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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."
Didn't someone external to Trolltech port the GPL-licenced code to Windows and licence it under the GPL? Without special clauses in the licence to prevent that, that would presumably be allowed.
Or, do the X11 and Windows versions differ so greatly that such a port is an insurmountable task?
Microsoft asks and they shall receive!
Screw application heterogeneity, write once, compile thrice, and run everywhere!!!
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
QT is the base of KDE, no? So when do we get KDE for windows?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I think they're trying to make this dual-licensing model similar to MySQL's - develop GPL'ed (even commercial) software with GPL Qt, but if you want to release it under different license (not as free as GPL), buy a commercial one from them.
Yea! Hopefully, now since cross platform OSS programs can now use QT, the GTK will die an awful awful death. No more hassle making custom widgets in C. Thank the lord. I hope that there is at least some very good competition between QT and GTK now. They are now fighting on relatively equal licensing ground now.
I read it as prohibiting use of even open source programs built with Qt in a commercial setting without a commercial license, which would violate the GPL. It's clear from other posters in this thread that it's prohibiting only the development of closed source software without a commercial license.
Of course, I'm not entirely convinced that even resolving this ambiguity helps; I'm fairly certain that the GPL allows me to develop closed-source software from GPLed code for use in any setting I want to use it in, as long as I don't actually distribute the derived program to anyone else. (e.g., if an investment banker somewhere wants to write a program using Qt for his own use in his office, for a commercial purpose, without distributing the program or the source, the FAQ seems to prohibit that, but the GPL says it's perfectly fine.)
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I agree there.
Could the Qt people clear that up:
If a for-profit company wants to develop in-house, never-ever to be sold or released to the public, custom applications, do they need to get a license from Qt?
"Piter, too, is dead."
I really wish the Qt XML implementation would support XPath.
XPath allows you to easily select part of XML DOM documents, simplifying your life...
XPath is powerful enough to become part of a programming language itself (Comega), in Microsoft's opinion...
However, last I checked, Trolltech doesn't think it's worth it. Booo!
PS., Designer and Qt are way better than WinForms!!!
Isn't Mono v2 supposted to support WinForms?
Given the dual licensing, can you please answer a question that has made me wonder about Qt for years? If I submit to Trolltech a fix or new feature for GPL'ed Qt, you can't include it in the commercial-license Qt, can you? Does the commercial-license version include community-submitted changes? Does the GPL version include fixes and improvements not present in the commercial version?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The main benefit of Qt's container types is that they are the same on each platform. You have to deal with different STL implementations having different bugs. The other reason Qt doesn't use STL is simply because when Qt was started the STL hadn't settled yet and was a PITA to use for cross platform stuff. So then made their own. Now they have to continue using and supporting their containers types. Their customers have too much code depending on it now.
--
Simon
You don't need to pay anything to have access to a very broad spectrum of OS widgets when developing for Windows (or the Mac), no matter if you are developing in a traditional commercial sense or using any other financial model.
That's my point. In contrast, with Qt, I have to pay even for developing basic GUI apps. Therefore, if Qt became the default toolkit on Linux, it would put Linux at a big disadvantage relative to Windows and the Mac. Fortunately, Qt isn't the only toolkit on Linux.
Linux has really worked itself into a corner here.
No, Linux hasn't "worked itself into a corner" at all, because we do have Gtk+ and other toolkits that are covered by the LGPL. Those toolkits are friendly towards commercial use, and that's no accident. That's, after all, why most of the system libraries (C library, etc.) do allow closed source development.
There is a bizarre social aspect, a "we don't need your steenking commercial software" attitude that will probably keep it there, too. It's interesting to watch.
Linux needs commercial software much less than Windows or Macintosh because it comes with so much out of the box. And a lot of "steenking commercial software", we indeed don't need. A lot of "steenking commercial software" is also overpriced crap. But the small percentage of commercial apps that Linux needs and where commercial development makes sense, it support via toolkits like Gtk+.
Isn't Mono v2 supposted to support WinForms?
There are two ways Microsoft can stop this. First off, Microsoft can pull the old "embrace and extend": make WinForms 2 and convince app developers to release WinForms 2 apps before Mono v2 can upgrade its WinForms reimplementation to match WinForms 2. This technique of continuously extending the Win32 API is what had held Wine back.
Worse, Microsoft might sue Novell, the corporate maintainer of Mono, for patent infringement and get an injunction against distribution of Mono v2. Novell is headquartered in the United States, a country whose courts recognize patents on an ordinary computer running a novel algorithm. Though Microsoft has permissively licensed the patents on the parts of the .NET framework standardized by ECMA, WinForms isn't among those parts.