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Trolltech to Extend Dual-License to Qt/Windows
scc writes "
Trolltech announced today
that Qt 4 will be available on Windows under the GPL.
While Trolltech has long dual-licensed
Qt on X11 (Linux, various Unixes), Mac, and embedded,
Windows developers have had no options other than a commercial license."
Can't I just download their software under the GPL, and redistribute it to anyone to be used under any setting at all?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
since they have a large audience now that can take advantage of them maybe LyX will start accelerating development and adding in some nice features that will make document creation much more productive.(integrate a bib database for god sakes!!!)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Goodbye, MFC.
This is exactly what has been requested by many Qt/KDE developers over many years. This will bring about a flourish of new applications being ported from linux to windows (whether you like that or not). This will heat up the Gtk vs. Qt arguments as a major argument against Qt no longer holds. This will also help push KDE Enterprise efforts as many enterprise concerns will be resolved by this move. Good move Trolltech!
This should increase the availability of quality F/OSS software on the windows platform, which can help ease the transition to Linux.
I only wish this were the case a few years ago. TORA (Toolkit for Oracle) was a great, inexpensive cross-platform PL/SQL editor. I tried to get my boss to standardize on it so that we could use the same tools in Linux and Windows, but he was turned off by the need to charge for Windows support. (He interpreted that as Linux arrogance and was worried that the Windows support would be lacking. Even though I explained it was because of Trolltech licensing.)
Turns out the boss was right, though for different reasons. Tora got bought out by a windows pl/sql tools competitor and basically killed.
It doesn't matter whether they allow Qt to run GPLed on windows or not - by releasing a GPLed version of Qt they are specifically allowing it to be modified and redistributed under the terms of the GPL. One possible modification is porting Qt to run on MS-Windows. so I can get Qt/X11, port it to Win32 (as the kde-cygwin project on sf.net do) and release it under the GPL. Other people can now use this version to develop and distribute Qt based application on Win32 - but again only using the GPL. So even given that case (and Qt from kde-cygwin is nowhere near production quality) I can still not distribute commercial non-GPLed software for Win32. I can however make in-house, not for distribution Win32 software based on Qt - something that wasn't available earlier. The problem is that doing the Qt/X11 to Win32 port is hard time consuming work which has to be done (to some extent) for each new release of Qt - so its not much of a threat to Trolltech buisness model. Still its a welcome change and might facilitate faster adoption of Qt in the MS-Windows world, which is a "Good Thing"(tm)
This is fantastic news!
Opensource projects won't have to choose between Java Swing (and all the baggage that comes with Java), a heavyweight wrapper like wxWidgets (and BitTorrent, written in wxWidgets, isn't the prettiest app), or a fairly ugly port of GTK, which I've been forced to use.
Does this mean we'll see a port of KHTML (Konqueror/Safari) to Windows?
Move over Firefox, this is going to become a 3-way!
GTK2 on win32 is good (and easy to install/bundle with your software)
wxWidgets is a very nice toolkit and has been showing up more and more in sofwares.
MS now allows developers to download their compilers and build tools in the SDK WITHOUT CHARGE, so it isn't a requirement that you buy a version of Visual C++ or .NET anymore, but you do have to use the command line only tools.
If I remember, it was the cost of being a "developer" on windows systems that directed their previous choice to charge for all windows QT software.
As a Windows C++ developer, Qt4 is now open-source for my purposes. Since Qt4 is obviously much better than MFC this is very significant.
But it is very frustrating since Qt could have been a very significant C++ framework on windows if it had done this years ago. Now it is a bit late for most of us.
The other frustrating thing is that TT, in the best tradition, is pursuing lock-in (vs. standards) in QT4. By deciding to embrace templated containers in their own proprietary way, vs. the standard, STL, way, they make it much harder for a programmer like me to convert to QT, both practically and morally.
I know they will have all the usual excuses for breaking the standard (I've heard them from MS in the past). It's kind of ironic that, just when MS stops playing games and finally puts out a truly standards compliant compiler (VC7.1) with a great standard library, TT decides to imitate the old MS.
