers things to drool over, they'll develop more software. If they develop more software using droolworthy tools, there's a good chance some of that software will be droolworthy in and of itself.
A good API isn't the be-all and end-all of software design. But giving developers things to feel excited over is important, especially in the open-source world.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
Dude, you can't hope to get a job if your only skill is technical trolling. There is no such thing as a company called Trolltech... oh wait.
exactly - so?
It's a C++ development toolkit - the users of this software are by definition developers.
Also, the article is posted in the "Developers" section of slashdot, it was never intended to interest you. If it bothers you so much, turn off the Developers section in your preferences.
Advanced users are users too!
What if someone bought Trolltech and got prior permission to LGPL the lot. THAT would worry Microsoft, and their pesky little C++ scam as of the weekend to be a trifle.
In the Linux world, Qt is often thought of as just a GUI toolkit. After all, there is no look-and-feel standard in the X11 environment, and by default Qt and Gtk look much different. Therefore, most look-and-feel decisions on the X11 platform amount to selecting between the toolkits. Consider PyQt, which provides GUI support to python via Qt, but nothing more.
What people don't realize is that Qt is actually a massive foundational library, similar in nature to Java's, for C++. It is a very large API, with threading, network, XML, objects, container classes, string handling, unicode, etc. The 'moc' tool even brings extra features to C++ that normally don't exist. It's almost as if Qt/C++ is a language of its own. GUI is a very small portion of Qt. In fact, of all the Qt code I've ever written, most of it has nothing to do with the GUI. Qt makes C++ actually fun.
I'm very much looking forward to Qt 4. With the plans for advanced threading support and GUI/non-GUI split (similar to how glib and gtk are separated), I can see Qt being very useful for writing cross-platform server applications, a market mostly ruled by Java. The great thing about Qt is that it gives us natively compiled code.
It would make more sense to position Qt4 against WMV9, but I digress. (too much Apple news today)
> While you may not realise the benefits straight away, software being easier to develop means more, higher quality apps for everybody.
Or higher quality crap, as we vegetarians like to call it.
Smile. Save a kitty!
Must-not-watch TV!
a. More controversial is the introduction of a new and elegant foreach construct.
b. VB has a foreach construct.
c. Therefore, VB is elegant ?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
A Qt widget set target against the Parrot virtual machine would be lovely.
.Net has well, all that Windows stuff (I'm not a big windows graphics programmer)
Just think.
Java has Swing / Eclipse and the old one whose name I can't remember but I did use it a lot but its 7:30am and the coffee hasn't hit me yet.
A Parrot/Qt set would give Perl, Python, Ruby etc a nice graphics toolkit targettable against multiple platforms. Yes I know about Tk/Tcl and WxWindows.
Uurgh. Must get coffee. And train
regards, treefrog
Or higher quality crap, as we vegetarians like to call it.
shouldn't that be Krap?
Yeah, if they said that Quake 4 were being positioned directly against Java, that would make more sense.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Sounds interesting, BUT.... The problem QT are as follows:
.NET, etc)
1) No GPL version for the Windows platform. As much as people in the Open Source community might hate MS, many (most) Open Source packages are cross-platform where Windows is a platform.
2) A non GPL version of the library costs an outrageous sum of money. Sure Trolltech wants to make money, but lower the costs a bit.
3) Why compete against Java? Somebody who uses Java is not going to switch to Qt as Java is still simpler. To me C++ != Java, and I am not saying one is better or worse than the other.
Frankly, I tend to prefer wxWindows, which has many of facilities mentioned in the parent post. And there are plenty of bindings for wxWindows (Python, Java,
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Wow, a new syntactic construct. Stop the press.
Seriously, such rejoicing about new language features fills me with pity at the thought of those poor programmers stuck with whatever language constructs the "higher autorities" deems them worthy to have.
Lisp has supported extending the language for about 40 years. And people still get excited when they get a new syntactic construct for C++. That is sad.
