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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.)

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. 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)?

  2. 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
  3. 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.

  4. 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.
  5. 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.