Original BeOS Developer Now at Trolltech

UltimaGuy writes "Benoit Schillings, co-creator of the Be operating system and former CTO of Openwave, has been appointed to the newly created position of chief technology officer (CTO) at Trolltech. In the meantime, Trolltech has also joined the new mobile OSDL initiative."

Comments

Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[gbulmash]

Unless you're doing pure open source GPL'ed programming, entry level for a version of QT you can use for commercial code is nearly $1800. You can't even use the free version to get your sea legs under you, because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

Microsoft, Borland, etc. usually have an entry level version of most of their programming products (with which you can still write proprietary code) that is less than my car payment. Entry level on QT is more than my mortgage.

Yes, they support open source, but unless you're an open source coder or a well-funded enterprise coder, they basically tell you to F off. I don't like that and it detracts from any excitement I could have about these announcements.

- Greg

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[NormalVisual]

I like Qt, but I'll agree it's pricey, and that's a per-seat cost. I'm currently researching options for a commercial product that will need to run on either a Linux or BSD platform, and TrollTech's pricing precludes them from even being considered. Unless you absolutely *have* to have cross-platform source, it's hard to justify that kind of money.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[grasshoppa]

So wait, your biggest problem with trolltech is they don't have a price point for you?

It's their software, right? They have the right to make money off of their own work, right? And license it however they choose?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[LWATCDR]

You can use the free version to learn QT just can't work on your real project with it... I have to wonder how often that rule is ignored.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[qbwiz]

Perhaps, but we have the right not to use it.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Well I don't see the problem. Either you "Contribute to the continued development of the product by purchasing commercial licenses from Trolltech", or you "Contribute to the Open Source community by placing your application under an Open Source license (e.g. the GPL)." What is the problem? That you don't want to contribute your code to the GPL, but you want to use a GPLed codebase? Isn't that akin to stealing? So you don't want to use the GPL? Then pay for the commercial license. Sounds like you want it both ways, to me. Ok, how about this? You get the Free version and play with it. Any work you do would be GPLed if you distribute it, and isn't available for use later with the commercial license, but you can testdrive it. If you like it, then pony up the cost of the commercial license, and don't use the test programs you wrote. No big deal.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[eosp]

Or the cheap solution...use WxWidgets.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[xfmr_expert]

Look again...that "Per Platform". If you want Linux\Unix and Windows, it'll cost you $2,990 for the "Desktop Light" edition per seat.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is $1800 considered a lot of money for a programmer?

If you're looking at producing something commercial, then it's a perfectly fine investment.
plenty of other industries and interests have costs similar or much larger than that - and they don't have the same prospect for making the money back as a good commercial application does.
By the way - to get your sea legs under you, there's an evaluation version. You can also talk to Trolltech about your specific situation and your possible options.

Every time a TrollTech article comes up, there's the same whiny troll about the price of the license, well guess what? It's a fucking GOOD thing that you can't afford it, because we don't WANT your crappy $15 shareware anyway.

And god help you if you ever want to be a musician: "waaahhhh, why do guitars cost so much?" "waaaahhhh, why do I have to pay $5,000+ for sequencers, effects and soft-synths?" or alternatively - "wahhhhhh, why does it cost $500 an hour to record in this studio?"

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[NormalVisual]

Trolltech most certainly has the right to price their product at whatever point they want to, and to impose whatever restrictions they care to. I don't have any argument at all regarding that, but I don't feel that *for me* it's anything resembling a reasonable price, given my specific needs. For someone else that needs to have their cross-platform capability or other features that Qt offers, TT's pricing may represent a drop in the bucket compared to what development would cost for rolling their own or using someone else's libraries, and thus it would be a good buy for them.

Everyone considering Qt needs to weigh the costs against the benefit of using it, and proceed accordingly. For my particular requirements, Qt is simply too expensive to consider, and since I can't use it professionally, any OSS stuff I happen to release will pretty much be guaranteed to be non-Qt as well. I doubt this will make the slightest difference to anyone but myself, but I can't imagine I'm the only developer in the same situation.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[billybob2]

because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

WRONG! Please mod parent flamebait.

You're confusing paid versions with proprietary versions. You can make money selling paid versions of Free and Open Source Software.

QT is licenced under the GPL, which is a Free and Open Source Software license. It forces software vendors to share the source code, but does not prohibit vendors from selling binaries.

Anyone (ranging from independent programmers to multibllion dollar companies) can create Free and Open Source Software built on QT and can sell the resultant software without giving a penny to Trolltech. Just look at Novell SUSE Linux, Linspire, RedHat and any other commercial distro that ships with KDE. These companies (and anyone else for that matter, including you!) can sell the binaries -- all they have to do is provide the source code to the user, so that the user can customize the software for his/her needs.

If you want to keep your source code secret and build proprietary applications that lock in users, prevent them from making modifications, restrict their rights, take away control of their computers, then naturally you need to pay royalties. In the world of spyware, DRM-infestation, and Treacherous Computing no proprietary software should be trusted.

In other words: If a company does the moral thing for the users and society, the company gets a freebie. If they're unscrupulous, then they better pay up.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Trejkaz]

It forces software vendors to share the source code, but does not prohibit vendors from selling binaries.

It's actually better than that. It forced the vendor to share the source code to the same parties with which they shared the binaries. In other words if you only have, say, half a dozen very trustworthy clients, or clients who would never even think to ask for the source code, then you're in a fairly good place.

On the other hand, it only takes one client with knowledge of the GPL to redistribute your code to the entire world... but that's another story.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[elhedran]

Entry level on QT is more than my mortgage.

Wow! thats one cheap mortgage. Where on earth do you live! I mean even if you are talking repayments, $1800 over 25 years is what? $10 a month with interest?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you that stupid? It's pretty obvious he's talking monthly.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[KillShill]

he has every right to complain.

just like you enumerate their right to sell it at any price point they want.

so what exactly are you trying to say, then?

that he should shut up and accept it?

complaining is a god given right (or nature given if you're into that instead).

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[be-fan]

Seriously. $1800 isn't a lot of money. In many engineering fields (mechanical, aerospace, maybe chemical and electrical), a full suite of software for a single engineer can cost well over $20,000. Something like CATIA's product-life-management suite starts at $12,000, and can cost over $30,000 per seat over 5 years when maintainence and support are factored in. Heck, even something like Matlab will cost you $2000 for the initial license, then another $4000-$7000 for all the plugins you need for your particular field.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Arandir]

I don't know any full time professional US/EU software developers that make less than $50,000. Most get paid a heck of a lot more than that. Surely they can afford a tiny $1800 license.

Qt isn't for part time shareware authors.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[10Ghz]

I was wondering how long it would take for this nonsense to surface itself. And it didn't take long: First message!

In short: what is the "issue" with Qt? the fact that it licensed under the GPL. And why is that a problem? Because it makes it difficult to write proprietary software using Qt (you have to pay TT in order to do so).

Hello, why exactly is that a problem? Since when did free software movement turn from creating great software that is Free, in to something meant to satisfy the whims of pushers of proprietary software? The people who whine about Qt and it's license are those who want to use it in order to earn money, but they don't want to give anyone else anything in return. They don't want to share the code and they don't want to pay TrollTech. Why exactly should we care one bit about those people/companies? In my book, they are selfish assholes who insist that others must give them kick-ass tools for free, but they don't want to give anything back in return. I guess Open Source and Free Software is great only as long as you can use it to earn money, without giving anything in return. But the moment you are required to do something in return, we get endless bithing and moaning.

And the funny thing is that people demanded that TrollTech must make their toolkit free software. TrollTech did so. And now that TrollTech is telling people to make their software Free Software as well, those same people whine and moan! First they demanded TT to free their toolkit. And when TT demanded the same thing from them in return, they cry and whine! What a bunch of hypocritical assholes! "Do as I say, not as I do!". They demand the right to earn money from Qt, but they want to deny TT the same right.

If you whine about Qt's license (GPL), then I guess you really care about proprietary software, not free software. As a supporter of free software, I don't give a flying fuck about your problems. Why don't you go push your proprietary crap elsewhere? We have enough problems with Microsoft, do we need MORE proprietary crap?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[hunterx11]

It's just ironic that developing software on a traditionally free platform is so expensive, whereas on traditionally closed platforms it's free.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[dbIII]

You can't even use the free version to get your sea legs under you, because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

There are a lot of pieces of software where the free demo is crippled in some way - in this case it isn't there are just restrictions on how you use it - just like the academic versions of a huge number of different pieces of software.

I see nothing wrong with having to develop all commercial qt software on the commercial version, and I do not see how they could compel people to pay for it at all if they let some of it get developed on the free version (how would you define how much you could do on it anyway?).

I'm not really sure I would be happy using a commercial application where someone was learning how to use a toolkit from scratch anyway - test out the functions in the toolkit with some code that teaches you how to use it with the free version first, learn how to use it, and then write your stuff you want me to pay you for. I've had to use far too many Visual Basic things cobbled together by people who are learning on the job to have any sympathy.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[idlake]

In short: what is the "issue" with Qt? the fact that it licensed under the GPL. And why is that a problem? Because it makes it difficult to write proprietary software using Qt (you have to pay TT in order to do so).

The issue with Qt is not that it is covered by the GPL, the issue with Qt is that it is covered also by a commercial license. And the problem with that is that it makes it easy to write proprietary software using Qt--all you have to do is fork over some money to Troll Tech. Troll Tech's dual licensing scheme inhibits most of the things that make open source good: free sharing of ideas and improvements, communal development, and the ability of different forks to compete on merit alone.

Troll Tech is using open source as a marketing gimmick to sell proprietary software. They don't want open source to succeed because it would kill them as a commercial company; they just want open source to succeed enough to make their business model work.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[idlake]

So wait, your biggest problem with trolltech is they don't have a price point for you?

No, the biggest problem is that Troll Tech is using open source licensing as a gimmick to push a commercial piece of software at an inflated price point. Without the open source marketing, Qt wouldn't have a prayer in the free market because it's overpriced for what it does.

And it is a commercial software project: it is run like one, it is sold under a commercial license, and Troll Tech retains all the rights.

It's their software, right? They have the right to make money off of their own work, right? And license it however they choose?

Yes, they have the right to offer it under whatever license they like. And we have the right to warn people against using it, and to expose what their approach to doing business means to FOSS in the long run.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[cahiha]

or you "Contribute to the Open Source community by placing your application under an Open Source license (e.g. the GPL).

Actually, I want to contribute to Qt under the GPL, but Troll Tech won't let me.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[10Ghz]

Oh look, it's the same moron who thinks that releasing GPL'ed software is a threat to Free Software!. Seriously, just stop. you are only making a fool out of yourself.

And the problem with that is that it makes it easy to write proprietary software using Qt--all you have to do is fork over some money to Troll Tech.

And that money is used to improve Qt, which in turn helps developers of Free Software since they have a kick ass Free toolkit at their disposal. And isn't it even easier to write proprietary software using GTK+? I mean, you don't have to pay anyone, unlike with Qt. So why are you whining about Qt and not GTK? It's even easier to write proprietaty apps with GTK than with Qt!

Either you don't know what you are talking about, or you are a hypocritical asshole. Which one is it?

Troll Tech's dual licensing scheme inhibits most of the things that make open source good: free sharing of ideas and improvements

The codebase is open, go right ahead and take a look and share your ideas. No-one is stopping you.

communal development

So, I can improve GTK+ just like that?`I can drop my code there right away if I wanted to? No? That's what I thought....

and the ability of different forks to compete on merit alone.

I don't see any competing GTK+-forks around, do you? So why aren't you whining about GTK+? And you could fork Qt right now if you wanted to. Just because no-one has forked it is not TT's problems.

Troll Tech is using open source as a marketing gimmick to sell proprietary software.

Again: Qt is licensed under the GPL. The codebase is identical to the commercial version. So what the hell are you blathering about this "proprietary software"?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Lussarn]

The GPL only comes in when you distribute, you can work on whatever code you like with the free version. Kind of weird if you ask me because they have per seat licences for proprietary code, but if you have a build box you should be ok as I see it.

Remember, you don't have to accept the GPL to use their code, you have to accept it when you distribute though.

Anybody care to clarify Trolltechs thinking here?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[10Ghz]

And another thing: According to TT's latest customer-survey, 28% of their customers (as in , people/companies that have bought their license) have participated in free software projects, with 68% targetting the Linux-platform. And TT also sponsors several free-software developers (Zack Rusin and Aaron Seigo for example). It seems to me that Qt is NOT "killing" free software, quite the contrary! they are funneling money and resources in to free software, they are bringing in more and more developers in to free software-community and they are actively promoting free software. Hell, thanks to Qt, we have a thriving community of free software developers formed around Qt and KDE! And still, some retards think that they are "killing" free software and that they must be stopped! Seriously: what is wrong with you people?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Kjella]

I don't know any full time professional US/EU software developers that make less than $50,000. Most get paid a heck of a lot more than that. Surely they can afford a tiny $1800 license.

Qt isn't for part time shareware authors.

