Slashdot Mirror
Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0
lypanov writes "Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video (Bittorrent download, Ogg Theora version). Read the Qt 4 Overview and the online Qt Reference Documentation for more information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4."
Will the KDE library be available for windows now?
Where does the name TrollTech come from?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Trolltech sounds so...dubious. I mean, when I think of Trolltech, I think of spyware. Hell, anything that is profession with the name "Troll" rubs me the wrong way.
I can imagine their future... "The current stock value of Trolltech rose to 300 dollars a share..."
Life is not for the lazy.
I've worked with my fair share of windowing APIs and QT's OO approach to the problem is very well done. On the one extreme we have the heavy MFC which has grown out of control into a mammoth mess. wxwindows, pretty much a clone of MFC, shares the same issues as MFC. WTL seems hopeful, if only anyone was using it and it had any sort of support.
The Win32 and Gnome APIs are written in C, so though they are fast, they doesn't get any of the programming benefits of Object Orientation.
Thought it has a funny macro kludges in certain places, the QT API is absolutely a joy to work with.
A slashdotting, to bittorrent, is lifeblood. A true swarm.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The guy who did most of the icons for the new Qt Tools is one of us. He's a pretty cool dude, once you get past the ego and the constant attempts at world domination.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
1) QT doesn't suck
2) QT is GPL'd, not LGPL'd, so whoever wishes to use it in closed-source software must buy a license to do so. This means TrolTech can afford to continue developing it full time, while still getting it well-used in open-source projects.
3) The commercial license is very affordable.
4) QT is very cross-platform.
5) QT is very full featured, but still fast and light.
6) QT includes a very nice GUI designer.
I'm going to infer that because you read the Amazon patent story, and subsequently read a goof-off story, you might be interested in reading El Reg?
I downloaded the movie via BitTorrent, but it does not seem to work. Is this encoded in some funky format?
Trolltech does have income. There are many businesses that won't touch the GPL with a 10 foot pole.
There are also Qtopia Pda and Phone Editions.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
I'm sorry, I could see how having their BSD/Linux versions open and their windows versions closed could keep them in business; but now that they don't have any income generating platforms left, aren't they going to be out of business next week?
They will continue to make money the same way they always have, by selling commercial licenses. There are plenty of companies/people who want to use Qt that who can't or won't use a GPL licenses for their projects. This change simply means that we will see more Qt-based free (as in GPL) software for Windows.
#!/
The company I work for has over a dozen enterprise-level licenses. We do it solely for the support. For us, it's essentially the same as using GPL code and contracting a 3rd company for fulltime support. Also, if Trolltech ever bit the dust, we've got the source code.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
It get my vote for "most disturbing dance video ever".
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
I mean, you must've gone to an awful lot of work to copy that blurb verbatim from the Dot.
</sarcasm>
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
That is expensive?
It is for a small time shop. But even carpenters purchase tools which are much more expensive than that. Shit, sewing machines are much more expensive than $5,000 for a good one.
Developers (not all, just many) are too stuck up if they cannot fathom paying $5000 for a tool which will take care of just about every tedious problem with their GUI program. And leave time for the real work (the application idea and implementation)
The fact that you can now rapidly prototype an application using QT and Python in a matter of hours on programs which may take days to produce is worth the money right there (but honestly just download the GPL version for proof of concept if you are afraid to pay for it)
There are other features which are outrageously worth the money. Not everyone will use them. QT is not for every developer. But honestly, what kind of snob are you that $5000 is an expensive tool for your professional career in which you get paid above the average grade of laborers who must purchase more expensive tools?
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
"Oh, uhm... would not time be better spent at kde.org fixing the many bugs in KDE 3?"
What makes you think they won't? Migrating to a new version of the Qt framework doesn't require rewriting all of the underlying logic, therefore allowing for bug fixes in a major portion of application code. Not to mention, there are plans for another release in the 3.x series (development can happen in parallel). Also, you should be happy to know that the things you complain about, kicker and kdesktop, are slated to undergo a major overhaul for the KDE4 release.
