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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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

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: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.

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

[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.

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: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: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."

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.

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: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: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.