If you want to find joy and productivity in programming, use Scheme, Common Lisp or some other programmable programming language. Free your mind.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Is this the one you can't remember?
I hope they looked at the Swing libraries for inspiration. I've settled on Swing as the library for a big project, because I need to change the core storage model of a word processor, and Swing makes that easy. The text storage just has to implement a simple interface, plug in your own storage object and everything works. If QT4 has something similar, I might be writing native code after all.
- So I can write large scale enterpise software in QT?
- So I can write applets in Java?
- So QT'll run in smartcards?
Oh, perhaps it's this aspect that they're shooting to duplicate.http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/for_each.html would do the trick (and would help in avoiding a large body for for-loop).
Qt 4 sounds amazing, I just hope that they will be able to deliver, that's a hume amount of stuff their promising and none of it is trivial. I'm very happy with the direction Trolltech is taking with Qt 4 and I wish them the best of luck! I'm also looking forward to Mark Summerfield and Jasmin Blachette's book on Qt 4.0. I've already got their book on 3.2.x and I found it to be pretty good, though still a bit too advanced for me (I don't know C++ well).
You can buy a commercial license and make closed-source linux applications, while supporting the community financially.
Or you can stick with the open one...
I can't see why it would bother microsoft either way.
Already, Java is being threatened by Microsoft (for obvious reasons) and by Sun themselves (for almost-as-obvious reasons-- i.e. Sun getting into bed with Microsoft). Remember that the software field does not look like "Microsoft versus Sun versus Apple versus...." at present. Rather, it looks like "Microsoft versus everybody else.."
Until the marketplace is more open, with no gigantic 95+% monopolies in any given field, I'd like to see the non-Microsoft players cooperate in an effort to cut MS down to size. Then, and only then, should they focus on competing amongst themselves!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I think SCO has made a business out of trolling :)
Yeah, well, the problem is that Java just isn't Free or Open Source enough, so it's doomed. QT, on the other hand, has a bright future. It's so Free you can't even write a non-GPL program that uses QT unless you pay an expensive per-platform per-developer-seat yearly fee. And you can't write a program that targets Windows for QT at all unless you go with the yearly fees.
Now, which do you think developers would rather go with? A company with tenuous links to SCO and a free-to-use but closed-source base library, or a company with tenuous links to SCO and a library you can only use to write GPLed software for UNIX? Yes, I think we all know the answer to this one: the one that the slashdot groupthink hasn't decided is "doomed". So, QT will win.
hehe, not bad of a reply.
How was this post moderated Troll ??? It is in fact very informative. I was looking for free alternative for QT (don't want pay 1500+ $ and fed up with MFC) and found them in this post. Please moderate it up.
...that will make Things better. What is it, that everybody is trying to discredit java, by just copying fundamental features of the Language, or API or VM? .NET and QT are just the big players here. I don't know whats wrong with these folks.
So Qt 4 is "positioned directly against Java". Fantastic! Except I read just a few days ago (also here on slashdot) that Qt will keep on blockading the release of a free-of-charge and publicly available version of their Win32 library port.
Now, call me cynical, but how in the hell are you gonna compete with Java, whose foremost strength is the (alleged) platform independency if you kill yourself right away for the most commonly used platform?
As pointed out by many readers already, Mac OS X is not free or Open Source, and does not have a statistically proven larger base of FOSS developers. So offering free Qt library for OS X while categorically denying Win32 is nothing but complete BS. And this new PR crap about "positioning against Java" is simply too laughable seen in this light.
Btw, I prefer KDE over Gnome, so I'm not an "enemy" of Qt per se.
Driven by consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, desktop applications are moving away from standard widgets and styles towards more customized user interfaces. Qt 4 will support this modern user interface approach through its powerful style system as well as with flicker-free refreshes and transparency for all built-in and custom widgets.
I find this trend distressing. Custom user interfaces are, in general, a bad idea. Using non-standard widgets impacts negatively upon application usability.
Standardised widgets help the user quickly adapt to new applications, by maintaining consistent user interfaces.