And not for anyone who has made a project, only to then want to go professional. If say BitTorrent had been written using the Qt library, it doesn't matter that he just got $8 million in funding. That code is still ineligible for a commercial version (unless you port it to a different toolkit, or Qt is willing to give you a special license). It also depends on what you use Qt for. If 95% of your program is non-GUI logic that needs a simple GUI, paying $1800/seat for that is a joke. Qt Commercial is (IMO) a fairly niche and lucrative market. Nothing wrong with that (queue the "Trolltech are dying" like "Apple are dying" trolls), and as a GPL toolkit it is excellent. The problem is that once you're hooked on the Qt toolkit, there's a broad range of projects you'd like to use it for, but for which there's no sensible license.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[muuh-gnu]

It isnt ironic at all. Youre free to develop Free Software for a free platform. You have to pay money for proprietary QT just in case you want to make unfree, proprietary software, and not to contribute anything back to the free platform you're using. Its a way to make sure youre either contributing to QT (in form of your money, which will lead to further development of Free Software) or directly to the Free Software platform, in form of your code. As I understand, you, and most of other QT bashers, dont care to contribute in any way, so stop whining.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[gnuLNX]

Quite often. In fact I am pretty sure they want this to happen. It gets people using their software. What are they gonna sya, "you can't purchase a license you must open source your program?" Nope. They are a business and they want your money.

Besides while they are expensive they are without a doubt the best cross platform development environment that money can buy. The QT framework is clean and well designed. The QT scripting language sucks as bad as any scripting language out their...far far worse than visual basic. Common Troll's give us that Python interpreter that we have heard rumored for so long now.

Word of advise to those looking to us QT. Try and keep the non graphical parts of your code base seperate from the graphical parts. You never want to be stuck with a proprietary framework....I speak from exerience as I try to rip the guts out of a 75,000 line code base tied in heavily to QT.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[muuh-gnu]

> And it is a commercial software project: it is run like one, it is sold under
> a commercial license, and Troll Tech retains all the rights.

What "rights" do they retain, any other Free Software developer gives away?
Their copyrights?

Why the hell should they give away their copyrights, and to whom?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Shawn is an Asshole]

He was talking about his monthly payment, smartass.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Phisbut]

Look again...that "Per Platform". If you want Linux\Unix and Windows, it'll cost you $2,990 for the "Desktop Light" edition per seat.

It actually depends if *every* licenced programmer develops for both platforms. If you have one programmer that does all the Linux/Unix stuff and one programmer that does all the Windows stuff, then you need only pay for one platform per programmer.

I know that because, well, that's what we do over here. We got two licences here, I got a single-platform-X11 licence while my colleague has a single-platform-Windows licence. Neither of us had to pay the dual-platform price.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[slashflood]

waaahhhh, why do guitars cost so much?

Sorry, it's "Wah-wah, why do guitars cost so much?" :-)

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Phisbut]

Everyone considering Qt needs to weigh the costs against the benefit of using it, and proceed accordingly. For my particular requirements, Qt is simply too expensive to consider, and since I can't use it professionally, any OSS stuff I happen to release will pretty much be guaranteed to be non-Qt as well.

The "use-it-or-not" decision shouldn't be based on the price. Qt is a tool. If it's "the right tool for the job", then it should be used. If whatever non-free software you develop can't make a decent enough profit to recoup the $2000 licence price for the tools you use to do your work, you have problems that are way more important than Qt's price.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[SgtChaireBourne]

The real problems with Trolltech have nothing to do with the GPL. Dozens of other posts will explain the details of that. The real problems with Trollech are related:

• Trolltech is talking IPO, that's often the kiss of death for creativity and productivity. No Google doesn't count as a counter example until more time has passed. Any company can survive on inertia for a while.
• Trolltech is talking about taking on MS staff to make executive decisions affecting the future viability of the company. These are, at best, guys without domain expertise.

It will be interesting to see how a BeOS developer fits into all that.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Phisbut]

The GPL only comes in when you distribute, you can work on whatever code you like with the free version. [...] Remember, you don't have to accept the GPL to use their code, you have to accept it when you distribute though.

It's not the GPL that prevents you from using the free version for development and only buy the commercial licence when you're ready to ship. It's the commercial licence itself that says you can't use code you wrote with the free version with it.

Quote:"The Commercial license does not allow the incorporation of code developed with the Open Source Edition of Qt into a proprietary product."
They don't say that the GPL limits you, they clearly say that it's their own licence that prevents it. I doubt they enforce it though, since you can't really prove whether the code was done before or after the purchase (unless of course you release a software that has like 40 million lines of code the week after you acquired the licence...)

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[mykdavies]

Joel on software has this to say (from http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubber Duckies.html):

There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the Ritz Carlton. And with all this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you're sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you're losing money.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[grasshoppa]

Look at it this way: 2,000 is nothing in the long run. If you are developing a commercial app, most likely you are shooting for, let's say low end, 1000 customers. That means an extra 2 bucks per customer for you to develop this for them.

If your potential customer base is less, typically that means a specialized field, in which case the cost for your software is going to be so high anyway, an extra 2000 isn't going to make any difference.

And trolltech has every right to make money off of their work. I support them fully in that regard. They make a software library that allows you to make your app look the same across three of the primary OSes out there ( win32, Mac OSX, and linux-stuff ). This is a non-trivial thing to do, and they do it very well.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[deKernel]

You think those prices are bad? Try looking at EDA tools! The good tools start at around $10,000 USD and go upwards of $100,000 depending on your needs.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[deKernel]

The only time you have the right to use it is if you either have paid for a license or your code is GPL'd. Period.

You really need to understand what a "right" is. I will give you a quick example for this situation. When you were born, were you given a contract that stated for your natural born life, you were given a perpetual license to Qt? No. This you don't have the RIGHT to use Qt.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Lussarn]

I see, smart move. Thanks.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Ilgaz]

So, while selling their browser (now free), Opera should not pay Trolltech for QT which makes them possible to run on many platforms (especially mobile!) with legendary low CPU and memory usage?

Looks like Opera ASA has no problem with that, they are a technology partner:
http://partners.trolltech.com/partners/tech.html

I am not developer but I remember lots of flame wars about GPL license of QT. They moved to GPL for opensource/free projects and they still get flamed.

Interesting.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Spicerun]

The "use-it-or-not" decision shouldn't be based on the price.

I'd love for you to tell our CEO and Accounting Department that. The resulting brawl would be downright amusing.

Also, in our company, there are other considerations ... like having to install QT libraries on whatever platform the Qt app is run (Doesn't matter if it is the Free version or not), whereas we can create apps with wxWidgets libraries statically in our apps, and don't have to require anything for wxWidgets to be installed on multiple platforms (especially on Windows). Not to mention that QT keeps the Mac feel on every platform whereas wxWidgets uses the Native GUI set on whichever platform you use (No, you don't have to have gtk+ on Windows btw for a wxWidgets app) eliminating the native feel problem. And, finally, that an app writer even doing a GPL app has to be careful of the Free QT lib they attempt to distribute with their app...enough of an issue that, in our company, it would require that the machines that would run a QT app would have to download their own version of the Free GPL'd Qtlib before installing our app to run with it (Very similiar to the Cygwin Binary dll where apps are not allowed to distribute that .dll, rather machines running a cygwin .dll have to download it directly from Red Hat Cygnus, the entire Cygwin system that is). We have none of those problems with wxWidgets.

Ok, let the flames begin....There is always some qtlib advocate who doesn't want to to believe that his qtlib has restrictions, thinks the restrictions can just be ignored (call them unimportant), or that they will make the case on the order of "Everybody should pay the cost anyhow, otherwise the free alternatives aren't worth it". I'm here to say it does matter to companies and developers trying to find the lowest cost and easiest for their users way to distribute their software.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[MyDixieWrecked]

Why is $1800 considered a lot of money for a programmer? ... because we don't WANT your crappy $15 shareware anyway.

Firstly... $1800 is quite a bit for a developer who may be working on a small, commercial project, whether it's a $5 shareware app, or a $60 shareware app.

It seems that in the last 5-10 years, shareware has been saturated with VisualBasic (or REALbasic on the mac side) apps that are sub-par and worthless, and that's been giving all of the other shareware apps a bad name. There are plenty of decent pieces of shareware out there, and several very good companies putting them out (unsanity, ambrosia, Panic, and the iPSP guys come to mind, immediately).

also, don't forget that there is a HUGE market for those little games, now. Even though you could make a free implementation, $ does drive some people to develop things. for linux to be fully adopted on the desktop, you've gotta have a selection of those Bejeweled (et al) games for mom and gramma. and they want the crappy 15$ shareware.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[sinserve]

Or if you don't want any bullshit, and just want to get work done with smallest possible foot print, FLTK. If you're on Win32, download Dev-Cpp and use fltk2.

http://fltk.org/

http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html

I have migrated from my legally bought Visual Studio to this bare-bones platform, and I am an order of magnitude more productive.

With FLTK, I wrote a 3D voice signal visualization and analysis software in three weeks. With native OpenGL. This stuff is what wet dreams are made of. Highly recommended.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Urusai]

You can't even use the free version to get your sea legs under you, because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

Huh? Unless you actually DISTRIBUTE, even under the GPL you can do whatever you like in the privacy of your own home or shop. If they don't like it, screw 'em, because that's what "privacy" is all about--what happens behind closed doors is not relevant to society's functioning (in general).

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

From the GP
Perhaps, but we have the right not to use it.

Calm down, good sir, no need to burst a blood vessel

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Profane MuthaFucka]

This is the problem: wxWidgets is one of the buggiest pieces of crap that I've ever seen. It's no good telling me that I can fix it myself since it's open source because the code is some serious crap to wade through too. They should seriously work on fixing their bugs.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Profane MuthaFucka]

wxWidgets is really awful quality as far as libraries go. They need to fix their bugs before I even consider using it again.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Spicerun]

This is the problem: wxWidgets is one of the buggiest pieces of crap that I've ever seen. It's no good telling me that I can fix it myself since it's open source because the code is some serious crap to wade through too. They should seriously work on fixing their bugs. Interesting, I've had no trouble with wxWidgets since I've been working on it for the past 2 years. It has worked wonderfully on my Linux and Windows with no problems at all.

But, then again, if you're going to force it to work like qtlib, yeah, you'll see lots of problems. The MetaCompiler stuff won't work in a Standard C++ only environment.

(I always get a kick out of people who think everything should work like what they're used to, rather than to learn how it really works)

Also, since you like to throw the 'crap' term around, then I'll say that QT is every bit of 'the buggiest Crap created" itself.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[NormalVisual]

If whatever non-free software you develop can't make a decent enough profit to recoup the $2000 licence price for the tools you use to do your work, you have problems that are way more important than Qt's price.

Well, being that I have an MSDN Universal Subscription, I don't suppose I need to be lectured on the cost/benefits of tools vs. development effort. For what Qt offers, I don't believe their pricing is reasonable, and I don't feel my time lost using another package would offset that expense, therefore I don't feel it's the right tool for the job for me. There's more than one time-efficient way to skin a cat, and not all of them cost thousands of dollars.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh YAWN. Please stop trolling.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I find it interesting that people like to make assumptions about how I write code, without even asking any questions. Sure makes you sound like an idiot to know that I used wxWidgets before moving to Qt. Blows away your loudmouth theory that I was making wxWidgets work like Qt, doesn't it?

First point: I made a simple app to display a tree graphically, using their built-in tree widget viewer. It seemed to work just fine for a few dozen items. As soon as I increased the number of items to several thousand, it started drawing lines all over the widget in random places, sometimes not even connecting to any branch of a tree. That's a BUG in the library.

Second point: I made a simple app to display some text and an OK button. To close the app, you click the OK button. The problem is that if you click the OK button without moving the mouse, the button doesn't click. You have to wiggle the mouse to get the click to be accepted and processed. This indicates very serious problems in the event handling code within the library.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Peter La Casse]

Why is $1800 considered a lot of money for a programmer?

Because what constitutes "a lot of money" is relative. I can think of lots of things I'd rather have my employer spend $1800 on. Plus, some companies don't have that much to throw around; if I were in that situation, I'd rather put up with one of the less-good alternatives than lose developers from my group.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the parent again... did you miss the *not*?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[idlake]

What "rights" do they retain, any other Free Software developer gives away?

Troll Tech retains all rights to the software; in particular, they retain the right to sell it commercially under non-free licenses. That is very different from most other GPL'ed projects, where the project accepts contributions under the GPL and nobody has the right to sell a non-free version.

Their copyrights?

That is exactly the problem: all of Qt is under their copyright. When the community contributes value to Qt (and they do), Troll Tech arranges for the resulting enhancements to Qt to fall under their own copyright or are shipped separately. That is very different from most other GPL'ed software projects (e.g., the Linux kernel, Emacs, etc.), where often dozens of different people hold the copyright on various parts of the source.

Multiple ownership of the source code of an open source project is good because it pretty much guarantees that the project will remain open and that the project will respond to the needs of its user community. When the entire codebase is owned by a single company, then the project will be driven by the commercial interests of that company, whether or not they also happen to ship a GPL'ed version.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[idlake]

You can make a sales pitch for how the extra $2000 don't matter and how good Qt is until you're blue in the face, the fact is people aren't buying it in large numbers. And if you think that you can present those kinds of considerations to justify $2000 in a real business, you haven't encountered real-world corporate budgeting.

As for Troll Tech's right to make money, nobody is disputing that; if they just offered Qt as a commercial, closed source product, we wouldn't even be discussing them here. Nobody has been complaining about the fact that XVT is closed source, for example. What I and others don't like is their marketing, which relies heavily on using the open source community to generate demand for their proprietary product.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[hunterx11]

I'm neither whining not bashing Qt; I am just pointing out that the licensing fees seem unduly high in light of the fact that the alternatives cost nothing. I am free to develop free or proprietary software for OS X and I don't have to pay anyone anything to do either.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[booch]

Your house cost less than $1800?

