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QT/Win 3.3.3 To 'Reach Production State Soon'
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.)
As for QT running in Windows, I think this would be great. I'd love to use Amarok and k3b when I'm in Windows.
I'm guessing a native port of KDE was impossible because Qt for Windows is not released under the GPL. Now, however, Trolltech will be releasing it under the GPL. Does this mean all the work of porting it was needless? 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?
Yeah cause so many KDE users are saying if only my windows box ran KDE I would drop this crappy Linux Kernel
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
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
This has upset a few people, who think that porting open source apps to Windows is strengthening MS's near monopoly and damaging Linux.
There are two sides to this argument and if you state them both, I think it's very clear which one is stronger. They are:
Now, what are the odds that any one unfamiliar app, or even a large set of unfamiliar apps are going to be so good that they'll convince people to undergo a wrenching transition in which they have to learn an entirely new environment and application set? I won't say it's impossible, and I will say that a number of my relatives have lusted over KimDaBa when I showed it to them, but I have a hard time imagining anyone but a geek who is interested in learning new computer systems for the sheer joy of doing it will be willing to put themselves through a complete change of their daily computing environment. Hell, I'm a geek and I dual-booted for a long time, and still use some Windows apps under Wine and VMWare.
On the other hand, it's a fact that to most computer users the operating system is beyond irrelevant -- it's invisible. "What operating system are you using?". "Umm, I think it's Internet Outlook XP". What matters is the applications. And most users are willing to look at something new, from time to time, if it's not too difficult, and if it doesn't prevent them from falling back on what they know when they need to get some work done.
I think it's extremely clear that if your goal is to break the Microsoft monopoly, the first thing you have to do is provide, bit by bit, a comfortable set of cross-platform tools that run well on Windows. Even now many who might like to migrate away from Windows can't do it because they're locked in by Office, Outlook/Exchange, and IE. Let them slowly migrate to open source replacements and then one day they will suddenly realize that everything they do on Windows can be done the same way on Linux, or a Mac, or whatever, and then Windows will suddenly find itself having to compete on its own merits, not on the strength of its application set.
Trying to "lock" people into Linux by providing an application set that only runs on that platform is trying to beat Microsoft at their own game. Open source lives by different rules, and if it's to be successful it has to play by those rules, not co-opt Microsoft's.
I, for one, welcome the porting frenzy to come, and look forward to introducing my Windows-using friends to some of the great open source apps I love.
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I think one of the things people are forgetting is what using a Unix was like 20 years ago. There weren't free compilers, free linkers, free editors, free application suites, free windowing systems.... Free software took over Unixes by replacing the components of the operating system piece by piece by piece. So that by the mid-late 90's a Solaris user was running
.NET or..., games for Windows only, .... they are much more like the Unix users of the mid 80's than those of the mid 90's.
/.
-- Free software for most apps they cared about
-- Free software to extend their OS enough to make it functional
-- Solaris apps where they weren't getting any additional value
-- at most 1 or 2 commercial applications for Solaris from vendors that had no particular loyalty to Sun and weren't at all unwilling to bring out Linux versions
This was why these users were even able to consider a transition to Linux. They could replace their current systems, with additional value (or at much reduced cost). Virtually everything they used was free.
Similarly on AIX and IRIX the fact that there weren't that many OS specific features that were vital was the reason that IBM and SGI jumped on the LInux bandwagon to offset OS costs while still making hardware sales. If AIX or SGI were still way ahead of Linux by the late 90's they never would have done it.
On the Windows platform we haven't come close to this. Windows users use: a Microsoft shell (explorer), a Microsoft office suite, other productivity apps written for Windows only, corporate in house software written in VB or
Apache/Firefox over IIS/Explorer is one of our first major victories in replacing part of the Windows lock-in. KDE offers a wealth of applications which might be able to attack Microsoft/Windows specific apps in hundreds of places at once that will probably result in dozens of victories.
We don't need a killer app yet. What we need is to make the transition even thinkable. People on
1) Don't tend to be experts in specific productivity apps
2) Don't have a great deal of investment in application specific data
Average users however do fulfill these two criteria. Lets win the app war, the middle ware war, the OS extensions war and then worry about the kernel.