I must leave Slashdot now, your ego is taking up all the bandwidth
Business Voyeur
Thank God for your post. I was beginning to think I was the only person in the world to find Ms Rice delicious. Now I need feel no shame
I wonder if it's anything like the foreach macro I wrote and proposed for inclusion in the Boost library. Slides and source code available from here.
i.e. a standardized way to interact with relational DBs (like ODBC and JDBC)?
If the answer is "No", I cannot really see the point.
your post is redundant. GPL is GPL. If you want GPL Qt on windows, you are free to write the code yourself. As if Trolltech's GPL isn't as good as the GNU GPL. Give this a rest.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Yeah - I have the same problem with kernel and compiler releases. I don't care about those, I just want to run my browser. Who needs to know about all that developer rubbish? If I wanted to know about that I'd go to some sort of nerd-news site.
Ydco co
And Jerry Seinfeld makes a living out of being funny , something you would be better off not trying.
Java works very well on server side. It doesn't work very well client side. Its horses for courses.
Sorry, but Java on the client works just fine. I've implemented many sophisticated GUI client applications and wouldn't dream of using anything other than Java.
While you may not realise the benefits straight away, software being easier to develop means more, higher quality apps for everybody.
So you mean trolltech think Java is easier and "higher quality"?
Dick Cheney is going to be president in 2008. Go start your own country if you want some terrorist utopia.
For most people who were in the pre-DotCom Boom you will recall that WebObjects via Objective-C really paved the way for Web Server-Side Development.
The decision to switch it to J2EE was political and at the time, necessary, in order to compete with all the hype.
Remember however, that this "CODE" wasn't washed down the drain. WebObjects leveraged Foundation and AppKit directly. The beauty of Cocoa is that augmenting WebObjects back to Cocoa/Objective-C is extremely trival for Apple.
I would be highly surprised if Steve doesn't decide to throw out the trump with Portable Distributed Objects (PDO) for say OS X version 11 and have it seemlessly work with .NET and J2EE.
What a lot of people who also worked once at NeXT know is that lots of the technologies that were never released are slowly being reincarnated into various pieces of the pie.
As a KDE user you can look forward to a (most likely) KDE 4.0 release that'll start faster and run faster, have smaller memory requirements, look better and have better accesibillity.
And you say there's nothing to be excited about as a KDE user?
So when will KDE 4.0 be released? I have no idea (and I'm not a KDE developer so I have no influence at all - I have just followed the KDE losely for quite a while) but my wild guess would be fall 2005 :)
Which bit ?
Against the J2EE platform supported by IBM, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, BEA, Sun, Manugistics etc etc
Against J2SE supported by IBM, Sun, Dell, HP etc
Against J2ME supported by IBM, Nokia, Ericsson, Sony, Sun etc
How about positioning it as a useful tool for corporate developers with minimal tooling support and no easy integration with corporate applications.
OSS needs to realise what WORKS in a corporate environment and why it does, and why re-inventing, or competing with, the wheel is not a great idea.
I like OSS, I advocate OSS with my clients, but its this sort of visionless statement that makes many serious IT directors walk away as they know its a bollocks statement made by people without a grasp of their problems.
Corporate IT _is_ IT.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
On Linux, Qt is in the unique position of being seen as one of the native APIs.
I thought that honor belonged solely to Motif...
Put identity in the browser.
How on earth is this Score:4, Informative ?
Who doesn`t already know this ? And what is "bad" about programmers who can`t survive on fresh air and need to eat occasionally - especially when KDE is regarded, by most programmers, as rather good when compared to other toolkits beginning with, umm, "G". The parent poster needs to be batted around the head with a large clue stick.
Or Ill just the free windows forms and not bother writing Qt for windows myself.
"Incidentally, for those still opposed to Qt's moc preprocessor, Havoc has some interesting comments."
.