I wouldn't use the rather inflammatory phrase "stuck up", but it basically comes down to a business decision: is it less expensive to pay TrollTech a multi-thousand dollar fee, or to get the necessary functions implemented without using Qt? For my company, the Qt was by far the cheaper, better option. Our Qt license paid for itself in the first year. We now have an app that runs well on every major platform, that was straightforward to write and is easy to maintain. Using a cheaper, less well-designed GUI toolkit would probably have doubled our development time, and coding our own portable GUI toolkit from scratch would have made things ten times harder. (of course making our app GPL would have given us the best of both worlds... but I couldn't quite convince management of that
(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If you don't make enough money from your commercial software business to afford a one-time expense of $2000 (the light version includes everything you need in a toolkit), you have no business writing commercial software. I mean, that's only about two weeks of one developer's salary. You'll spend about 5 times that in lost productivity if you use VC++ alone. The $3000 version includes XML, databases, networking, and a ton of other stuff which is definitely worth it if you need it. Not to mention you get full source code.
Troll indeed.. Let's see.. you're comparing a cross platform GUI toolkit against:
1) A toy programming language
2) A C++ compiler and IDE
That's not apples-and-oranges. Those aren't even fruit!
You have to use Mingw for the GPL'd version. The paid version supports Visual Studio, though.
wxWidgets: Qt: Notice that Qt manages to do it in a sane fashion, with a single, readable method call. wxWidgets requires two calls, one with a boolean parameter? This leads me to number 10: Sane and readable APIs.
what is the difference between mingw and a cygwin installed gcc/g++ environment ?
MingW is a native windows app that doesn't require the cygwin dll and creates exes that are standalone in windows.
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
And yet, even with that great mystical sign from above, you refused to spare us the agony. Why, oh aixou, do you torture us so?
From here:
Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO, and Eirik Eng, Trolltech's President, had been working together with various cross-platform GUI tools back in 1991. We were both very disappointed in their quality and were sure we could do it much better. Haavard went on to write his Masters thesis on GUI design, while I wrote a C++ GUI toolkit for a Norwegian company. In 1993 he called me up and suggested that we should join forces and use our experience in GUI design to write the toolkit that would be the king of toolkits. We had no customers, no funding and a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily we were both married to wives who had full-time jobs. We used some savings to rent a small office and hacked away for a year while our wives fed and cared for us.
Personally, I find the entire thing rather neat and almost romantic. If you told your spouse/sig. other "I'm gonna go work on something and make absolutely no money for a year and you're going to support me...do you mind?" (s)he'd probably say something along the lines of "hell no" or go packing. The company name comes from a dream one of the cofounders had about their wife as well.
I dunno. I don't see that many couples that're close or stable enough to do that.
There's more important things "chicks" can have than a "hot" body. Like...helping you realize your dreams?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
From the /. summary:
I think what was meant here was proprietary licenses, not commercial licenses. This is a rather common misunderstanding that stems from not seeing the GNU GPL as a license under which one may do commercial work. But many developers and distributors have done commercial activity involving GPL-covered works over the years. What the GPL prohibits is distribution of proprietary derivatives, hence the GPL is not a proprietary software license.
Digital Citizen
I struggled with this a bit earlier today. The docs are pretty weak right now.
First, get and install mingw from http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml
Second, from Trolltech, get and install "qt-win-opensource-desktop-4.0.0-mingw.exe", NOT "qt-win-opensource-desktop-4.0.0.zip".
Then, from the Start menu, run "Qt 4.0.0 Command Prompt" to get a DOS box with everything set up properly. Then play with the examples and demos, using qmake to create the makefiles.
Hope that helps!!
Try the "Compose" key of your X-Windows system. It's usually Shift+RWin, but it can be changed in your kbd section of xorg.conf using Option "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin" for example.
Use Compose ' e to get é, Compose s s to get ß, Compose / o to get ø, etc.
you can press each key separately, you don't have to hold each one down. It's much easier then remembing ALT+ASCII code combinations.
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
Ultimate++
It is BSD licensed, it comes with IDE on both Linux and Win32, and it kicks ass for productivity.
See comparison with Qt.
To me, this seems like an interesting catalyst to learn a GUI API. Not only is cross platform is a welcome positive; the Qt structure is intriguing. Particularly see the Qt Object Model for a great read. I had little idea that Qt used a signals model and was tending towards strict use of the MVC paradigm. Perhaps comprehension of Qt would increase my chances of bothering to learn the almost entirely alien Cocoa/Obj-C rhetoric.
