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QT/Win 3.3.3 To 'Reach Production State Soon'

Posted by timothy on from the so-will-windows dept.

sebFlyte writes "The KDE Cygwin team are reportedly closing in on a native port for QT to allow said graphical framework to run over Windows. This has upset a few people, who think that porting open source apps to Windows is strengthening MS's near monopoly and damaging Linux." (Of course, KDE also runs on OSes besides Linux.)

12 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Windows by Claire-plus-plus · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It's not choice of applications that caused me to change to Linux on my work/development box it's Windows' stupid activation process. Windows activation and the security holes in IE might be what kills windows.

    Linux doesn't have to kill Micro$oft Bill Gates is doing a fine job on his own.

    --
    99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
    1. Re:Windows by silicon+not+in+the+v · · Score: 2, Interesting
      That's silly. Linux has far more Apps than windows. My Linux box has 2 full office suites for a start. I don't think I know anyone with windows can say that.
      Sure, there are millions of apps for Linux, but you know how many of them most Windows users know? 0. The problem is not lack of apps--the problem is familiarity with the apps.

      Let's say you sit a Windows user down in front of a nice KDE desktop and ask them to try to chat with their friend on Yahoo Messenger or burn a CD or crop a digital photo. They would know how to use the "Start menu", so that's familiar, but then they are faced with 50 or so applications in there that they don't recognize the names of and don't know what any of them do. Their familiar programs like Y!Messenger, Nero, and Photoshop aren't there, and they don't know what these things like XMMS, Xine, Gaim, K3B, Konqueror, Gimp, etc. do. They just haven't heard of any of these things, so it is difficult to get going.

      Just to get a feel for where I am coming from, I still have Windows at home because my wife uses it. We do know how to keep it relatively safe with Zone Alarm and Firefox, so it runs well and is not a problem. I have a secondary computer that I am using to familiarize myself with Linux so that I can move to that at some point, but my main problem is time. I only have 1 or 2 nights a week at home to do anything at the computer, so that is going to be a long learning curve to find out how to do the stuff I want with this new set of apps. Sure, browsing and email is easy, but I do more complicated stuff than that, so it's a little more challenging. I would appreciate this QT setup so that I could learn one new app at a time, while being able to get stuff done. When I have transitioned to using most or all of the new apps, and am not using stuff that needs to be on Windows, I won't have a problem switching to Linux.
      --
      We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
  2. Not so. by BoomerSooner · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's a great way to work OSS apps/environments into the users familiar zone. The more comfortable they get the less likely they are to notice when the underlying windows part is gone altogether. If you can run everything on a linux box you can on a windows box without the ms tax, why wouldn't you (other than users being unfamiliar with it)?

  3. great.... by moosesocks · · Score: 3, Interesting

    oh great.

    another library to suck up more RAM/CPU cycles on my windows box.

    Lets see what I've got running

    Standard win32 controls / libraries
    GTK+ controls for GAIM/GIMP
    Whatever the heck iTunes uses
    Java windowing stuff...
    Firefox's XUL and XPCOM.....
    and now QT -- all to provide the exact same functions.

    nice! Has it ever occured to anybody here that this is a little excessive? Personally, I'd lean twoard an OpenSTEP like implementation as shown in the demo posted to /. a few days ago. Apple's already proven it to be successful/easy to the point that most developers choose to rewrite their frontends using cocoa instead of using a ported windowing toolkit.

    I don't want an inconsistent user experience. I want my dialogs / menus / print box / file manager to be the EXACT SAME IN EVERY APPLICATION I RUN. I don't care if Linux or MacOS look a bit different than windows. All I care is that Windows looks like Windows, Linux looks the same all around, and Mac Looks like Mac. It's really not a hard concept.