:-)
I'm not aggainst Qt moc preprocessor but I think some things can be done in a more efficient way in a c++ way rather than java (static time without introspection, marshaling and other stuff). For example, signal and slot communication, which is one of the main uses of qobject/moc, can be done using c++ templates (see libsigc++ o signals library in boost)
Instrospection and dynamic uses are probably neccesary in a higher level (interfaces compiling, components and scripting), but no in these uses.
It's just my opinion, do not repply with http://doc.trolltech.com/3.1/templates.html, because I think these arguments aren't valid:
No. 1 "Syntax matters" I think syntax in c++ way is even easier
No. 2. "Precompilers are good" ?? It looks like a theological statement:-) Well, probably precompilers are good for interfaces compiling in components, or when c++ compilers are not powerful enough, but not now in this context (more with TT supporting mingw)
No 3. "Flexibility is king" Templates are sooo powerful
No 4. "Calling performance is not everything" But is a big component in UI designing (I've seen similar comparisons between CORBA versus dcop/dbus, and I think the election was dbus)
No. 5 "No limits" ?? For what? There are no limits for the enterprise
The price instantly puts the toolkit out of reach for smaller development houses
Total, utter rubbish. If a small development house can afford one employee with a single PC they can affors a Qt license. I don't know what world you live in, but in the Real World $1550 is small beans for a primary development platform. Seen the prices of BEA Weblogic or Windows 2003 Server lately?
What was the point of killing all those people?
What was the point of sending so many Americans off to their death?
What is the point of arguing with someone this fucking stupid?
There is no point. Good night.
All the morons are out this morning...
> QT isn't even free software
The GPL'ed version is. GPL'ed Qt != Win32 Qt, i.e. you need to view them as different products.
Trolltech have given us GPL'ed Qt, but they have absolutely no obligation to provide their Win32 version under the same license.
The price is a factor only if you want to develop using Trolltech's proprietary version. I suppose that if you can't afford that then you may have to consider cheaper alternatives, but this doesn't lead us to "QT's licence is BAD!" unless you see all proprietary licenses as bad (I do, but you seem to be singling out this one).
I don't see Qt as a competing technology to Java, but I love using the Free Qt, and appreciate Trolltech's generosity in providing it.
- Brian.
First, we need to clear up the confustion from the following statement:
"Qt is positioned as superior alternative to Java".
Trolltech cannot possibly mean that. What they meant to say is: "Qt is an alternative to Java when it comes to cross platform client applications using a GUI". While Qt may do some non-GUI things, too, it's totally different from Java (clue: Qt is not a programming language) and from the Java platform (it doesn't come with a VM, it doesn't have its own bytecode, etc...). What remains is that it's an alternative to Java if you want to deploy applications across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Giving Trolltech the benefit of doubt, this is what they meant.
Having done client-side programming for many years, i can see that there is something to that. I once hoped that Qt would develop into a viable alternative because AWT/Swing was so slow.
However, since then Sun has done their homework and made Swing fast (indistinguishable from native, for the most part), and they are continuing to work on performance in release 1.5. There is still a lot of room for improvement. Things like Apple's library caching - where they pre-compile the native libraries and cache the machine code on the hard disk which makes a Java apps start as fast as a native apps, more hardware acceleration for Swing etc.
Once we get performance out of the way (i have not seen Qt, but i assume it's fast), there is nothing Qt could offer that Java didn't do better.
For example, you don't have to deal with c++. Java is not perfect, but it's - yes we can say that in public - definitely more productive than c++, in the same way that c++ is more productive than asm machine code.
Add to that extensive networking libraries, array bounds checking (buffer overflow exploits not possible in java, imagine that), garbage collection, serious instead of optional OO, and the list could go on and on, no recompiling, runs on more platforms than Qt, free deploy license...
No GPL version for Windows makes it impractical for a lot of cross-platform applications. Gaim, for example, uses GTK for both its Linux and Windows versions, but this would be impossible to do with Qt.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How about this one? (For the "programmable" bit, see here.)