Ummm...
What you don't understand is that this is how marriage works. My wife left a good job so I could make a career move. I supported her as she went through grad school and the process to become an Episcopal priest. Right now, she is at home with the kids while I am presenting at a conference.
We have been married 23 years, and I claim that this sort of thing is more typical than you might imagine. We have both realized dreams because of the support of the other.
The Qt/Windows Open Source Edition Page
c e-desktop-4.0.0.mingw.exe.torrent
http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/windows.html
For the click-alergic people:
Please note that the Open Source Edition of Qt will support the MinGW compiler. Visual Studio support and integration is provided with the commercial Editions of Qt.
They also provide a package that will install the binaries, and tries to install the right version of MinGW. A Torrent is:
http://www.trolltech.com/torrents/qt-win-opensour
WxWidgets doesn't have Developers Fees, and uses the Native GUI on Windows, GTK, Mac, and even embedded systems (There's that crossplatform you claim only Qt has)...and All with standard C++ (No stupid Metacompilers needed). WxWidgets used with MinGW or Cygwin make for the ultimate competition, without the Qtlib nonsense. And considering WxWidgets uses STANDARD C++, I'd say it is more portable than Qtlib. Finally, compared to WxWidgets, I'd say that, yes, $5000 per developer is expensive for its type of toolkit.
I don't mind you FUDsters promoting Qtlib or Trolltech, but at least be truthful about it.
And, for your information, here's the info about WxWidgets differences...this might help you keep your facts straight: http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/wiki.pl?WxWidgets_Compa
"(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)"
Another satisfied user/customer here. I even convinced my bosses to buy a commercial Windows license for 3.1 a couple years ago (which I'm still using, btw). The rest of my colleagues are using Borland's C++ Builder, though I am more productive with Qt/KDevelop than they are with Builder (with one possible exception).
Unfortunately, the entirety of Builder costs about as much as just the Qt license. Considering that, for my Windows-only counterparts, the cost of the Qt libraries alone equals or exceeds the cost of a Builder integrated Editor + Compiler + Debugger + GUI library, the Qt-as-a-standard argument was stillborn.
It made no sense to pay for Qt, and then have to spend an equal amount of additional money for a development environment where half its features would go unused. Despite the fact that Builder's GUI system is horrendously primitive compared to Qt, the very well integrated system that Builder provides outweighed everything else.
On the bright side, my productivity with Qt+KDevelop is high enough that they let me continue using it for all my applications. I think they're also hedging their bets that I will eventually arrive at a day when I've rewritten all our in-house stuff to be Linux enabled, therefore allowing us to give Microsoft the Great Big Middle Finger.
Yet both Gnome and KDE have both managed to have very large footprints.
Perhaps "making sure" was the wrong phrase. But there is alot of competition when it comes to GUI toolkits. So first and foremost critera, for me, is the quality. But next question is "how many platforms will it run on". I'm well aware that I can re-write my GUI and port ot any platform. But I'm an American. I want it for free and I want it right now. So if I can find a toolkit that appears to offer what Qt can, plus allows me to do a simple recompile on more platforms, then I will choose that toolkit. If, otoh, you can demonstrate that the quality of Qt is superior, then quality trumps # of supported platforms. If I wanted it to run on EVERYTHING, I would choose Swing. It would not surprise me one bit if someone IS working on a Swing port for Commodore 64. But I have decided that I prefer the quality that a native C++ toolkit provides me. I have written great Swing apps, so please no flames. But my critera for choosing a toolkit includes the number of deployment platforms it supports. Why is this invalid? If someone expressed an interest in buying my software for a Palm, why should I lose that sale because I don't have the time to port it to Palm? Just as important, why would I want to spend the time and money to port it to palm if I can find a toolkit of equal quality which does that job for me?
Looks like a troll, but it seems it's better to clean up other people's misconceptions anyway.
No can do. GPL and BSD are incompatible according to our friendly psychos at FSF.
Only that archaic, ancient, malicious BSD with advertising clause.
The more modern variant is not, and it's 100% OK to use it in Qt programs, it's just that the recipient has to be able to distribute it under the GPL if he so wishes.