Perhaps you meant that the 1-time license fee costs more than your monthly mortgage payment. That's a serious case of comparing a bushel of apples to bag of oranges.

And their pricing model allows you to gain all the experience you want in using their software, as long as you're not building a commerical product. Heck, I usually build a separate throw-away program when I'm learning a new framework anyway.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[grasshoppa]

And if you think that you can present those kinds of considerations to justify $2000 in a real business, you haven't encountered real-world corporate budgeting.
Depends on the real world. To me this seems a slam dunk: For $2,000, I get an app that will run on multiple OSes, considerably broadening my potential customer base. And it'll only add a few bucks to the end product.

Only a PHB would deny that kind of request, and they wouldn't even do that if you dropped the words, "Mac OSX".

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[elhedran]

I mean even if you are talking repayments, $1800 over 25 years is what? $10 a month with interest?

Sorry, I forgot to put in the word 'monthly' for the mentally retarded. I'll correct it for you.

I mean even if you are talking monthly repayments, $1800 over 25 years is what? $10 a month with interest?

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

direct sales models usually depend on a $100K sale, not $75K.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[qbwiz]

I agree 100%.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[idlake]

Depends on the real world. To me this seems a slam dunk: For $2,000, I get an app that will run on multiple OSes, considerably broadening my potential customer base. And it'll only add a few bucks to the end product.

Cross-platform support at the toolkit level is uninteresting for most companies; if you are serious about cross-platform, then you have to put in place an entire infrastructure for supporting the new platform (help desk, tech writing, marketing, etc.). At that point, you might as well create a new native UI, which is quick and easy given modern tools, and which will be better quality than anything you do with a cross-platform toolkit.

Only a PHB would deny that kind of request, and they wouldn't even do that if you dropped the words, "Mac OSX".

Non-Macintosh software houses don't generally give a damn about Macintosh (not worth the extra trouble and expense), and Macintosh software houses are disdainful of Windows.

Overall, cross platform support is a small niche market.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[grasshoppa]

Overall, cross platform support is a small niche market.

If that's true, you have to wonder why. Let's take, for example, the dental industry. There are a number of practice managers out there ( and pretty much all of them suck once you get beyond a single small practice...but I digress ), but they are all window based.

Now, let's make one built on qt. Is approximate in features to the others ( not that hard, believe me ).

So we have a new dentist opening his doors. He is going to be a single office, but he wants to go chartless from the get-go ( big deal in the dental field ). So he's going to have 4 ops ( 1 hyg, 3 for dr production. Triple booking ), 2 front desk people, an insurance person, and his+office manager. That's 8 systems out the gate. 9 if you want to give him an xray room computer ( and with chartless, he'll need it for digital xrays ). And due to the number of systems, let's toss in a server. One server to bind them all, and all that.

So, we have 10 systems that won't need the windows tax, that's a savings of about 2000 ( 9 pro, 1 server license ) right out the gate. Now, what would a practice be without letters? Because we built ours to be OS independant, we couldn't count on MS Office being installed, so we opted for open office instead. So that's 9 office standard licenses we didn't have to fork over cash for either. Let's say that's 4,000. Now, let's take a moment about actual software costs: Most practice managers today are moving to a centralized sql solution. I've seen ones for pervasive, oracle and mssql. Just imagine for a moment *those* licensing costs.

So, we just saved our Dr at least $6,000 is start up fees. What does this mean to us, the software developer? Our offer doesn't suffer from the hidden costs our competitors do. Further, this creates more busines opportunities for us. We could prebuild a linux system to run our software, prebuild his whole network, in the course of a day.

And let's talk about those hidden fees. Because we chose qt, we were obviously smart enough to go with postgres ( data integrity is critical, not speed ). Nothing in our setup require the end user to worry about the number of licenses they have to pay for, excepting support ( which I will touch on in a moment ). So once the Dr drops the cash for the system, he's done. He can be sure that he won't grow beyond some mystical number and suddenly he won't be allowed to log in anymore.

Now: Support. Who here has supported a full linux network? Those of you who have never had the pleasure, let me tell you something: It's pure bliss. I don't care how many systems you throw on your network, with linux, once you have something setup, it's setup. Minimal maintence. Shit doesn't "just break" for no reason. More so if you've built it. So our Dr's support bill could be considerably lower than our competitors.

At the end of the day, our Dr may pay more for our system than the competitors, but not by much, and he gets a ton more in the bargin. Further, he gets reliable systems that don't need constant tweaking, so his productivity is quite a bit higher. Add to that the fact that we can lock down our linux systems tight as drum, and they are still functional, and we can assume a higher degree of security. Which means the ditz he hires for the front desk won't be able to install the latest and greatest spyware.

The business opportunities for cross-platform development astound me when I sit here thinking about it. I'm just shocked no one else has picked up on this yet.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[idlake]

The business opportunities for cross-platform development astound me when I sit here thinking about it. I'm just shocked no one else has picked up on this yet.

Well, given that good cross platform toolkits have been around for 20 years (some of them far better than Qt), obviously, there is something wrong with the concept.

Now: Support. Who here has supported a full linux network? Those of you who have never had the pleasure, let me tell you something: It's pure bliss.

When I'm an ISV and I sell software for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, then I must support the software on all three platforms. That means phone staff, procedures, testing, upgrades, installers, tech writers, documentation, and a lot of other people and subprojects for each platform. When I hire all those people, I might as well hire someone to do a native port to OS X because the cost of doing that is negligible in comparison.

So, we just saved our Dr at least $6,000 is start up fees. What does this mean to us, the software developer?

Sounds like you are talking about in-house custom software development. Yes, that's a niche market where cross-platform toolkits sometimes make sense. Those kinds of applications require excellent tool support and very high level languages and toolkits. Custom software is usually done in Visual Basic, and now more in .NET. If you need cross-platform features, people use Real Basic or Java or some more specialized environments; Qt and C++ are completely the wrong choice.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like firefox development, its the developers who choose what goes into their repository.

You are however free to fork it and continue your own development branch.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Umm, no. Here's a correction for, in your words, the metally retarded:

Entry level on QT is more than my monthly mortgage payment.

Re:Issues With Trolltech Lower Excitement

[elhedran]

I had thought you just hadn't gotten the joke the first time, but perhaps you thought I seriously thought he had an unbelievably cheap property or some such. Actually I can't work out quite what you thought but I'll try to explain anyway.

I know he meant a monthly mortgage payment compared to the whole cost of a Qt License. I had thought the second part of my joke would show I read his comment correctly and yet still thought to poke fun. Comparing one month's payment on something that might take 25 years to pay off against the complete cost of something is stupid. Its funnier to take him literally, but really its still a joke if you don't. Perhaps if I had made a third part of the joke, along the lines of only buying a tiny fraction (1/25*12) of a house to live in you might have realized I understood what he meant and still thought to poke fun.

It doesn't actually bother me some people find the price to expensive since a vast number of people don't and line up to pay year after year just for the support. I apologize for insulting you, I thought you were just not getting the joke.

Still, a final thought for you. How many industries let you set up a business where $1800 would be considered a big investment. now stop, and consider Software Engineering is a profession unlike say, house cleaning. How many professions can you start working for yourself where $1800 is considered a big investment. It always makes me laugh when someone says they plan on starting a successful software business and yet say that a few thousand dollars is a prohibitive price.

I predict

[eobanb]

I predict three types of comments here...

1) BeOS was a great multimedia OS

2) Trolltech's licencing schemes suck

3) Gnome vs. KDE

Re:I predict

[civilizedINTENSITY]

How about Linux/Java vs Linux/QT for embedded apps?

Re:I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS was way ahead of its time, and was particularly well-suited for multimedia applications. I think its main failure was the user interface. The learning curve was just too steep for people used to Windows (~90%). Perhaps they would have hit a bigger market if they went with something at least resembling Windows, such as Gnome or KDE. They probably thought the QT license was too restrictive (costs more than a fucking kidney transplant), and Gnome looks like total shit. So they whip up this Fisher Price interface and fail to gain any significant market penetration. A couple years later, and they're gone.

Re:I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

4) SCO changed their name to Trolltech?

Re:I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its main failure was the user interface. The learning curve was just too steep for people used to Windows(~90%). Perhaps they would have hit a bigger market if they went with something at least resembling Windows, such as Gnome or KDE.

What the fuck have you been sniffing? If you could use windows, or MacOS, there was (virtually) no learning curve to use BeOS.

Re:I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh!

Re:I predict

[KillShill]

i wish there were more people like you in every thread.

no, seriously.

yeah i'll be here all week but what does that have to do with this discussion?

Re:I predict

[be-fan]

Heh. Neither Qt nor GNOME even existed when BeOS was developed. The BeOS interface was modeled on the Mac's.

Re:I predict

[FST777]

Trolltech's licencing schemes suck

They MUST have anticipated to the effect their licensing would have on sites like /. when they came up with that name...

Re:I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict three types of comments here...
You forgot the I for one welcome our new overtroll comments.

Re:I predict

[nazsco]

> 1) BeOS was a great multimedia OS

Does this means that M$ will use it power over OEM vendors to shutdown trolltech?

on a serious comment: what i liked most in Qt over gtk and tk was the similarity to the beOS api, like dealing with threads and all.

What i despite, is the fact that they deliberately hide their GPL'ed version in the guts of their site.

Dear Trolltech

[porksoda]

I was just wondering if it's at all possible for you guys to change your name from Trolltech to something less pleasant sounding. No, wait.... Not possible.
Maybe.. Goatsetech?
I dunno.
But fire the guy who came up with that name, anyway.

Sincerely,
Common Sense

Re:Dear Trolltech

[NoGuffCheck]

how about... Ass-milk?

Re:Dear Trolltech

[porksoda]

if you're gonna go THAT route, may i suggest TubGirlTech?

Re:Dear Trolltech

[saskboy]

The Parent post isn't funny, it's insightful. Every time I read about "Trolltech" on Slashdot, I immediately think of the secret troll page hidden on Slashdot, and not a programming group responsible for a segment of Linux desktop programming.

Re:Dear Trolltech

[Scott7477]

Boogers R' Us?

Re:Dear Trolltech

[catch23]

Maybe an awful name is a good way to create a well known company. People probably shudder upon hearing the name "TrollTech". Maybe someone should create a company called "FuckTech". People would freak out upon hearing that name...

Re:Dear Trolltech

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Common Sense,
In light of you and,....3 other peoples complains we have decided to consider the following other names: Curledanushair Tech, BugaBuButuglyAssSmear Tech, JizFaceTech, and last, but definatly not least BabyShitCockBarfFuckingElefentAndswallowNew_Low.Te ch().

And for your concern we have sent you a Tifanies Box.

Signed,

TrollTech

Re:Dear Trolltech

[Lord Kano]

AssMilkCheeseTech

Re:Dear Trolltech

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe.. Goatsetech?

Or "Tubtech".

shudder

Trolltech..

[nile_list]

I've always been bothered by that name. Trolltech. Looking at Wikipedia's article, apparently the company is from Norway. Does "troll" mean something in Norwegian?

I also see that they used be "Quasar Technologies." That seems a hell of a lot better than Trolltech. Maybe it will always be a mystery.

sigh

Re:Trolltech..

[StonedRat]

I think the troll in trolltech refers to :

A supernatural creature of Scandinavian folklore, variously portrayed as a friendly or mischievous dwarf or as a giant, that lives in caves, in the hills, or under bridges.

as aposed to people who troll for arguments which is

To trail (a baited line) in fishing.

Re:Trolltech..

[Namronorman]

They covered this on NPR today (for whatever reason, I don't know). They said that often times in folklore, that when a Troll disguises itself as a human you can still see its tail.

They went on for a few minutes talking about various different trolls of which you already mentioned, but what I found most interesting is that they're supposedly good luck if you see one.

Re:Trolltech..

[ToasterofDOOM]

A supernatural creature of Scandinavian folklore, variously portrayed as a friendly or mischievous dwarf or as a giant, that lives in caves, in the hills, or under bridges.

I get it! So a troll is either good or bad, and either big or small. Thanks, that clears a lot up.

Re:Trolltech..

[Anonymous Coward]

I get it! So a troll is either good or bad, and either big or small. Thanks, that clears a lot up.

Being married to a Norweigan, I can tell you that this is not atypical logic and reasoning for their culture. Or at least for their womenfolk.

Re:Trolltech..

[Spy Hunter]

Your sig is missing an apostrophe. Without the possessive form ("programmer's") it doesn't make any sense.

Re:Trolltech..

[jayloden]

According to the book C++ GUI Programming With QT, I believe that the founder of the company had a dream in which he owned a company called Trolltech. He told his wife about the name, and she hated it, so they went with it.

Re:Trolltech..

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolls are well known in Norway from fairy tales. They are ugly human-like creatures living in the forest or mountains with certain mutant-like features like one eye, several heads or a tail. Sometimes they're big enough to have a tree growing on the nose, and sometimes they eat people (at least christians). But they are almost always bad, ugly and stupid.

Re:Trolltech..

[Kjella]

I get it! So a troll is either good or bad, and either big or small. Thanks, that clears a lot up.

It's not an exact science. In Norway, where Trolltech is located trolls are the huge brutes from RPGs/the Hobbit, generally all bad. The smaller ones would be called "hulder" here.