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
    1. Re:great.... by ciroknight · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Which is why I ask "Why hasn't there been a framework written yet to make ANY windowing system look native?" I know there are attempts: wxWindows for example. But the problem is, you still have to use their API's, which means that you're limited to your coding skills. There's also been qt-gtk which is a library that accepts some gtk calls and passes them to the QT library. This is more of what we want/need.

      Imagine a QT-GTK-Windows-wxWindows-SWING-Cocoa-etc. Program using absolutely any GUI style coding you know, and let the catch-all library intercept the call, and pass it to whatever windowing system you want. I know this will be rough work, but where virtually all windowing systems do the same thing, I'm sure it can be done. The hardest part will be tearing apart the Macros that each implementation uses, and then optimizing it once you've stripped it to its most verbose state.

      Then the problem won't be "What libraries are in RAM?", but instead "Which can perform the interpretation from X to X fastest?". More kudos to QT-GTK, but I hope it keeps going.

      --
      "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
    2. Re:great.... by Brandybuck · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm pissed that not everyone wears the same brand of clothing.

      --
      Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
  4. Re:Maybe I Don't Understand... by Lendrick · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does this mean all the work of porting it was needless?

    Perhaps not... one might speculate that Trolltech released Qt for Windows under the GPL specifically because the port was almost there. Also, Trolltech claims that their GPLed version doesn't come with tools that will work with Visual Studio, whereas the public port does.

    Furthermore, does this mean we'll see an influx of Qt apps being ported to Windows now that they're free to use Qt on that platform?

    One would hope. There are certainly some KDE apps that I'd like to be able to use on Windows.

  5. Re:I disagree by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Why is that such a great goal? The point of Free Software is not to get people running Linux.. it's to give people freedom. You can be running all the Free Software on earth and still not be aware of your freedom. That's a lot better than running proprietary software and not being aware of your freedom but it's hardly a worthy goal. Yes, we should get people to switch to Firefox and OpenOffice and Thunderbird and Linux but at some point we need to make these people aware that they are not only getting great software, they're also getting their freedom back. That means we have to start:
    • telling them it is a-ok to share the software with their neighbour.
    • suggesting that they hire local developers to customize their software
    • teaching them to code

    That way the next time someone offers them proprietary software they'll ask
    • can I share this with others?
    • can I customize this?
    • can I fix my own bugs?

    And when the answer comes back "no no no" they'll say "no thank you" to proprietary software.
    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  6. Re:I disagree by theapodan · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I may be mistaken, but I don't think that the QT license is a free software license anyway. I can recall some disagreement regarding its freeness, and its alternative licensure for commercial applications. Wasn't this the reason for GTK development?

  7. Re:I disagree by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That was a LONG time ago. Trolltech quelled all those accusations by releasing Qt under the GPL. They provide the exact same code under a proprietary license for people who want to write proprietary applications too though.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  8. Re:Public service announcement: DO NOT CODE FOR QT by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All true. Trolltech are using the GPL for exactly what it is ment to be used for: to encourage the development of Free Software. They are making it economically better to release your code under the GPL, and God bless em for it. BTW - you do have the choice to use another cross platform toolkit, so don't go bitching that you have to pay for Qt if you want to write proprietary software. At least they offer to sell you a proprietary license, if you want to incorporate GNU readline into your proprietary application you won't have the same kind of luck.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  9. second time this has happened by jeif1k · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When Qt originally was QPL'ed and people were complaining, Troll Tech did nothing. Then, a bunch of people got together and started the Harmony project, an truly open source clone of Qt. After that was underway and looked like it was going to become a serious project, Troll Tech gave in and changed their license (and their relationship with the Harmony developers was apparently less than amicable).

    Now, people undertake the effort to port Qt to Windows under the GPL, and after they have invested a lot of effort, Troll Tech gives in and changes their license. Apparently, if one wants Troll Tech to do anything, one has to exert this kind of pressure.

    While I really don't care about Qt on the desktop (the problem is taking care of itself), something will have to be done about their embedded toolkit, which is currently holding Linux PDAs hostage.