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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.
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?
I suppose this is the end of the KDE on Cygwin project, and good news in general for Qt/KDE applications on Windows?
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.
QT is the base of KDE, no? So when do we get KDE for windows?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
That's it exactly. Basically their business model says here go play with out software/libraries for as long as you want...develop whatever you want. But if you sell the resulting code for profit then we also want some of the profit. Actually it is a little more complecated than this. You have to purchse the license before developing any of the code that will be used in a commercial product.
what?
i've taken a number of qt-based linux apps off kde-apps.org and recompiled on windows - as long as the developers stick to the Qt API, its a breeze to port!
--- blackironprison, where ignorance is bliss....
I was under the impression that Trolltech did have a GPLed version of Qt for Windows. I thought it was the one included in their GUI programming book (the book is at home so I can't look it up myself). I also seem to recall at least a few projects stating that if you contacted Trolltech and notified them that you were working on an open source project and would like Qt for Windows, they'd give it to you for free (although maybe under a different license?).
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
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.
So, if you write GPL code, OK. You want to relicense, OK. But the commercial version of Qt states,
NOTE: Qt Free Edition is licensed under the terms of the GPL and not under this Agreement. If Licensee has, at any time, developed all (or any portions of) the Application(s) using Trolltech's publicly licensed Qt Free Edition, Licensee must comply with Trolltech's requirements (see http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qt-x11 .html) and license
such Application(s) (or any portions derived there from) under the
terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License
version 2 (the "GPL") a copy of which is located at
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#SEC1 (i.e., any Product(s) and/or
parts, components, portions thereof developed using GPL licensed
software, including Qt Free Edition, must be licensed under the terms
of the GPL, and the GPL-based source code must be made available upon
request).
They will NOT license you a commercial version if you try to do it. They will withdraw your commercial license if you do this. See? You do this, you are left with only a GPL distributable. They also said in their email release that they will enfore their license. So please, don't try to pull a fast one on Trolltech.
You have your rights to relicense software. They have their rights to license their software to you.
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!
Nice troll there.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
That's not true, I installed Qt3 on my Windows machine and I had the option of using the GPL.
I came on a CD with this book http://vig.prenhall.com:8081/catalog/academic/pro
We have asked Canopy to divest since SCO turned against Linux. Unfortunately under US and Norwegian law you cannot force someone to sell something. We have sold all our investments in Canopy companies a long time ago. We do not like the fact that Canopy and SCO owns shares in Trolltech. The irony is that they became shareholders because the old Canopy/Caldera wanted us to continue to create good Linux software. Canopy/SCO owns a very small share of Trolltech and has no control or influence whatsoever on the strategy and operations of Trolltech. Trolltech is controlled by it's employees. Eirik Chambe-Eng (President, Trolltech) -----
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.
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?
Please don't port all the good KDE apps to Windows.
The Windows people need as many reasons to switch as we can muster.
Like, you know, Kate and Kmail. And Kwrite. And even Konqueror!
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
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.
KDE.org has a nice interview with the president of TrollTech, Eirik Chambe Eng. Definitely worth a read!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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.
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'
Unfortunately, Qt still has one shortcoming - it draws it's widgets itself on Windows (as does GTK+, BTW). The only multi-platform toolkit that doesn't do this is wxWidgets. That said, wxWidgets has a horrible API, with macros everywhere and the need to use #ifdefs for many platform differences (ugh...)
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
I'm getting a chuckle out of your debate with that fanboy. But here goes. :)
All I've been discussing is an unencumbered widget API so that applications can code to a standard target. This is a very specific area and that's all I am talking about here. We don't need any libraries other than those required to interface with the OS, basically we need to be launched, we need fopen() and friends, malloc() and friends, and we need a graphics API that supports windows and controls.
If that's all you need, why not wxWidgets? You can link to it statically and you're safe, as far as I know. I know the LGPL has some crap about providing object files in case the user wants to recompile underlying libraries, but that's been an obsolete method for quite awhile now. It's not necessary. If someone asks for them, you just say "If you're asking, that menas you're running on a supported platform and it's not my problem" and you ask your lawyer how it's legal that way. :)
As far as I know, linking to wxWidgets doesn't immediately incur the problems you associate with the LGPL because GTK because a system library at that point. Maybe it will anyway, I'm not completely certain, but that's provided as one of the selling points of wx anyway.
I am agitating for a standard, with-the-OS, and so always-there-to-use, widget capability. Windows has this. The Mac has this. Linux does not have this. I would like Linux to have this.
Man oh man does this irritate me. You can expect Qt or GTK+, but that's it. You can usually expect both at the same time (neither KDE nor GNOME satisfies everybody at the same time). Yeah, this little issue frustrates me too. Furthermore, I just can't stand targetting GTK. I've been targetting wxWidgets instead (using wxPython anyway, so I'm the Linux version of a VB hack). I'm *so* happy Qt is going to be GPL on Windows now. (I only write open source stuff, so this is obviously not an issue for me)
As far as what Qt accomplishes, you're still safe, so far as I know, except you have to buy a Qt license to use Qt in your application. Could get expensive, but numerous folks have reported "I think our TCO was lower with Qt!". So there's at least a high level of satisfaction fo rpeople that use it. :)
I don't personally think it's unreasonable for a free platform to require someone to pay in order to distribute non-free software of their own making for that platform. Call it what you want, I don't see how it's unreasonable. The point of the platform, unlike Windows, was never to make anybody money. The point was always freedom (except in the case of the kernel itself, but you'll find the point still had nothing to do with making money for anyone). regardless of what that other guy said, if you (or any other developer) isn't willing to deal with what we've built and the for-pay alternatives that get you onto this platform aren't good enough for you, then too bad for both of us. And I think we're better off accepting those consequences, because you can't come much closer than you have (for reasons you've said you have but haven't detailed, which is fine, they're probably confidential), and we have no obligation to come any closer than we have.
The thing you and yours need to be asking yourself is, "Is it a real possibility that I'll have to accept these terms someday? Can I hold out for better terms? Can I afford to?" If the answer is "yes", then there's not even any reason for us to try to make a deal. If the answer is "no", then you're not in the bargaining position you might think you're in.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Moreover, such agreements, at least if the founders have done their homework, normally do not let a single minority investor control the strategy or operations of the company in any way.
As a side note Norwegian law makes it possible to exclude a board member from certain board discussions when there is a conflict of interest.
Regarding your questions, I can only refer to my previous posting.
Please understand that I cannot say much more.
Trolltech's founders and first employees were developers with roots in the open source community. Those developers know very well where they came from and they still run and control the company.