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."

Comments

GPL Qt for Windows

[Nurgled]

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?

Kindows????

[spectrokid]

QT is the base of KDE, no? So when do we get KDE for windows?

Re:Kindows????

[Bulln-Bulln]

Quote from KDE-Cygwin:

Posted By: habacker
Date: 2005-01-27 14:21
Summary: source and binary snapshots of QT/Win Free Edition available

The QT/Win Free Edition is not far away from to be a full working release.

Maybe this is why Trolltech made this announcement? Trolltech propably had its reasons not to release the Windows version under GPL, but with this fork their reasons may be undermined. So maybe the guys at Trolltech thought "better done right (by us), than done buggy (by others) and give us bad reputation".

Of course this is just speculation and the close time gap between the KDE-Cygwin announcement and the Trolltech announcement could be just a coincidence.

Yea!

[LoveTheIRS]

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.

Re:Yea!

[ultrabot]

Hopefully, now since cross platform OSS programs can now use QT, the GTK will die an awful awful death.

GTK is still preferable for developing proprietary applications. The whole software world isn't suddenly going open source - and that's what keeps Trolltech in business as well.

Re:Is TrollTech trolling?

[geoffspear]

I think what had me confused is the use of the word "use" in the dual license FAQ.

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.)

Re:Is TrollTech trolling?

[jdavidb]

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?

Re:This is both GREAT and FRUSTRATING

[Simon]

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