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Trolltech Adopts GPL 3 for Qt
Funkmaster F writes "At the KDE Developer Conference today, Trolltech CEO Havaard Nord announced that its Qt application development toolkit will be released under GPL 3. 'Here at the KDE release event, Nord's announcement was met with applause. Like Trolltech's initial decision to move from its own QPL license to the GPL, this announcement and the company's more recent decision to adopt the GPL for all platforms rather than just Linux, demonstrate the company's ongoing commitment to openness.'"
So the complaint that KDE is not as "open" as Gnome is no longer valid?
So I can no longer use QT to make whatever application I choose..
Sure you can; just pay Trolltech for a commercial license. That's always been an option.
-- Alastair
You are plain wrong. Qt is released under GPL v3 and GPL v2. Just chose the license you prefer at your convenience.
Trolltech first released its Qt toolkit (for X11) under the GPL (v2) back in 2000. The Mac version was GPL'd in 2003 and the Windows version in 2005.
This announcement just means that they're adding GPL v3 to the licensing (it will remain licensed under GPL v2 also).
-- Alastair
Wow, way to spread FUD.
The GPLv3 requires that if you sell a piece of hardware that allows the software in it to be updated, and that software is covered by the GPLv3, the user must be able to update it with their own version as well as versions you supply. There's nothing about not allowing DRM.
This makes it easier for a user to bypass DRM for end-user devices like Kindle or the iPhone and such. But it doesn't disallow you from implementing it. So your point is basically as wrong as saying that the GPLv2 doesn't allow you to make money on your software.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
They wrote QT, they want to distribute QT, and they chose terms to do it.
Obey their terms if you want to use their product. If not, find something else or write your own.
The press statement says:
Qt is already available under the GPL v2 and will continue to be so in addition to the GPL v3.
Wrong again: if you pay for a commercial QT license, you can develop ANYTHING YOU WANT on top of it.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
The GPL isn't, and never was, about developer freedom; it's about end user freedom. TrollTech understands this very well. If you want freedom as a developer then you'll have to pay them for it. That's their business model. They'll let you have their library for free if you give your software away for free as well. Otherwise you pay. Switching to the GPL 3 just furthers this policy.
The problem I have is that they require that any software written for their commercial-license library be only written for their commercial-license library.
Nonsense! You can use the commercial version to write BOTH commercial and Free Software.
Write your editor with their free library, then never be able to distribute it in any way without GPL'ing it
Not entirely correct. Their GPL license includes disclaimers for several common Open Source licenses. You still need to open your source, but you are not limited to a single license.
As for the future of your app, decide before you start which license you will be using. It is not fair to the Qt developers (who get paid from license sales) to "cheat" by developing under the Free Software license and then switching to the commercial license when you release it.
You may use the GPL version for training and learning the library. And there is an Evaluation license if you wish to evaluate Qt for your own project. But when you start the actual coding of your software, purchase a commercial license if you intend for your software to commercial itself.
It's quid pro quo. Do unto Trolltech as you would have Trolltech do unto you.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I simply find stupid the idea of having two different installed toolkits on the same computer
Why? That makes no sense whatsoever. Unless you really can't spare the extra ~5mb of ram, what's the issue? You realize that Windows is probably running about 5 different toolkits at once right?
less importantly but still somewhat relevant, OpenOffice
You do realize that Openoffice uses its own toolkit called VCL, right? Which means, that your computer has two different toolkits installed! Egad! Quick, uninstall Openoffice!
The only reason it integrates into Gnome is because there is a GTK compatibility layer, just like there is a Qt compatibility layer for KDE.
Not to mention Firefox uses XUL and XBL. GTK can be used to render some interface widgets, but that is minor in comparison.
Actually, you can develop all your software using the GPL version (without distributing it) and then decide to distribute it under a commercial license.
The GPL actually requires that when you distribute a software you distribute the source code with it.
If you never distribute the software developed with the GPL version of Qt, you'll never have to give away your source.
When you have the finished version ready, you may purchase Qt license and distribute it commercially as closed source or anyway you want.
I realize that GPLv3 was designed to address a lot of problems such as Tivoization, but in following the debate on the Debian-Legal mailing list, I'm not completely comfortable with choosing version three.
Trying to actually read the whole license to decide for myself just makes my head spin.
Note: there is no software to download yet; there won't be any until the alpha test version is ready.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
All of them running over Gtk.
.gtkrc* and do it, it will reflect on every software using Gtk
Over GTK? No, the exact opposite. GTK is a shell on top (Openoffice also has a Qt shell). And you think that doesn't contribute to bloat? It's worse, because now you've actually got two whole toolkits loaded in memory at any given time. So don't think you're really saving anything.
I can go to
Well when I'm running KDE, I change the colours and fonts, and those colours get applied to GTK apps if I tick the box..
Every GNU+Linux distribution (which includes Ubuntu and Red Hat) already ships a bunch of GPLv3 applications. From the perspective of companies that distribute general purpose operating systems, GPLv3 is strictly better than GPLv2 because of the internationalized wording and the "contributors can't screw the community with patents" provisions.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The LGPL allows you to *link* code into commercial products. You still have to release the LGPL'd code, and anything you've added to it.
My goodness, it's almost as if you had some way to make companies who don't want to participate in the development of free software participate by funding it! That's so... evil?
how to invest, a novice's guide
This is supposed to be a bad thing, I take it? As I see it, the alternative for the software house would have been to just release their code. Open source, or pay up and fund future open source development. Seems like a pretty big win-win for the community to me.