Here's Qt's new 'foreach' construct:Here's the equivalent code in Lisp:And here it is in OCaml:
Don't expect to port to Windows without paying the Trolls.
Why on earth not? If you've only ever agreed to the GPL license on their X11 version, there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop you from porting the library, like these people are doing.
I work for a small development house, and we were certainly able to afford it. $1550 is less than two weeks' salary (and that's before counting expenses on the top of the payroll) so if Qt can save that much developer time it's worth buying. Note that the price includes good technical support.
Russians.
As far as portability goes, and correct use of an object oriented
frame-work I can't see why one wouldn't use wxWidgets?
why would anyone in their right mind consider anything else for
cross-platform development with the C++ language?
Pay peanuts, you get monkeys...
Arash Partow
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
The price is per developer, not per user.
Have you checked the prices on Win32 development tools? $1550 isn't cheap, but it's far from outrageous or out of reach.
If that is out of your budget, you aren't a "smaller development house" -- you haven't even learned to think like a business yet. Products like Qt save development time, which allows lower bids, which means more revenue. If you can't work the numbers, go back to the basement -- your business won't be outgrowing it for quite some time.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Trolltech will be a niche player.
_Will_ be? That's what it is now. Maybe you meant to say "will always be a niche player.
But how will they make shared data thread-safe implicitly!? Usually, for MPC, data is just copied. But if different threads share pointers, the access must be synchronized. Will QObjects become Monitors, like Java's Objects?
Fighting communism....
Cold War motherfucker. Remember who won.
No, I don't remember who won. Care to enlighten me you inbreed shithead?
Could you tell us what sophisticated application
this was or if it's an internal application, could
you name any non-trivial GUI application written
using Swing which didn't look and feel like sh*t?
The only Java GUI I've used which didn't suck
the one for Eclipse and that doesn't use Swing.
I've being using Java for years so I'm not a Java
basher.
QT isn't even free software. It's GPL'ed on X11 and the Mac - but not the most popular development platform: Windows.
Firstly, by that reasoning, GNU HURD isn't Free Software, because it doesn't run on Windows. What a load of shit. Secondly, a Windows port does exist, and you can find links to it scattered all over this discussion.
well, the benifits are quite simple. 1. being able to write code easy will help coders build there apps faster and more stable. so coders will have time to add additional features. (webcam support in kopete perhaps) 2. less ram and disk usage. more bit for your buck! less diskusage means less disk spins and thus faster loading. less ram usage means you can run heavy or multiple tasks at the same time faster then before. 3. faster and more responsive widgets! come on, this is something every end user loves. almost all the user joe's that I showed kde 3.2 where just creaming to get ik because konqy started 1000x faster. QT 4 really is a must have.
It wasn't the cocksucking russians...
2) A non GPL version of the library costs an outrageous sum of money.
If you think only 1500-3000 ( depending on package ) per developer for a perpetual license is a large amount of money, then you're either 12 years old or have never paid a dime for software in your life.
A manager of any team of 5 or more people would laugh at that kind of money. It is chump change compared to how much a company would spend on *paper* for pete's sake.
And if you take into account the developer's time ( which any manager must ), Qt is actually cheaper since it is so powerfull it takes on average 25-50% less code to do things in Qt than it does to do in other C++ toolkits I have used in the past.
I would use Qt even if I was only targeting Windows and even if I was the only person on the team. It is *that* good. People who knock it just do not have experience using it.
Go and read another article then.
I disagree, and I think it's pretty bad fanboyism that the original poster was marked "Offtopic".
A widget toolkit is used by both developers and end users.
Think about it. A developer uses the APIs, so we want them to be nice, but the user uses the widgets, so we want them to be nice too. Fully featured widgets that are designed to look good and be easy to use are just as important as nice looking APIs - in fact, I'd say they are moreso, as users typically outnumber developers by a long way.
You know, I wonder if this is a key insight. TrollTech have a big financial incentive to make a toolkit that is really nice - for developers. Most of their licensees I'd guess are developing custom apps in industry, not for mass usage by the public. Features that appeal to users therefore don't get priority, because users don't buy their software - developers do.