Sure - I understand that. But here's the problem: I can buy a license for Qt/Commercial from TrollTech without telling them what I plan on using it for. If they want to refuse to sell to me under those circusmstances, again, it's their right. However, even if I do tell them, there's nothing to prevent me from using it to build other projects as well - including projects that started out using Qt/GPL and my own dual-licensed source code, for example.
Basically, their "if it's GPL from the start, it has to remain GPL forever" clause of theirs has zero force; they know it, which is why their means of dealing with it is to refuse to sell you a commercial license. Before that can work, though, they need to have intimate knowledge of what you're developing, why you're developing it, what your future development plans are, etc. In other words, they need to start treating every customer as a potential license violator and criminal. Take a look at the RIAA, and you can see how well that works.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
But if you're paying for a commercial license, you have pay per seat anyways, and that would work out to exactly the same dollar figure they'd have made if you had bought the commercial license from them in the beginning.
Trolltech can tell you to go screw yourself if they want, but why would they turn their noses up at a sale?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
OK, I'll bite.
The Windows GUI API has no restrictions on it at all.
One thing the Windows GUI API has in common with all GPL/LGPL/LMAO licensed software is that it comes with NO WARRANTY EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
Additionally, if there is a bug anywhere in the Windows GUI API, that bug is in your software, and there ain't jack shit you can do about it. You're screwed. Completely and totally. What do you tell your customer? "OH gee, that bug is Microsoft's fault for building a shitty library." Right.
Contrasted with numerous open source libraries that you can do all sorts of wonderfulness with, you can fix the bug in the library!
Hm. And if GTK isn't your flavor, or Qt, you have several others to choose from. wxWidgets gives you all the creamy goodness of a BSD-style license, and the (blech) GTK interface in Linux. How do you get around any so-called limits in the LGPL for Linux? Simple, you're depending on wxWidgets, which uses native widget sets on each platform. So you're not confined by the LGPL in any way.
There are several toolkits available that do just that. Now, how many are there for Windows? What range of license possibilities are there?
Last time I checked there was only one, for th eopen source programmer, that is. Buy (that's right, buy) a license for Visual Studio, or only write C programs because otherwise you just don't have enough stuff to link, and you don't have the permissions you need to distribute dependent libraries. Or you could buy (that's right, buy) a Delphi license (or another of Borland's point-and-click languages), but then you can't even keep to the terms of your GPL license when you distribute! Because you can't provide source for libraries that aren't reasonably expected system libraries (the winAPI stuff is, but borland's wrappers *aren't*). What else is there? I'm sure I missed quite a few.
Hm, there's Qt, which requires you to buy a license. There's wxWidgets, which doesn't. There's FLTK, which doesn't (and is another one available under Linux). MOzilla provides a complete RAD environment, not necessarily point-and-click but what could be faster than jsut writing an xml file?
come to think of it, most of the really good shit is cross-platform and open source. I suspect the real reason people still use Microsoft's crappy libraries is inertia.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Why do all scanner programs look like they've been written by some 4 year old from Taiwan? All of them - Lexmark, Epson, Canon - they all use stupid bitmap buttons and non-standard widgets (like Adobe).
As far as wimp-themed GTK goes, have a look at GAIM for Windows, that's what it uses, looks alright to me. However if you look at Ethereal for Windows, it's a joke, looks just like it does under Linux - which is really odd under Windows!
Personally I've come across the problem of wxWidgets being too limited BECAUSE it uses Windows native widgets - like no way to put other widgets inside a ListCtrl or AboutDialogs being centered to the screen inside of the parent window....
I also am fed up with the spacer/sizer methods in wxWidgets, the way Qt does it seems so much better (but aren't they the same?!) or maybe it's just QtDesigner is much more intuitive than wxDesigner, BoaConstructor, VisualWX et al.
I'm switching from wxPython to PyQt for my next project.
#include <sig.h>