Norway ___ Sweden(N) _ Sweden(S)/Denmark
Troll ____ Giant _____ Giant
"Hulder" _ "Vitter" __ Troll

So yes, they're used for different types but mostly mutually exclusive.

Re:Trolltech..

[ToasterofDOOM]

Yeah, I guess it was. However, programmers was plural, so it should be programmers'. Being pedantic without being a spelling r grammar nazi can actually be helpful!

Re:Trolltech..

[Spy Hunter]

That expression is usually used with a singular possessive noun. For example, Kelly-Moore Paint advertises itself as "The painter's paint store." Using a plural there looks strange, though I'm not enough of an english weenie to know if it's technically incorrect. At least with an apostrophe there your intent is clear and people will be able to parse the sentence more easily.

Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

At least I know that $150,000 of my Qt annual license fees are paying *somebody's* salary.

Re:license issues

[benjamindees]

the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

Sure it does. It just doesn't allow you to distribute that code. You can sit down, write all the programs you'd like with the free version, test it out yourself, then switch to the commercial version when it's time to release.

The Zeta community gets smaller and smaller

[MysteriousMystery]

The community of BeOS loyalists just keeps shrinking it seems. I was reading on a popular BeOS news site that Microsoft hired some former Be programmers to work on Windows sound. Now trolltech has one of the co-creators of the BeOS. It really makes me wonder how much longer the small user base of BeOS users will last, especially since Zeta hasn't taken off due to its price.

Re:The Zeta community gets smaller and smaller

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I don't see how the fact that Be programmers have day jobs means "BeOS loyalists just keeps shrinking." I'm not saying the community is increasing or decreasing, just that your linking two things that aren't realated by causality.

Re:The Zeta community gets smaller and smaller

[ChunderDownunder]

There is a Zeta community?

I thought the active BeOS community were biding their time with BeOS Max Edition before Haiku is ready.

No issues with Haiku and price. :)

Besides, I don't believe that any of the ex Be employees have the legal right to work on Zeta or haiku due to IP constraints.

Re:The Zeta community gets smaller and smaller

[dlockamy]

I do believe that was a joke.

If I remember correctly the story you read was refering to the Vista's media controls being identical to those of BeOS

Re:The Zeta community gets smaller and smaller

[MysteriousMystery]

I think it's real http://www.bedoper.com/bedoper/2005/32.htm Take a look.

Re:The Zeta community gets smaller and smaller

[commodoresloat]

I was reading on a popular BeOS news site...

Interesting. Please share your definition of "popular."

So many initiatives, so little impact

[ReformedExCon]

This MLI that Trolltech, Motorola, and WindRiver are forming looks to be another one of those biannual mailing list groups. By which I mean that there is a lot of initial interest and a bunch of people join the group and get included on the mailing list and after a month or two of email flurries, the list dies down to an automated email verifying the list recipients every two years.

These things come and go so fast that it seems to not even be worth the trouble to discuss.

On the other hand, Linux as a mobile platform is a reality, and it isn't just that handful of companies listed in the article that are involved in embedded Linux development. About half the selection of mobile phones for the Japanese Docomo network are based on Linux. Many home entertainment device makers use Linux in their home electronics products. And the number of private Linux "homebrew" projects is huge due to the relatively low cost of entry.

Linux in the "mobile" market is booming, and doesn't need an Initiative to help it. Indeed, the software aspect is only one component in the embedded market. Hardware considerations are much more important. Should OEMs go with XScale or OMAP? OMAP or Alchemy? These initial hardware decisions pave the roadmap for future software needs. Standardizing the software from the outset only limits the choices that OEMs can make.

Wow, misread that.

[yurivish]

I thought it read "Original BSOD Developer". Hehe...

A question on dual licensing

[teslatug]

Does Trolltech incorporate GPL-ed contributions into their commercial release? If yes, what gives them the right to re-license those contributions under a non-GPL license? Else, what do they get out of open sourcing their software other than publicity?

Re:A question on dual licensing

[oliverthered]

I think KDE is a pretty good add for their toolkit, and like the pirated coppies of Adobe software when the GPLers at collage leave collage their going to go to their employers knowing how to use the QT toolkit.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

[lisa simpson]I know what all those words mean, but that doesn't make any sense.[/lisa simpson]

Re:A question on dual licensing

[xfmr_expert]

For you contribution to be accepted, you must assign copyright to Trolltech, allowing them to release your contributions under whatever license they choose. If you don't, they don't incorporate it. No skin off their back.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Psst... I believe the proper spelling is "college", and I use the GIMP, thanks.

- A College GPLer

Re:A question on dual licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the other issues have been adressed..

Else, what do they get out of open sourcing their software other than publicity?

1) Lots of free software developers. Having developers is rather important for a toolkit.
2) Free software using Qt which can serve as a demo of their toolkits capabilities.
3) More customers, stemming from people using the free version and then purchasing a license for a proprietary project.
4) Contributions of code.
5) More detailed bug reports.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[oliverthered]

Ok, years ago you could get all kinds of pirated software on DAT tape, software that cost much more money than most people could afford.
Like today people installed and ran that pirated software, learned how to use it and when the .COM boom started they went to work for companies already knowing how to use all this expensive software. When the company turned around and asked their employees which software to use they told their boss to use the same software they got on pirated on the DAT tapes, and the companies that produced that software proffit ed. By allowing people to use/learn Qt for free Qt gain hundreds of people who already know how to use their toolkit when they enter a commercial environment.

That probably still doesn't make sense.... one day...

Re:A question on dual licensing

[QuantumG]

They don't accept contributions at all.. their not a community project. If you send them a patch they will request that you send them a description of the bug and a test case. They won't even read your patch because it might infect the brains of their programmers. It's a very shit way to run an open source project.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[AJWM]

What in the world gave you the idea that Qt was an open source project? It's a commercial product from a commercial company that, out of the goodness of their hearts (or because they see a commercial advantage in offering the toolkit free for developers to play with), they also happen to release under the GPL. What you describe may indeed be a crappy way to run an open source project, but it's a great way to run a company -- it avoids copyright infringement.

If you want an open source project, go restart Harmony -- the project to create a (L?)GPL'd version of the Qt toolkit back before Trolltech released it under that license.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[QuantumG]

Blah, I'm sure most people would rather work on GTK+.. at least they'll accept patches.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[Chainsaw]

Work ON - possibly. Work WITH - no. The differences and general feeling of quality and design between the two API:s is staggering. For personal projects, I would choose Qt because I can create a wokring application much faster with it compared to GTK+.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[k98sven]

It's not an open source project.

BTW, you'll get that same response from projects like GCC too. They require copyright assignment on all code, and they won't look at a (non-trivial) patch either.

And they have the same reasons.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[QuantumG]

Yes, but unlike Trolltech and Real Media and other companies, they're not asking you to sign over your copyright so they can go off and make proprietary software with it. When you sign over your copyright to the FSF you know they are not going to do something ethically dubious with it like that.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[be-fan]

What's ethically dubious about it? They tell you upfront what they're going to do with the code!

Re:A question on dual licensing

[QuantumG]

To people who associate themselves more with the Free Software movement than with the Open Source movement, making any kind of proprietary software is ethically dubious.

But here's an idea. Suppose Kubuntu starts to sprint ahead of Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth says to the GNOME team to pull their socks up and they can't. What's gunna happen? Will they rename Kubuntu to Ubuntu and create a Gubuntu distribution? Doesn't seem very likely, unless Shuttleworth buys Trolltech. There is another way though, he could just hire 20 developers to add 20,000 lines of code to a GPL fork of Qt. If Trolltech want to use any of those changes in their proprietary product they'll have to go cap in hand to Shuttleworth and he could easily tell them to piss off. Then what? Trolltech continues on with their substandard commercial offering whilst supporting the GPL release? No, that wouldn't happen. Trolltech would take their bat and ball and go home. Meaning Shuttleworth could knife KDE right then and there by laying off those 20 developers.

Not that any of that is gunna happen. It's just fun to think about :)

Re:A question on dual licensing

[Carewolf]

Actually it is easier to get Trolltech to accept a Qt patch, than to make FSF accept a GCC patch.

FSF requires your signature on wierd legal papers before accepting anything.

Re:A question on dual licensing

[k98sven]

Keep your arguments straight! First you're saying Qt is shit because they require copyright assignment. Although so does the FSF on certain projects.

So now you're saying that it's 'ethically dubious' for free software programmers to contribute code to a project if there's a properitary version of it? That'd make it 'ethically dubious' to contribute anything to a BSD-licensed project then.

That's an incredibly narrow-minded ethic you've got there. Not even RMS would agree with that.

Not exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Under Linux, wxWidgets is just a wrapper around either plain-old X11 or GTK. I know that wxWidgets has a fairly liberal license, but if you're releasing under Linux using GTK you must abide by GTK's license, as well. Is GTK totally free, or does it cost money for use in proprietary software?

Re:Not exactly.

[NormalVisual]

GTK is LGPL, so as I understand the license it should be okay to use it in both free and proprietary projects.

IANAL, this isn't legal advice, etc....

I wish

[oliverthered]

I wish I could select uneditable text (like error messages!)
I wish the QT supported full reflection and serialization so that drag and drop could be fully intergated in KDE.
I wish they would make QT thread safe so that when web plugins and konquerer tabs crashed they didn't take all my konqueror windows with
them.

and finally I wish that new guy would read my comment.

Re:I wish

[Anonymous Coward]

Add them as feature requests (not on slashdot).

Also I don't believe thread safety would prevent all of konqueror crashing if a tab in konqueror crashed. Also I use to have the flash plugin crash all the time and it never would crash Konqueror, so there is at least some protection against plugin crashes in konqueror.

And one last thing: Its Qt not QT. I use to think it was QT but its actually Qt (and pronounced Cute). Wow this is like the only time I will ever be able to correct someone's spelling... or grammar... or... whatever the hell that would be counted as!

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

Also I don't believe thread safety would prevent all of Konqueror crashing if a tab in Konqueror crashed. Also I use to have the flash plugin crash all the time and it never would crash Konqueror, so there is at least some protection against plugin crashes in Konqueror.

If QT was thread safe then you could run plugins/kparts and Konqueror windows/tabs in separate threads, if the thread crashes you can just kill/susspend that thread and warn the user that their other windows may crash, so save any work and they can probably keep on going.

The reason that flash plugins don't kill the browser is because nspluginviewer runs in a separate process to Konqueror, threads would allow the plugins to run in separate threads (and possibly be pooled), Qt and KDE etc... would also be able to benefit from the new multi-core chips coming out.

And one last thing: Its Qt not QT. I use to think it was QT but its actually Qt (and pronounced Cute). Wow this is like the only time I will ever be able to correct someone's spelling... or grammar... or... whatever the hell that would be counted as!

You should look at the rest of my posts if you want an example of poor spelling and grammar, they kept me in school like a prison for years but never bothered to teach me English.

Re:I wish

[FAdmThiago]

Qt is thread-safe. What you can't do is interact with the GUI from outside the main thread, that's all.

Also, when a program crashes, it simply crashes, regardless of whether it was single-threaded or multi-threaded. Killing, cancelling or otherwise suspending threads without going through their normal exit sequence is not a good programming practice. For instance, you never know if it crashed with a locked mutex (for instance, the main event-queue mutex).

If you've ever experienced a Linux kernel-level crash, you must have noticed that you get a process stuck in D state. And you can cause other programs to get stuck too just by trying to access the resource that was locked.

One other thing: I know what I'm talking about. I designed the only multithreaded code that all KDE applications run today since KDE 3.3.

As for selecting uneditable text in dialog boxes, that's a nice feature (one that KDE has, btw). Submit it to Trolltech using the qt-bugs email address.

Re:I wish

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no expert, I haven't written anything remotely similar to what you say you have designed.

But are you seriously saying that Linux doesn't free the locked global resources of killed processes? That seems like something pretty fundamental to a stable OS.

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

Qt is thread-safe. What you can't do is interact with the GUI from outside the main thread, that's all.
That's all!! You can have a multithreaded app so long as you run anything GUI through a mutex, that's not thread safe.

Also, when a program crashes, it simply crashes, regardless of whether it was single-threaded or multi-threaded. Killing, cancelling or otherwise suspending threads without going through their normal exit sequence is not a good programming practice.

Umm... no it doesn't it's possible to recover from a crashed thread if you manage the threads resources properly, I think it's better programming practice to give the user the opportunity to save their work.

For instance, if a thread crashes because of a div/0 or a missing NULL pointer check and the stack trace is clean there's a very good change that you can susspend the thread with little or no sideeffects (with good resource tracking it's closer to none). That's not a 100% guarantee, but it miles better than the current situation.

Re:I wish

[temojen]

I wish they would make QT thread safe so that when web plugins and konquerer tabs crashed they didn't take all my konqueror windows with them.

I wish you would learn what threading means and how it relates to what you can expect from the memory state of other threads if one of them crashes.