Maybe this is why GTK+ has been getting more user-oriented features lately like a new file picker, double-buffering, stock artwork and so on: these help the developer but not as much as they help the user.
I think TrollTech need to be careful here. If they focus only on adding developer sugar like foreach macros and (slow) XML parsers they could end up alienating users and by implication (though it may be hard to see) developers.
+1 Funny anyone?
An on-topic joke, methinks.
NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
If I write something for Windows, I create a .exe and I can use it on any Windows machine.
.exe files for Windows).
If I write something in Java, then almost any machine with a browser can run it.
What about QT?
How does QT relate/compare to TCL/TK?
I switched to Linux about a year ago and started writing in Python because someone at Sun said it was better than Java. The dependancies drive me nuts and I haven't worked out how to share my stuff (except, of course, that I can create
Er... markov chains? Tweak them a bit more :)
The code in scheme is:
(for-each process list)
and in CL
(mapc process list)
In CL you may want to use the function cell:
(mapc #'process list)
It depends on what type of process it is.
Nothing in the new feature list excites me as much as the smaller and faster part. I enjoyed using QT because it was simpler than MFCs, and was pretty fast, but recently Ive found wxwindows and fltk to be smaller/faster than QT. I know wxwindows binaries are huge, but in memory, theyre smaller, and along with FLTK are faster too.
Now if only they'd release GPL or otherwise a free version for win32. A lotta people like me have to develop the app and present it in half-developed form to management to earn the requisition for the $$$. The demo version cannot be downloaded anymore, so I'll pretty much have to start with wxwindows from now on.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Hmmm, off shore.... Hmmm.....
I kid you not. Could it be that BECAUSE people thought, Ahh 3K noise in contrast to wages and software, that we have an off shoring issue?
Having gone through the manager cycle the problem is not the single costs, but the package. And if you can save anywhere then as a manager you do it. Hence why off shoring is so interesting to many companies.
The reality is that people and software companies have to start thinking differently since the "ol" days of charging an arm and leg have disappeared.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Americans, unlike European contries, do not suck cocks. America gets pussy. Lots of warm pussy.
I've been clicking around this article for a few seconds now, and I don't see any screenshots... What's the point of this article? ;-)
Uh, parent is Off Topic or Funny, not Troll.
As another poster pointed out, typeof() is evaluated at compile-time, not runtime.
DNA just wants to be free...
I thought Apple was up to QT 6 now, with 7 just around the corner?? What up?
It's too bad it didn't pan out that well.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
While I realize that there are several issues to contend with here, this, at least in my opinion, is not the answer. KDE/Qt is polished, and offers a great deal of flexibility. Even so, developers still need to use that flexibility wisely.
If you take the GPLed QT code and port it yourself to Windows using the GPL license and call it "FreeQT," would TrollTech sue you?
At the end of the day, I put my stuff out under the BSD license--the GPL imposes restrictions that, in my opinion, contradict the definition of being free.
Watch out... some apes can carry diseases like AIDS.
Dick Cheney is a washed up old cretin who by all rights should be long dead, he can't dodge that coffin for much longer though, and a (hopefully) long and excruciating death is just around the corner. Worms and maggots will be chewing on his boney unappetizing corpse long before 2008 has come and gone.
I almost wish I was a christian, then I could be smug in the knowledge that old Dick will be spending the rest of eternity off in hells weeds.
It is impossible to write a GPL program and release it under Windows under Tolltech's license using the latest QT library from Trolltech.
You could maybe port the GPL'd Linux version to Win32 with a lot of effort maybe....
I keep people ranting about free software and freedom. Isn't it odd that people praise Trolltech for supporting free software but they do not allow programers freedom of choice when it comes to what OS they write for?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
2000 * 4 developers = 8,000.
