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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.)

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  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: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.