Re:I wish

[spuzzzzzzz]

Umm... no it doesn't it's possible to recover from a crashed thread if you manage the threads resources properly

The following code crashes immediately with a SIGSEGV, even though the segmentation fault is in a child thread (and I've tried this without detaching the thread, too):

#include <pthread.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void *crash(void *a)
{
int n = *(int*)a;
}

int main()
{
pthread_t pt;
pthread_attr_t attr;

pthread_attr_init(&attr);
pthread_attr_setdetachstate(&attr, PTHREAD_CREATE_DETACHED);
pthread_create(&pt, &attr, crash, NULL);
while(1) {
printf("ping\n");
sleep(1);
}
}

The only way I can possibly imagine how to solve this is to catch the SIGSEGV, but man (2) signal has this to say: "The effects of this call in a multi-threaded process are unspecified." Maybe you can enlighten me as to how one can recover from a crashed thread?

Re:I wish

[rikkus-x]

if a thread crashes because of a div/0 or a missing NULL pointer check and the stack trace is clean there's a very good change that you can susspend the thread with little or no sideeffects (with good resource tracking it's closer to none).

I've never heard of this being done. Please let us know how to perform this magic.

Rik

Re:I wish

[Bogtha]

I wish they would make QT thread safe so that when web plugins and konquerer tabs crashed they didn't take all my konqueror windows with them.

"Thread-safe" means that an API can be used in two threads simultaneously without them interfering with each other. It does not mean that a process is protected from being killed when one of its threads causes a segfault or whatever. Qt is thread-safe.

What you are complaining about is not thread-safety, but the fact that Konqueror uses threads for separate windows and not processes. Unsurprisingly, this is configurable - go to Control Centre | KDE Components | KDE Performance, and change Minimise Memory Usage to Never. It sounds like you have it set to Always, which is not the default.

Re:I wish

[Anonymous Coward]

if a thread crashes because of a div/0 or a missing NULL pointer check and the stack trace is clean there's a very good change that you can susspend the thread with little or no sideeffects (with good resource tracking it's closer to none).

I've never heard of this being done. Please let us know how to perform this magic.

Here's how it works for processes: Set up a signal handler to catch SIGFPE and SIGSEGV. On exit, either have it exec another process, OR have another process (which is already running) "wake up" (by whatever means) and take over. This second process is simply a clone of the first, and was cloned or forked after the first finished loading all its shared libs. For processes, keep your stuff in shared memory and it will stick around until you remove it explicitly.

Thread behavior is another issue due to immaturity of threading libs etc. ("undefined behavior" with signals? Please.) That being the case, you can do everything threads can do by using multiple procs and shared memory.

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

Install a signal handler, when the thread crashes the signal handler will be called and you can stop / cleanup / verify that the stacks ok for the thread that has crashed. Fortunatly I've got some code for this....

#define _REENTRANT
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <unistd.h>

void *thread_function(void *);
void *thread_function2(void *);
void signal_hand(int signal );

pthread_t main_thread;

void crash(void);
int main(int argc, char* argv[]){

        pthread_t thread_id[2];

        signal(SIGSEGV,signal_hand);
        main_thread = pthread_self();
        printf("I'm thread %ld",main_thread);
        printf("Creating threads\n");
        pthread_create( &thread_id[0],NULL,&thread_function, NULL );
        pthread_create (&thread_id[1],NULL,&thread_function2,NULL );
//      pthread_join( thread_id[0], NULL);
//      pthread_join( thread_id[1], NULL);
        printf("Going to sleep\n");
        sleep(20);
        printf("Bye Bye\n");

}

void crash(void){
        try{
        int *a=0;
        *a|=*a;
        }catch(...){
                printf("Caught an exception\n");
        }
}

void signal_hand(int signal){

        printf("Signal %d in thread %ld\n",signal,pthread_self());

        if(pthread_self() == main_thread  ){
                exit(-1);
        }else{
                pthread_exit((void *)-1);
        }

}

void *thread_function(void *)
{
        int counter=0;
        while(++counter < 10){
                printf("In thread %ld\n",pthread_self());
                sleep(1);
        }
        printf("About to SEGV\n");
        crash();
        printf("Done crash\n");

}

void *thread_function2(void *){

        while(1){
                printf("In thread %ld\n",pthread_self());
                sleep(1);
        }

}

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

See this post for a code sample.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165711&cid=138 26115

Running multiple threads is more or less the same as running multiple processes, if you manage the threads resources well then it's fairly easy to clean up when a thread crashes. (I've made a few assumptions about core libraries being well debugged, which should hopefully be the case.)

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

Qt is not thread safe, you have to use a mutex to do any GUI work, and that prevents different Konqueror tabs (or plugins) having their own fairly independent threads.

If you manage the resources of the threads properly there's a very good chance that you can resume from a crashed thread (or a thread that's gone into an infinite loop) without having to kill off the whole application. It's not always possible to recover an application from a AWOL thread, but it should be possible to recover most of the time.

I have my minimize memory use for file browsing, but it doesn't stop Konqueror taking out everything Konqueror, I've also tried Minimise Memory Usage of Never, but that doesn't work either.

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

As for selecting uneditable text in dialog boxes, that's a nice feature (one that KDE has, btw)

Did you mean doesn't? If not your thinking of something else. For example start Konq, Goto Help/About KDE and try to select the text that reads "K Desktop Environment. Release foo.bar"

About Konqueror is weird, I can select the first line of the authors, but none of the other lines! that's plain weird.

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

n.b.
        I call signal in the main thread before starting the other threads, I believe that the 'The effects of this call in a multi-threaded process are unspecified' refer to installing the signal handler from a different thread. That may only work on x86 though.

Re:I wish

[orcrist]

FAdmThiago said:As for selecting uneditable text in dialog boxes, that's a nice feature (one that KDE has, btw)

then oliverthered said:Did you mean doesn't? If not your thinking of something else. For example start Konq, Goto Help/About KDE and try to select the text that reads "K Desktop Environment. Release foo.bar"

No, it does have the feature, you're just showing that it also has uneditable text which can't be selected, not that it doesn't have uneditable text which can be selected. IOW:

• "There is no text for which (!editable && selectable) == true" is false.
• "There is text for which (!editable && selectable) == true" is true
• "There is text for which (!editable && !selectable) == true" is also true

;-)

I believe it's a parameter, so it depends on the author, whether a specific text is selectable. It definitely seems to be the default that text is selectable; just try:
kdialog --error 'fatal error!!!' on the command line and you'll see that the "fatal error!!!" string is selectable.

-chris

Re:I wish

[Guy Harris]

I tried your program (compiled with G++ 4.0), and it got "Bus error (core dumped)".

Re:I wish

[Guy Harris]

I tried your program (compiled with G++ 4.0), and it got "Bus error (core dumped)".

According to the current version of the Single UNIX Specification, the default action for SIGSEGV and SIGBUS is "abnormal termination of the process", and "The behavior of a process is undefined after it returns normally from a signal-catching function for a SIGBUS, SIGFPE, SIGILL, or SIGSEGV signal that was not generated by kill(), sigqueue(), or raise()." What the behavior is if the signal-caching function terminates the thread by calling pthread_exit() isn't specified in any immediately-obvious place.

Re:I wish

[Breakfast Pants]

When a thread crashes it can overwrite things in memory. It can even overwrite the "cleanup code" you are trying to implement. What are you gonna do then, add cleanup cleanup code? Etc. etc.?

Re:I wish

[FAdmThiago]

When a process exits or otherwise terminates, its resources are freed.

When a thread exits but the rest of the process keeps on running, you can't automatically free any resources. You need the program to tell you what can be freed or not.

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

Well:

1 : Applicators should be using core libraries that should be bug free
2 : Applications should use atomic messaging to send messages between threads instead of using global memory, this significantly reduces the changes of an AWOL thread having a pointer that points into another threads memory.
3: In applications like Konqueror there's very little interaction between different tabs, kparts, sandboxed plugins etc...
4: And most importantly, it's not a 100% works every time fix all, but for the majority of the crashes, hangs or just annoying one tab blocking all the others, I've hand in Konqueror it would work, is it better to possibly allow the user to save their work or to loose all their work?

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

Hmm.. I'm only catching SIGSEGV and not SIGBUS.
pthread_sigmask is apparently the propper way to do things because it works properly in a threaded environment.

Re:I wish

[Guy Harris]

I'm only catching SIGSEGV and not SIGBUS.

For better or worse, not all systems deliver SIGSEGV when you dereference a pointer that points outside the mapped address space, some deliver SIGBUS - and, for better or worse, some systems deliver SIGBUS when you dereference an unaligned pointer.

pthread_sigmask is apparently the propper way to do things because it works properly in a threaded environment.

The current Single UNIX Specification says of pthread_sigmask():

If any of the SIGFPE, SIGILL, SIGSEGV, or SIGBUS signals are generated while they are blocked, the result is undefined, unless the signal was generated by the kill() function, the sigqueue() function, or the raise() function.

so if you mean that the thread should block SIGSEGV and/or SIGBUS (and SIGFPE, for the divide-by-zero case) either when it starts or in the signal handler, there's no guarantee that'll work.

Re:I wish

[oliverthered]

For better or worse, not all systems deliver SIGSEGV when you dereference a pointer that points outside the mapped address space, some deliver SIGBUS - and, for better or worse, some systems deliver SIGBUS when you dereference an unaligned pointer.

It was only an example that I knocked up if a few minutes and not intended to be the bee all and end all in catching signals and managing them.

so if you mean that the thread should block SIGSEGV and/or SIGBUS (and SIGFPE, for the divide-by-zero case) either when it starts or in the signal handler, there's no guarantee that'll work.

That's not what man pthread_sigmask says, each system will have their own quirks when it comes to managing signals which is a bit of a pain. My man pthread_sigmask says,
"NOTES
              For sigwait to work reliably, the signals being waited for must be blocked in all threads, not only in the calling thread, since
              otherwise the POSIX semantics for signal delivery do not guarantee that it's the thread doing the sigwait that will receive the sig-
              nal. The best way to achieve this is block those signals before any threads are created, and never unblock them in the program
              other than by calling sigwait."

It then goes on to say,
"BUGS
              Signal handling in LinuxThreads departs significantly from the POSIX standard. According to the standard, ``asynchronous'' (exter-
              nal) signals are addressed to the whole process (the collection of all threads), which then delivers them to one particular thread.
              The thread that actually receives the signal is any thread that does not currently block the signal.

              In LinuxThreads, each thread is actually a kernel process with its own PID, so external signals are always directed to one particu-
              lar thread. If, for instance, another thread is blocked in sigwait on that signal, it will not be restarted.

              The LinuxThreads implementation of sigwait installs dummy signal handlers for the signals in set for the duration of the wait. Since
              signal handlers are shared between all threads, other threads must not attach their own signal handlers to these signals, or alter-
              natively they should all block these signals (which is recommended anyway -- see the Notes section)."

Borland entry-level license

[Latent Heat]

I believe the minimum price point to do anything commercial with Borland is about a grand. The old $95 dollar standard versions, if they exist anymore, used to allow commercial use if the restricted features allowed what you wanted, but I understand they changed all of that.

Gee, what ever happened to the $49.95 Turbo Pascal? Borland, we hardly know you.

What was BeOS really like?

[Latent Heat]

What was BeOS really like, apart from there were no applications for it and no one used it?

One one hand there is Windows, which sucks monkey's balls when it comes to soft real time like multimedia with respect to issues such as control over task/thread scheduling, granularity of same, and Windows deciding to take siesta's for 10's of ms (we are not talking about any kind of hard guaranteed real time). On the other hand there is Linux, and I suppose there are real-time versions and frame buffer graphics and such, and yeah, yeah Linux is better in security and other aspects, but from what I have seen, Linux makes Windows look good on the gaming/soft realtime/attempt to be responsive front.

I had heard that BeOS was in a class by itself for soft real time. What was it like? I also heard that BeOS apps were quite thoroughly multi-threaded. What was it like writing a multi-threaded GUI app? Was it particularly hard?

Re:What was BeOS really like?

[dlockamy]

Hmm, where to start?

As far as soft real time? Back in the day I ran Be on a P2 350 2xx Megs ram. I could easily play 10-20 mp3s at one time with all playing smoothly while I ran several other programs. Sure there was no reason to do that, but it looked cool. Same goes for video. I remember the cool thing at one time was to play 50 or so copies of the Phantom Menace trailor.
You really could run the full system to 100% and still have damn good GUI responce. There's still no system (that I've found) that runs as smooth as Be did in 1998.

The great thing about programming was that the threading was to embedded in the system that you didn't know you where even using it. Take some time to browse the BeBook. It was a great api.

Re:What was BeOS really like?

[nyteroot]

Err..

Linux makes Windows look good on the gaming/soft realtime/attempt to be responsive front

You must be kidding. Using fluxbox and mplayer, I can have mplayer fullscreen on one workspace and switch around workspaces including the mplayer one just as fast as if mplayer weren't even running. Alt-tabbing between WMP and other applications on the same machine in Windows is painfully slow. For that matter, I can do the same with Starcraft and WINE.

Re:What was BeOS really like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehehe... using mplayer on Windows I can do exactly the same thing! Play full screen videos using barely any CPU time.

It's mplayer the speed monster, not Linux :-)

Re:license issues

[nighty5]

Sure it does. It just doesn't allow you to distribute that code. You can sit down, write all the programs you'd like with the free version, test it out yourself, then switch to the commercial version when it's time to release.


This is actually *NOT* the case. As per the QT license, you must BUY the licence before you start coding the application.

Refer to the license FAQ: http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/index.html ?catid=1953&id=182


"Can we use the Open Source Edition while developing our non-opensource application and then purchase commercial licenses when we start to sell it?