8,400 / 120 = 70
4 Developers * 30 / hour = $120 / hour
Even if using QT only saved you 10% of developer time ( and from my experience it saves you more like 25%-50% ), it would pay for itself after only one and a half weeks. After one and a half weeks you are making pure profit.
From the interview of Trolltech's guys:
:)
PF: Now, a question that everybody has been asking: Why isn't there a GPL version of Qt3 for Windows?
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. The situation is very different from Linux, as you know. On Windows development usually happens as shareware or commercial software and we don't see that community evolving into producing Free Software.
Hope this clears the situation a bit
Yes. GT3 is not free software as in free speech unless you write on Linux. I have seen that no community line before and it is a load of Monkey Muffins. If you want proof that it is a lie look at the very question you posted...
"PF: Now, a question that everybody has been asking: Why isn't there a GPL version of Qt3 for Windows?"
If everybody is asking I would guess that there is a communit for Free Software development under windows otherwise no one would be asking!
The situation is very clear. QT is not free as in speech or free as in beer.
It looks like a good lib and most likely worth the money but it sure as heck is not free.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
GT3 is not free software as in free speech unless you write on Linux.
... or Mac.
I don't comment about the "everyone" thing, but can you point out some big OS projects on Windows? Anything as big as KDE? I can't remember, but please tell me some big projects and communities if there's such. Do they do cross-platform stuff too?
QT is not free as in speech or free as in beer. So what do you mean with free? Isn't Linux kernel free as it isn't licensed under BSD/LPGL license as you're trying to tell me or what?
I did not use the term everyone. The person from OS news said everyone. As to a list of large OpenSource projects on Windows well there are a few and have been listed before. They do tend to be cross platform as well.a lDub
OpenOffice
AmiWord
Mozilla
Emule
Virtu
GAIM Yes they have a windows version.
FireFox
Thunderbird
Fillzilla
Apache
Perl
Netbeans
Eclipse IDE
Not to mention almost all of the GNU tools.
Yes almost all of these run under Linux as well but there are windows ports of them as well. The Linux kernel is free by every standard I can see I am not into the whole BSD/LPGL/XYZ wars. I do not even really have a problem with the way Trolltech sells there software. I only have an issue with it being called free.
How can it be free if it is practicaly impossible for me to write GPL software using QT for Windows?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's interesting because I would prefer to not have scrolling menus because I don't like waiting for them to scroll. Multiple columns is faster than a single scrolling column and makes sense when the columns aren't wide.
True story.
The OCaml variant of the very strongly typed languages of the ML family is not only extremely elegant, like Lisp and Scheme, but is extremely fast.
This is a ridiculous question - there's plenty of cross-platform OS applications. None of them use Qt, because you can't reasonably write cross platform, open source applications in Qt that target windows - anyone who wanted to use your app there would need a Qt license. So of course you don't see "demand" for cross platform apps if you're Trolltech - anyone who writes open source code with your toolkit has already given up on porting to Windows. People who want to write cross platform apps use other options.
In my main software project I have used a very specific "foreach" macro (it only works with a single type that we use a lot). Whether this is a good idea or a bad one, I have not had any problems with syntax highlighting or automatic indentation, in Emacs and in several IDE's.
Well yes, but the main point was how strong the opensource community is there in Windows base..
AFAIK only eMule and VirtualDub are the ones which are developed mainly by Windows users/developers. Others are mostly used and developed under some *NIXes, but fix me if I'm wrong.. That's only what I think about those.
For an example, I think Apache httpd was first written to *NIX and then ported to work on Windows.. Can you give me some apps which are done by the opposite way?
From what I hear most FireFox developers are on Windows.
The main point is that you can not write GPL sofware with QT3 for the Windows Platform. You can with GTK.
What I have a problem with is not that TrollTech is limits what people can do with their software. They wrote it they can do what they like. What I have an issue with is them lieing about it.
Truth. Our libs are open source under Linux but we plan on making a pile of money selling it to Windows programmers. It ain't Free as in speech or beer unless you are runing Linux/BSD.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.