No. Our commercial license agreements only apply to software that was developed with Qt under the commercial license agreement. They do not apply to code that was developed with the Qt Open Source Edition prior to the agreement. Any software developed with Qt without a commercial license agreement must be released as Open Source software."

Re:license issues

[Anonymous Coward]

To highlight, its the commercial license wording that excludes developing under the GPL and getting a license at the last minute, not the wording of the GPL (which many people assume after reading the F.A.Q.)

Re:license issues

[Trejkaz]

As per the QT license, you must BUY the licence before you start coding the application.

Does playing around with a toolkit to learn how it works count as writing the application these days?

In other Be-related news...

[doorbot.com]

...HaikuOS has a paid developer for a few weeks.

Axel's development blog is available, as is the story on OSNews where I found the link.

Apparently, Haiku should have a bootable CD image soon.

Re:license issues

[nighty5]

You can absolutely learn the toolkit on the opensource license, for free, which is what I'm doing right now. I'll buy a license when I start coding for the commercial app.

Am happy to fork out the $1800 as the toolkit itself is going to save me thousands of dollars in development work I that I don't have to do...

Re:license issues

[Spy Hunter]

You can sit down, write all the programs you'd like with the free version, test it out yourself, then switch to the commercial version when it's time to release.

No, you can't. You can't "switch" code you developed using the GPL version to the commercial version. It's not against the GPL; it is against the commercial license that TrollTech sells QT under. You can write all the programs you'd like with the free version, but you can never ever use any of that code with the commercial version of QT.

The reason for this is that QT has no run-time licenses or per-copy royalties. You only ever pay for the development you do. After that you never have to pay TrollTech again, no matter how many copies you distribute. Obviously if you could develop all your code using the GPL version, buy one commercial license, compile once and release, then TrollTech would be out of business in short order.

Someone's gotta say it.

[TheLittleJetson]

It's not 1996. BeOS isn't that cool anymore. Mac OS X is the new BeOS.

Re:Someone's gotta say it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not 2003. Mac OS X isn't that cool anymore. Windows Vista is the new OS X.

Re:Someone's gotta say it.

[Anonymous Coward]

ha ha ha.

very funny. Vista's not even out yet.

The only thing we know about its coolness is what Microsoft tells us about it. And we know how truthful they always are!

Re:Someone's gotta say it.

[Fandango]

Ah, yes, but the original developers of BeOS are still great engineers, so it's newsworthy to hear about their new pursuits. As a former BeOS hacker and an intern at Be in 1997, it's great to see what's happened to the various engineers that I used to work with. Dominic Giampaolo is now at Apple where he is the chief architect behind Spotlight and other cool stuff, and several Be engineers, including myself, are now working at Danger, Inc., the company behind the Hiptop/Sidekick and Hiptop2 smart phones.

I remember Benoit as an über-hacker who wrote something like 50% of the original BeOS single-handedly. It was great to hear about his new job while I'm waiting for KDE 3.5.0 beta 2 to compile on my Gentoo box.

Re:Someone's gotta say it.

[MrHanky]

OS X is about as close as you can come to an opposite of the BeOS. BeOS was small, light, had excellent threading; OS X (Panther) is 3 GB for a default install and demands almost 128 MB just to boot. It's not that OS X is a worse OS (it certainly isn't), but you can't really appreciate it for the same reasons.

Re:Someone's gotta say it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where Are They Now?

With the intense interest generated by our last featurette, BeDoper has decided to expand upon the idea, and see exactly what some of the other BeOS alumni are up to lately.

Steve Sakoman - With the dissolution of Steve's Snake Oil startup, Mr. Sakoman is currently part of our illustrious President Bush's press team.

Leo Schwab - Interestingly enough, Bols is now programming director for Columbia Broadcasting System.

Fred Fish - After lending his image to the indefatigable Freddi Fish series, Mr. Fish is preparing the Fred Fish Collection DVD, just in case this Amiga thing takes off again.

Scot Hacker - Scot is currently bringing down the house as Apple, Inc.'s resident Sigmund Freud impersonator.

Chris Herberoth - Aside from his death metal and hip-hop supergroups, Chris has declared 2003 "The year I beat Corum III".

Ynop - At this very moment, Ynop is working on top secret stuff, and getting me in trouble with my advisor at school.

It's actually a good name

[ari_j]

Trolltech is headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Trolls are a very central part of Norwegian popular culture and folklore. See the Wikipedia article on trolls for more information about this Scandinavian cultural element, and this article about the Troll Oil Platform for another example of Norwegian companies using this tie to their folklore.

Benaphores

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean he's going to create bad, non-functioning printer GUIs and name things like 'benaphore' for TrollTech too?

Out of all of the people that presented at the various Be Dev Conferences, he's the one that was the least impressive. He seemed to be cut from the same cloth as JLG when it came to attitude, with nothing to really back it up.

Re:Benaphores

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually, I met with a bunch of people at Be and he was a quite good engineer and one of those at Be with the least attitude (that place was packed with higher-than-thou nerds). So he was a fairly good guy, as I remember. But none of these Be guys had a lot of vision or maturity. It was all about technology for the sake of technology. That plus the attitude nailed the coffin.

Re:license issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, even if you were to develop an app for internal use you cannot go from open source to closed. Trolltech's commercial license is setup this way - once open source, always open source.

http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/index.html ?catid=1953&id=190

You missed the obvious

[toupsie]

4) Apple was smart for integrating NeXT and Jobs instead of BeOS.

/ducks

Re:You missed the obvious

[tautog]

I agree. NeXt was mature and ready for primetime (look at the resume).

In any case, BeOS is (was) way cool and much more innovative than anything else out there. Super fast, virtually crash proof (no REALLY) and very easy to use, once you left the LEGACY mindset behind.

Re:license issues

[John Hurliman]

How exactly do you write code with the Qt toolkit? Using both the free and commercial versions all I got was a library to link against, some compiling tools, and a GUI designer that I don't use.

#include <QApplication>
#include <QPushButton>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
        QApplication app(argc, argv);

        QPushButton hello("Can anyone guess what license I was coded under?");
        hello.resize(300, 30);

        hello.show();
        return app.exec();
}

If anyone can send more information about this Qt IDE that you develop code in let me know.

Secret Troll Page?

[Anonymous Coward]

I immediately think of the secret troll page hidden on Slashdot

Secret troll page?
Why wasn't I told?
Do you have a link?

Re:Secret Troll Page?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOBODY has a link.
It's THAT secret.

Re:Secret Troll Page?

[Dave2 Wickham]

Trolltalk, presumably.

Re:license issues

[Arandir]

No it doesn't. Play around to your hearts content. When you're ready to code for real, then buy the license. Simple. If you're not playing around, then you need to make up your mind quickly if you're going to release it open source or not.

To be blunt: If you're writing code you intend to release under a proprietary license, you need to buy the proprietary license. Of course, that's exactly what Trolltech just told you, but it didn't seem that you heard.

What Did BeOS Do?

[obender]

I am not trying to start a flame war but could anybody explain why BeOS mattered at all? I did try it years ago but it did not recognize the network card in my laptop so I uninstalled it after maybe 15 minutes. If anything, it did tell me that the browser mattered to me more than the underlying operating system.

Re:What Did BeOS Do?

[Derleth]

BeOS was interesting because it was a very graphical, easy-to-use (or so I've heard) media-centric OS that was based on a real preemptive-multitasking kernel with native support for the POSIX API and a good Unix-like CLI pre-installed. The kernel, to my knowledge, wasn't really Unix-like (it was a single-user OS) but it had Unix-like stability and (as I've mentioned) true multitasking.

Basically, it was MacOS X back when Apple's Macintosh was stagnating and losing serious ground to the Microsoft-centric PC world. It lost because Be, Inc. didn't think it needed to produce an Internet-ready OS until it was far too late.

(For a while, Be, Inc. thought Apple would buy their OS and make it the center of the next-generation MacOS. When Steve Jobs became head of Apple again, however, he brought the NeXT system with him and now MacOS X is basically NeXTSTEP on more competitive hardware and with a somewhat more familiar interface. There was serious bad blood between Be fans and Apple fans over this.)

Re:What Did BeOS Do?

[m50d]

It was awesome for multimedia, because the scheduler was just amazing. Not so important now, but BeOS would let you play four videos at once on a pentium 1. I still haven't seen a system as responsive, even on my 2600+.

Re:What Did BeOS Do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because BeOS fought the MAN. And when the MAN get's you down, you're on anyone's side against the MAN.

Basically. Same old groupthink.

Re:What Did BeOS Do?

[caulfield]

(For a while, Be, Inc. thought Apple would buy their OS and make it the center of the next-generation MacOS. When Steve Jobs became head of Apple again, however, he brought the NeXT system with him and now MacOS X is basically NeXTSTEP on more competitive hardware and with a somewhat more familiar interface. There was serious bad blood between Be fans and Apple fans over this.)

Just some clarification... It was Gil Amelio who bought NeXT instead of BeOS. Jobs was still in exile at NeXT and wasn't named (interim) CEO until 14 months after the merger. The bad blood that exists from Be fans can generally be tracked back to Gassee putting all of Be's eggs in Apple's basket. When Apple balked at paying $400M+ for Be (widely rumored to be the value Jean-Louis Gassee pegged for Be, and coincidentally the same amount Apple paid for NeXT), Be was kaput. I would say an equal portion of Be loyalist anger is placed with Gassee for asking too much for Be and killing the company, and Amelio/Apple for choosing NeXT instead. Jobs doesn't really enter the picture.

Also, BeOS in 1996 had fine internet/networking capabilities. I doubt that even entered into the decision to choose NeXT over Be.

Mobile OSDL

[Anonymous Coward]

the new mobile OSDL initiative

Mastering the second part of "take the money and run"?

Re:license issues

[Trejkaz]

No, I heard. I said that because the previous poster had replied to a message which basically said "testing is free", with "no, you're wrong." Clearly he wasn't wrong.

Re:license issues

[Fizzl]

I think they are misinterpreting the GPL. Or possibly have written that answer to obscure it, but still actually saying what the GPL says.
It is OK to develop using the free QT, as long as you do not release anything outside. No beta testing either. Or multiple developers.
As long as it is only in your hands, it is ok to develop and use it. You know, when you are the only one holding the binary and the sources, you are fully complying to the GPL as long as you do not give it to anyone else. The second you give it to someone else, you are required to also give the source and the second person is now eligible to redistribute the whole thing to whomever he wants.

Actually it's from the same word

[commodoresloat]

These little mischievous Scandanavians had a practice of writing "f1rst p0st" under the bridges where they hung out.

CTO added for upcoming IPO

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolltech is doing their IPO soon. They are stocking the company with "executives" with some paper behind them. It's time to cash in.
I'm sure they'll send you a thank you note if you are one of the stooges who sent them thousands of dollars for Qt licenses.

Qt/Embedded is evil

[idlake]

I have several devices running Qt/Embedded and it's nothing short of evil. A device running Qt/Embedded cannot be used with other standard Linux GUI toolkit: Qt/Embedded takes over the entire window system. The justification for this is that Qt/Embedded is supposedly an efficient system for embedded devices, but nothing could be further from the truth: compared to X11 with an embedded X11 toolkit, Qt/Embedded is a resource hog, slow, and has a UI that is poorly adapted to small screen devices. The Qtopia applications built on top of if suck compared to Palm and even PocketPC. I won't even go into the licensing issues with Qt/Embedded, which is a whole separate discussion.

I think Troll Tech should be kept as far away from embedded and handheld Linux as possible. I would argue that Troll Tech is largely responsible for the fact that Linux handhelds have not taken off more. Fortunately, on the desktop, their ambitions are kept in check by the fact that they are forced to build on top of X11 so that they can't monopolize the drivers and screen, but on handhelds, they are out to take over, and that's bad.

You can use GPL version for indoor programming

[-_broken_watchman_-]

You can use GPL version if your program doesn't exit from your company. More than 90% of the software made in the world doesn't exit from the originating company.

Also, if you want to close your software when you give it to others, DAMN, PAY A LOT FOR IT :-) . Nobody likes being given closed software.

Trolltech has problems with ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to commercial license or dual license... never do business with them without getting every promise in writing. Like the troll, sunlight seems to have a bad effect on their commitments. In fact, many people would call these promises... lies. Once they get your money, you are shit out of luck. No matter what they told you to get you to buy those commercial licenses... they will deliver on none of it. Bigtime buyer beware on this company.

what about ppc

[commodoresloat]

Is there any remaining BeOS-on-old-ppc-hardware community? I have an old 604-based machine that still has BeOS on one of its partitions... I know Apple killed any BeOS-on-G4 hopes long ago but I wonder if those of us with 603s and 604s could find updated versions of BeOS software to run on these things if we were so inclined. Hehehe... not that I'd actually boot it up and use it, but it would be nice to know that I could if I wanted to :)

it taught the world that tight code is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Essentially BeOS wasted a lot of time and money in the pursuit of ultimate quality threading code. By the time the developers could ship anything of importance, the market had passed them by.

let's hope

[cahiha]

Let's hope he does for Qt what he did for BeOS.

Re:let's hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that means to make it really innovative, fast, multithreaded, simple, elegant, and fun to work with?

Oh yes, I was a long time BeOS user. Computing was fun again. Those were the good times. I'm a CS engineer, and I'm pretty damn bored and tired of Windows, Linux, and computer stuff in general. I hope that Benoit can bring the fun again :-)

Carlos

Re:let's hope

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh yes, I was a long time BeOS user. Computing was fun again. Those were the good times. I'm a CS engineer, and I'm pretty damn bored and tired of Windows, Linux, and computer stuff in general. I hope that Benoit can bring the fun again :-)"

Computing started being fun in the early 1980's, with systems like Smalltalk, but then, we all took a collective wrong turn. What Benoit delivered with BeOS may have been slightly better engineered than Windows, MacOS, or Linux, but it draws from the same cesspool. And he has chosen to work for a company that delivers yet another C++ toolkit and doesn't even have good development tools.

Funnies

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, where are the score 5 funnies, its Trolltech!

Yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Practically speaking, how the f*** are they going to know what you do with the free toolkit on your own computer? If you are a one-man show working out of your home, I don't see any way they can prevent you from getting your app into working condition with the GPL tools and then building it for real with the commercial version once you have someone who wants to buy it. Plus, your code is *your* code, and Trolltech has no say in what you do with it. Irrespective of any FAQs, the license of the GPL version of Qt is the GPL, and the GPL prohibits a distributor (such as Trolltech) from imposing any additional restrictions. I have never read the terms of the commercial Qt license, but it would have to have some very dubious clause to the effect that "you cannot use the commercial version with your own code that was developed with GPL Qt", even though anyone can use GPL Qt without restriction. There is no non-disclosure or non-compete clause that comes with GPL Qt, nor could Trolltech impose such a thing and remain in compliance with the GPL.

Simply put, I think that it would be utterly bizarre for Trolltech to refuse to license their commercial kit to someone because they want to use it with their own code developed with GPL tools.

I disagree...

[hummassa]

with the "inflated price point" thing. Have you ever read Qt? It's very, very expensive to develop/maintain/keep going forward a library so complete, robust, etc.

Re:I disagree...

[idlake]

It makes no difference to me as a customer how much it costs to develop the library. There are plenty of good alternatives that I don't have to pay for (beyond what I already pay for the OS in any case): Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk+, Cocoa, MFC, .NET, etc. It's unfortunate for Troll Tech that they can't subsidize their development with other revenue streams, but that doesn't make me any more inclined to pay lots of money for their stuff.

Furthermore, if I'm going to pay $1800/developer, then I'm going to pay that money for improving an open source toolkit like wxWidgets or Gtk+, where I get specific improvements for my money and where I don't have to pay over and over again.

Re:I disagree...

[Shakes268]

I also disagree. Capatalism gives you the right to choose in the market place what you will or will not pay for but right now I think there is a huge rift being formed just on the basis of "Do they sell a commercial product or do they give it away?" Since most of those on slashdot are advocates of free software of course any company choosing to sell a product, try to be successful and employ people (which drives our economy) is going to be the bad guy.

Re:I disagree...

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes no difference to me as a customer how much it costs to develop the library.

To a customer, quality makes a difference.

There are plenty of good alternatives that I don't have to pay for (beyond what I already pay for the OS in any case): Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk+, Cocoa, MFC, .NET,

Good but not great.

• Swing - how many Swing-based apps do you see out there? Not many because it looks like, well, Swing. And it's slow. Not native. However, this is probably the best of the bunch from your list, next to Qt. To make up for the disadvantages with Swing, IBM came up with the SWT toolkit, which Eclipse is built on.
  
• wxWidgets - workable toolkit, but documentation, ease of use leaves much to be desired. You get what you pay for applies here.
  
• GTK - Linux only. C based, so no OO, in my book a generation behind Qt/Swing/etc.
• Cocoa - only OSX, so you can't really compare.
• MFC - you've obviously never used this clunker, largely hated in the GUI world. Obviously not even comparable since only runs on Windows. Not much good with out Visual Studio either, and that'll cost ya.
• .NET - works only on, well, Windows. That's right, don't even think about MONO. Again, not much good with out Visual Studio, and that'll cost ya.

Meanwhile, KDE is built with Qt. Need we say more?

Re:I disagree...

[idlake]

Since most of those on slashdot are advocates of free software of course any company choosing to sell a product, try to be successful and employ people (which drives our economy) is going to be the bad guy.

Well, I can't speak for all of Slashdot. I have no problem with a company selling closed source software. What I fault companies for is if they use open source or free software as a marketing gimmick but are actually pursuing goals and strategies that run counter to the goals of open source and/or free software. I think that's what Troll Tech is doing: they are using KDE and the GPL as a marketing gimmick for a product that would otherwise have disappeared from the market long ago.

What I think Troll Tech ought to do is make all future releases of Qt closed source. KDE could go on with the GPL'ed version of Qt, so nobody would be harmed, and the conflict of interest in the development of Qt that the dual license represents would disappear.

And, whatever I think is the right thing to do, I guarantee you that this problem is not going away, no matter how much the KDE project may want it to. KDE could have taken over the Linux desktop long ago (it has really consistently been ahead of Gnome), but as long as this issue persists, that just is not going to happen, no matter how good KDE may get technically.

Re:I disagree...

[Guy Harris]

GTK - Linux only.

Define "Linux only". Perhaps Linux distributions are the only OSes that come bundled with GTK+ (although I think they're in the ports collections of at least some of the BSDs), but they're certainly not the only OSes on which GTK+ works. It works on, as far as I know, most if not all modern UNIX+X11 systems (including OS X+X11), and there's also a Win32 port that runs atop GDI (with some annoying bugs, but Tor Lillqvist is now working at Novell, and I suspect he was hired to, at least in part, make it work better on Windows to support Evolution on Windows). No OS X version that runs atop Quartz, though.

(By "Linux only" did you mean "UNIX+X11 only"?)

Re:I disagree...

[Anonymous Coward]

To a customer, quality makes a difference.

That presumes that Qt is better quality; it is not.

Good but not great.

The same can be said for Qt, it's good but not great: written in C++, little tools support, cross-platform compromises, no community development, outdated GUI paradigm, outdated programming paradigm. There would be little reason to prefer it if it were free, and certainly not at $1800.

GTK - Linux only. C based, so no OO, in my book a generation behind Qt/Swing/etc.

Gtk has a native Windows implementation and a budding native OS X implementation (but I think that's a mistake--I'd prefer an X11-only toolkit--cross platform features are useless for most applications and costly). Gtk is very much OO; in fact, its object system is arguably more dynamic and better than that which Qt gets from C++. As for "generations", Gtk, Qt, and Swing are all the same generation--and they were all obsolete the day they were written.

Meanwhile, KDE is built with Qt. Need we say more?

KDE is pretty much the same quality and functionality as Windows, Macintosh, and Gnome, so that's no argument either for or against Qt.

Re:I disagree...

[FAdmThiago]

And I disagree with your disagreement. Trolltech is not using Open Source as a marketing gimmick.

First of all, their product is really Open Source and it's the same version that is sold, not some dumbed down version. Second, the money they earn from the commercial licenses is invested back into Qt, which is Open Source. That means that anyone who downloads the free version receives benefits that the paying costumers made possible.

Moreover, Trolltech employees devote part of their paid time to work on other Open Source or Free Software projects. KDE is of course the prime example, but you don't have to go far: just think of EXA (X.org project).

Finally, I fail to see the logic of not releasing a GPLed version. How would stopping a service you have no extra costs on bring any benefits? It would only make sense if the GPL product were harming Trolltech, and I don't see it that way.

And more importantly, they cannot stop releasing the GPLed version because of the Free Qt Foundation: if they don't release an Open Source version in a 12-month period, the last released version is automatically relicensed BSD.

Re:I disagree...

[idlake]

First of all, their product is really Open Source and it's the same version that is sold, not some dumbed down version.

First of all, that's not true. Troll Tech does not release all of the Qt implementations under GPL. Furthermore, when I buy a device running Qt/Embedded, I don't get the source code because Troll Tech sold the source code to the device manufacturer under the commercial license. That means that I can't actually modify how the thing is running on the device.

But more importantly, the project may be released under an open source license, but that doesn't make it an "open source project"; the power of open source and free software derives not from the license (which is a means to an end), but from the way those projects are run and what guarantees I get as a user and contributor. Open source projects accept and incorporate contributions from the community, and all developers on the project are on equal footing.

Moreover, Trolltech employees devote part of their paid time to work on other Open Source or Free Software projects. KDE is of course the prime example, but you don't have to go far: just think of EXA (X.org project).

That's philanthropy; it is philanthropy direct at open source, but it isn't relevant to the status of Qt.

And more importantly, they cannot stop releasing the GPLed version because of the Free Qt Foundation: if they don't release an Open Source version in a 12-month period, the last released version is automatically relicensed BSD.

Troll Tech chose those rules, they have to live with the consequences. It doesn't change the fact that (in my opinion) the right thing for them to do is stop dual-licensing and deliver an honest, commercial product.

And I don't see a problem with that consequence anyway. If Troll Tech really contributes value to Qt above and beyond what open source developer do, then within a short period of time, Troll Tech's version of Qt should be very competitive with the BSD version again.

still overpriced

[cahiha]

Why is $1800 considered a lot of money for a programmer?

Because it's about $1800 more than Cocoa+XCode, $1800 more than Gtk+ or wxWidgets, or $1000 more than .NET+VS-Enterprise. In other words, it's overpriced compared to the alternatives. Whether a company can in principle squeeze the money for paying for the overpriced product into the budget is not relevant.

"wahhhhhh, why does it cost $500 an hour to record in this studio?"

The proper question is "why does it cost $1500 an hour to record in this studio without a sound engineer, when it costs $500 to record in that other studio with a sound engineer included?". That's the question people are aking about Qt.

Yeah.

[hummassa]

AC:

To highlight, its the commercial license wording that excludes developing under the GPL and getting a license at the last minute, not the wording of the GPL (which many people assume after reading the F.A.Q.)

But it is an unenforceable license.

Re:Yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it unenforcable? And if the answer involves the GPL then it doesn't count, since the commercial license isn't anti-gpl, its pro itself.

Re:Yeah.

[Shano]

I'd say it's unenforcable on a purely technical level: how do you prove the code was developed with the free version? Scrub the original timestamps from the files, and leave at least a couple of weeks between buying the license and releasing, and there's enough reasonable doubt that you can get away with it.

Re:Yeah.

[muuh-gnu]

They can force you by not granting you a proprietary licence at all.

You can try to take this risk, and develop your small sharewarchen with the free version, and after the development switch to the proprietary, but people who invest real money (and much of it) in a QT app can't, because not getting a licence from Trolltech would mean they would have to GPL their proprietary app, or not distribute it at all.

Re:Yeah.

[hey!]

Well, I'd be interested if there has ever been an instance of them enforcing the policy of not granting a commercial license. This would involve something that's very unnatural for a business to do: walking away from an offer of new cash that can be applied against sunk costs.

Scenario: I develop for my own use an application, then realize, shit, this is pretty valuable stuff. So I contact TT and say, "I have this app I wrote, and I think it has commercial potential. I want to hire two programmers and give you $5400 for three commercial licenses, but if you say the word, I'll just have them port to WxWindows instead."

Look up ...

[hummassa]

KDevelop :-)

Seriously?

[hummassa]

Why is $1800 considered a lot of money for a programmer?
Maybe because in some countries it's the yearly wage of said programmer?????? Hint: a high-pay programmer in my country makes circa US$ 10000/yr.

Contributing to Qt

[hummassa]

How/why is that?

Re:Contributing to Qt

[cahiha]

It's because it's dual-licensed--if they started incorporating contributions from the community under the GPL, they couldn't license it commercially anymore. Qt may be under a free software license, but it's not a free software project.

Re:Contributing to Qt

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I doubt that the community would follow you if you tried to fork QT. Might get lonely. I don't think there is a problem with modifying the GPLed QT to suit your tastes, though. I mean if you want a non-standard QT library on your system...

If you want your changes to show up in the real QT, you probably have to give the code to Trolltech, who might or might no accept it. If they do accept it, wouldn't it show up in the GPLed QT? Or are you saying you want to extend the GPLed QT in ways that wouldn't show up in the commercially licensed QT? Why? Seems like that breaks the model...

It's your own code

[Anonymous Coward]

"They do not apply to code that was developed with the Qt Open Source Edition prior to the agreement."

I don't see how they can possibly enforce this. It is *your* code, and it is (or should be) no business of Trolltech how you developed it. This is a FAQ, not the actual license, and the legally enforcable license terms are what matter. I could not find the text of the license itself on the Trolltech website.

Re:license issues

[Anonymous Coward]

What Trolltech meant is:

If you're using the free version of Qt, then anything you develop must be released as open source. If you're thinking about developing a commercial application, then you better buy Qt before even starting on any of your code.

Yes, the licensing scheme sucks.

That's certainly news to me

[andersh]

I'm Norwegian and I've never heard that before - I think they're just mixing in Irish folklore out of ignorance.
My impression based upon on our stories is that Trolls are always extremely large (as in mountain sized) - and they're not to be confused with the dwarfs called "nisser" (plural). Trolls are often featured in our fairytales where they are semi-evil monsters that will kidnap a princess - that the brave young man will liberate [and later marry gaining half the kingdom]. All of the Scandinavian countries are still monarchies.

A "Nisse" is similar to a leprechaun - though not the same. Nisser are an integral part of our Christmas traditions, Juletid (am. "yuletide") or simply "Jul". Remember this holiday is based upon our pagan belief system - and was only adopted/coopted by the Christian church. Don't confuse the nisse with Santa Claus - he's not a part of our ancient culture. One tradition involving the nisse is to put out a bowl of porridge (traditional) on Christmas Eve or else... you don't challenge the nisse(r)! They can be kind, bad or simply naughty. On the farm they could "problems". Today they're displayed everywhere come Christmas time - from garden gnomes to illustrations. I hope I managed to communicate the difference between the American and Scandinavian Christmas.

Can't agree. Try X/Qt, or try a different ROM

[chiark]

I have a Zaurus SL-C1000 and 760, and also have had a 5500. I do understand what you're saying about Qt/Embedded (now just called qtopia), but it's horses for courses: an X11 handheld device isn't what everyone wants... I disagree that the apps aren't optimised for small screens: to me, it's an excellent UI. Opie seems to look exactly the same, surely imitation is the sincerest form of flattery ;-)

The best thing about QTopia is that it has a *superb* web browser, namely Opera and if you don't like that browser you can use Netfront, too. These are both optimised for handheld browsing and are one of the two reasons I stick with Qtopia...

..the other reason is that I sync to outlook. Oh, the shame of admitting that on slashdot!

There are alternatives, too. If you don't like what Qtopia offers, try PdaXRom. If that isn't available for your device, they might be interested in moving it onto the device so just ask.

And if you want to run X applications, use PocketWorkstation or better still a combination of X/Qt and Pocketworkstation, which gets rid of the frankly sucky use of VNC.

All but GTK+

[hummassa]

(from your list above) are inferior products IMHO.

Re:license issues

[zootm]

I think they are misinterpreting the GPL. Or possibly have written that answer to obscure it, but still actually saying what the GPL says.

I think the problem in this case is nothing to do with the GPL, and more a feature of the Qt commercial licence, which states that it can't be used for apps that were developed using the open source edition. They're not misinterpreting the GPL, since it is not the licence which introduces this restriction.

BeOS never broke the MS grip on OEMs

[SgtChaireBourne]

What was BeOS really like, apart from there were no applications for it and no one used it?

The answer to the second part, why few people used BeOS, is well-documented: MS squeezed the OEMs to keep them from shipping machines with BeOS and when Be fought and won, MS made sure BeOS never showed up in the bootloader. It's not dissimilar to the ongoing difficulty in buying a non-MS x86-based PC See there's a reason all those back issues of BYTE are missing or stolen from the shelves.

I suppose the answer to the first part, why there were few applications, is probably the same as why there were few OS/2 apps and why the Macintosh apps (esp. games) disappeared: MS put pressure on other vendors not to develop for the platform and probably had clauses in the NDA for Windows NT developers outright prohibiting it.

Re:BeOS never broke the MS grip on OEMs

[screeble]

The XP "nt loader" STILL doesn't play nice. I just split a drive with partition magic and installed Breezy Badger after already installing XP.

50M grub /boot partition at start of drive. XP boots. Can't find "autochk." Restart. Ad nauseum. It took about an hour of fucking around with partition flags and grub settings to get both OS-es to boot from the hard drive properly.

I don't blame Microsoft for this one, mind you... I can easily point the finger at PopCap. My wife loves (read:is addicted to) Chuzzles and Dynomite. XP has to stay.

Developer mindshare

[Latent Heat]

There are a number of factors in considering to use an OS -- ease of use, cost, market share, performance, security, ease of developing/really neat developer tools.

My original point is that Windows never was particularly strong in performance. While Linux is strong in many of the above metrics, it does not really best Windows in terms of performance that a whole bunch of died-in-the-wool Windows developers are going to switch to Linux in pursuit of improved performance.

In many ways Windows is the bad squeezing out the good. I had heard that OS-2 (what Windows 95 effectively killed off even though MS was in partnership with IBM on OS-2) was pretty good on threads and soft real time. I had heard that BeOS was simply fantastic on this score.

What I am curious is whether the heavy use of threads came at a cost -- was it hard to wrap your mind around what you needed to do to write a BeOS app? I guess I need to follow the link and look at the online API docs to get some sense.

But the other thing I am saying is that if the goal is to compete/supplant Windows, there should be powerful incentive to switch. I do soft real time images and audio stuff, and BeOS sounded very interesting to me right at the time it started to crater.

Re:license issues

[Anonymous Coward]

no, it is completly the GNU GPL. If you link against another GPL program (the GPLed QT library), your code must also use the GPL license. The GPL is a viral license. That's how it works. QT does not use the GNU LGPL which doesn't have that restriction. Basically, trolltech is defending the GPL saying that you aren't allowed to violate the GPL even if you want to pretend you already have another license you think you may be purchasing in the future.

Good thing you're here!

[cbreaker]

Good thing we have people like you reminding us of this *every single time Trolltech is mentioned anywhere.*

$1800 isn't that big a deal with even a small business. Sure, I think it would be great if it were $100, but I don't fault them for that. $1800 is the price point for Trolltech where they feel it's still worth developing and still worth releasing regular GPL versions.

Trolltech eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to know how you can make money trolling. What's the business model?

Are you trying to tell me...

[bluGill]

Are you trying to tell me that if I go to Trolltech and say "We made a mistake, and used the freeversion. How do I make this right so we can release our software?" They won't come up with something? I'm sure it will be more than if we had just bought the license like we were supposed to. I'm sure an offer of twice what I would have had to pay by doing it right to start with would be accepted.

Of course they could refuse to come to any agreement, but will they? Money is on the table, if they remain reasonable they can take it. If not a good product gets written off, and the company refuses to use qt for any other products.

Re:Are you trying to tell me...

[Spy Hunter]

No, you're right. I imagine if you came to them and offered to pay more than what it would have cost to buy the licenses to begin with, they would be reasonable. I bet they also would make exceptions for commercial applications using the LGPL'd KDE libraries, which would otherwise be forbidden by this policy.

pthread_sigmask

[oliverthered]

There is a new function, pthread_sigmask(), that is used in much the same way as sigprocmask(), but it sets the signal mask only for the current thread. Also, a new thread inherits the signal mask of the thread that created it; so a signal mask can effectively be set for an entire process by calling pthread_sigmask() before any threads are created.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2121

Re:license issues

[justins]

That's just straight-up weird. Totally unenforceable.

Re:license issues

[drsquare]

How exactly do they know if you used the free version?

Say you use the free version to code some software. Then you buy the commercial version and release the code. If QT come round complaining, just tell them that you programmed it using the commercial version.

What are they going to do, put spyware on your computer? This is completely unenforceable.

Ambiguous

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hard to detect a violation" is not the same as "unenforceable."

Without an automated mechanism to detect license violations, most commercial licenses have the same problem: proof. That's why the BSA has a hotline for people to report their companies.

So you can do it but you are violating the license and at the mercy of anyone who knows about it.

Re:license issues

[Spy Hunter]

Yes, you can cheat TrollTech out of their money by lying and breaking the law. News flash: you can do the same with any other software company. You could buy one copy of Visual Studio .NET, then download a crack and install it on a million computers and Microsoft would never know. The situation with TrollTech is pretty much the same; the only difference is you don't need to download a crack first, but that doesn't make it any more legal.

Re:Can't agree. Try X/Qt, or try a different ROM

[idlake]

I have a Zaurus SL-C1000 and 760, and also have had a 5500. I do understand what you're saying about Qt/Embedded (now just called qtopia), but it's horses for courses: an X11 handheld device isn't what everyone wants...

If Qtopia ran on the Zaurus through X11, it would be indistiguishable to users from the way it is running now. It may be that Troll Tech originally really did think that Qt/Embedded could be more efficient than Qt/X11, but they were wrong, and at this point, the only reason for Qt/Embedded's existence is that it is great for Troll Tech's business.

Qt/Embedded (now just called qtopia)

Qt/Embedded is the toolkit, Qtopia is the embedded toolkit plus a set of standard applications. (At least that was the case last I looked.)

[PdaXRom, X/Qt, ...]

Those are workarounds for nerds, not something you can use for mainstream application delivery. If I want to deliver an open source application on Qtopia to mainstream users, I have to write it in Qt. And if I want to deliver a commercial application on Qtopia to mainstream users, I have to license Qt, overpriced and cumbersome that it is. And Troll Tech knows this; it's great for their business, it just happens to be lousy for the adoption of embedded Linux.

I disagree that the apps aren't optimised for small screens: to me, it's an excellent UI. Opie seems to look exactly the same, surely imitation is the sincerest form of flattery ;-)

Well, I can't comment on Opie, and Opie isn't exactly mainstream anyway. The point is, we don't have a choice at this point: almost all embedded Linux devices run Qt, and you simply can't realistically develop and deploy other toolkits on it.

Re:license issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Has a court ruled on this? Are you a lawyer? What you meant to say was that it would be hard for TT to know about violations.

The problem with doing anything that might get yourself in trouble is that your chances of getting caught are proportional to the number of people who know you did it.

Re:license issues

[justins]

What you meant to say was that it would be hard for TT to know about violations.

Um... hello, Mr. Coward? Doesn't that make it unenforceable? Yes, it does.

Re:license issues

[drsquare]

What law is being broken exactly?

Here's the actual license

[MeBadMagic]

Here is my license for 4.0.1 commercial.

Qt COMMERCIAL LICENSE AGREEMENT
Agreement version 2.10

IMPORTANT-READ CAREFULLY:
1. This Trolltech End-User License Agreement ("Agreement") is a legal
agreement between you (either an individual or a legal entity)
("Licensee") and Trolltech Inc. ("Trolltech") for the Trolltech
software product(s) accompanying this Agreement, which include(s)
computer software and may include "online" or electronic
documentation, associated media, and printed materials, including the
source code, example programs and the documentation ("Licensed
Software").

2. The Licensed Software is protected by copyright laws and
international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual
property laws and treaties. The Licensed Software is licensed, not
sold.

3. Some of the files in the Licensed Software have been grouped into
Modules. These files contain specific notices defining the Module of
which they are a part. The Modules licensed to Licensee are specified
in the license certificate ("License Certificate") accompanying the
Licensed Software. The terms of the License Certificate are considered
part of the Agreement. In the event of inconsistency or conflict
between the language of this Agreement and the License Certificate,
the provisions of this Agreement shall govern.

4. By installing, copying, or otherwise using the Licensed Software,
Licensee agrees to be bound by the terms of this Agreement. If
Licensee does not agree to the terms of this Agreement, Licensee may
not install, copy, or otherwise use the Licensed Software. Licensee
may, however, return it to Licensee's place of purchase within 14 days
of purchase for a full refund. In addition, by installing, copying, or
otherwise using any updates or other components of the Licensed
Software that Licensee receives separately as part of the Licensed
Software ("Updates"), Licensee agrees to be bound by any additional
license terms that accompany such Updates. If Licensee does not agree
to the additional license terms that accompany such Updates, Licensee
may not install, copy, or otherwise use such Updates.

5. Upon Licensee's acceptance of the terms and conditions of this
Agreement, Trolltech grants Licensee the right to use the Licensed
Software in the manner provided below.

6. Trolltech grants to Licensee a non-exclusive, non-transferable,
perpetual license to make, use and modify copies of the Licensed
Software for the maximum number of named individuals within Licensee's
organization ("Named User"(s)) specified in the License Certificate
for the sole purposes of designing, developing, and testing Licensee's
software product(s), which may include the Licensed Software
("Applications"). Modified Licensed Software shall be considered as
Licensed Software for the purposes of this Agreement.

7. Licensee may install copies of the Licensed Software on an
unlimited number of computers provided that only the Named Users use
the Licensed Software. Licensee may at any time designate another
Named User within Licensee's organization to replace a then-current
Named User by notifying Trolltech, provided that a) the then-current
Named User has not been designated as a replacement during the last
six (6) months; and b) there is no more than the specified number of
Named Users at any given time.

8. Verification: Trolltech or a certified auditor on Trolltech's
behalf, may, upon its reasonable request and at its expense, audit
Licensee with respect to the use of the Licensed Software. Any such
audit shall be conducted during regular business hours at Licensee's
facilities and shall not unreasonably interfere with Licensee's
business activities. Trolltech will not remove, copy, or redistribute
any electronic material during the course of an audit. Licensee does
not implicitly grant Trolltech any form of license agreement. If an
audit reveals tha

Re:license issues

[Spy Hunter]

Contract law. When you buy the commercial version from TrollTech the license you agree to forbids using it with any code that was developed using the free version.

Try again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to detect violations of this type of clause but you're kidding yourself if you think that makes them unenforceable.

'Unenforceable' means the clause can't be enforced. It means that the courts would throw out any claims even if TT had unimpeachable evidence.

Clause like this are not unusual. Most commercial software developers have these hard-to-detect-violation clauses in their licenses like: don't reverese engineer, don't run on more than one computer, etc. Have you never heard of the BSA which was formed to educate people on this issue and which, conveniently, runs a hotline for employees to report their employers?

Go ahead and violate the license but I bet you'll be quiet about it. Like a previous poster suggested: order the license and then wait a few weeks before the release. You should also hope nobody finds out or, if they do, that they never get pissed off enough to report you because the clause most certainly is enforceable!

Re:license issues

[zootm]

Yes, but you only need do that at distribution time. You own the copyright to the software you wrote, you are free to arbitrarily relicence it at your leisure, even if you GPLed it in the past. There is no way that the GPL can stop you from doing this, it dictates rights for others. The Qt licence states that you can't use its commercial version if you have ever used the OSS one, which is an additional restriction.