I think you're missing my point somewhat - I can't, as a small developer who doesn't even know if his software is going to be released commercially, start coding now and then purchase a license later. I'm a small game developer and my editor may be of no interest to anyone but me. But if it does turn out to be useful to release it, and I don't want to release it open-source, I can't simply buy a commercial license and be done with it.
Why should Trolltech mind if I bought a license later rather than sooner? They're still getting the license. One way just forces me to decide much earlier, when I may simply not have the information that I need to determine which is the right course of action. (Which, in this case, turns out to be "don't use QT".)
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Just out of interest, what makes you prefer firefox? I switched to konqueror as my primary browser nearly two years ago and haven't looked back - so much faster and "cleaner"-looking.
I am trolling
As others have noted already in this thread, that sort of behaviour is expressly forbidden under the QT licensing. The GPL licensing only applies to open source code developed with QT. If you wish to release commercially, you have to make that decision before you start writing code, and follow their commercial license terms (not the GPL). Their commercial license overview is fairly clear in stating that you cannot legally release commercial code that was developed using the GPL edition.
From Trolltech:
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Qt's commercial license indeed has a restriction, that you can not develop an application that was *previously* developed on the GPL version of Qt. So you can't develop your software against the GPLed Qt, test the waters, and only when there looks like to be profit, buy a commercial lincense and ship it.
This is a very reasonable restriction, but a restriction nontheless. So it's not "anything you want" as you claimed.
( -1, RTFA )
Qt is now triple-licensed :
For clients and users who are somehow constrained to the GPLv2, nothing changes. Qt is now a triple-licensed toolkit: commercial, GPL version 2 and GPL version 3 (technically, the X11 version is even quadruple-licensed). In the Open Source version, you get to choose which one you want to apply to your code. And if neither option is suitable for your needs, theres always the commercial alternative. One other thing I would like to point out is the fact that we are future-proofing it. The new license headers say specifically that you may: (at your option) use any later version of the GNU General Public License if such license has been publicly approved by Trolltech ASA (or its successors, if any) and the KDE Free Qt Foundation.So, I hope your fears are thoroughly allayed, and you can go about your business today with piece of mind that at least on commercial software vendor understands your software licensing worries.
Pirate Party UK
If you don't distribute during development, there's no way trolltech could know if you did the actual development with the GPL version or a commercial version... Once you want to release it just buy a commercial license and wait say a month and release it proprietary.
This is obviously violating a term of the commercial license. However if you're a small fish with only one developer, there's no way trolltech will know or care for that matter. The term in the commercial license is there because they don't want big companies with many developers to just buy one commercial license. Which is fair enough...
But IMO, if you don't want to release free software don't base your applications on free software libraries! How hard can that be to understand.
Last time I checked Visual Studio was not a multiplatform development environment, whereas Qt is.
And come on ! How can you compare Qt with Adobe Flex ?
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
I build a shiny widget, and release it under the GPL. Lots of people use my shiny widget - it becomes the gold standard for shiny widgets. Then some software house cuts a huge deal for software development with [insert name of immense multinational here]. The only trouble is, they need a shiny widget as part of the code. And damn, your one is the standard.
They come to you, and boy, you have them over a barrel. Because you were cunning enough to use the GPL, you can hold them to ransom, and charge them $1M for a limited license that lets them use your shiny widget in their new project. And whats more, you can sell it all over again the next time someone needs your shiny widget in a non-GPL setting.
Great imagination, laddie, shame about your grasp on reality.
The maximum value of any piece of software is what it would cost to do a clean-room reimplementation from scratch. Remember that a lot of the original GNU software was clean-room reimplementations of pre-existing UN*X utilities. On the whole it's always easier to do a clean-room reimplementation than to build the original system, because the re-implementors have a complete functional specification and a working prototype to test against.
In the past I've needed bits of commercial functionality which weren't available open source, so I simply reimplemented them from the specifications. It isn't hard to do - and it isn't hard to do the other way round either. So, sure, if you spent $1.5M equivalent in programmer hours developing your implementation, you might just get your $1M license fee. If it's something you knocked up in a weekend, they'll pay a programmer for a weekend.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
There are no separate versions. There is only one codebase for any given version of Qt, with the only difference being the license headers, and the few features that are only available in the commercial version (the website mentions "commercial database drivers and the Visual Studio Integration on Windows.") The Open Source edition is a single package containing all the applicable licenses.
(Or, for the short answer, "they will be.")
My goodness, it's almost as if you had some way to make companies who don't want to participate in the development of free software participate by funding it! That's so... evil?
It is false advertising. Just like the other day, where I asked a free man to do some work for me. And he asked me in return how much I was willing to pay him. Pay? But he was supposed to be free!
Someone has totally misunderstand the concept of freedom.
> Even Microsoft doesn't get to collect extra fees for commercial software development on
> Windows.
They recoup it by collecting extra fees for using windows. (_Both_ from you and all users of your software.)
> GTK is much better suited for a general-purpose library on Linux than QT simply because it
> allows you to develop "anything" using it.
The only difference is that GTK allows you to close code up and sue your users who share it with other people. Kinda weird for a "free software" library to faciliate proprietary lawsuits.
>However, I do have an objection to supporting their attempt to make QT central to Linux
>software development.
They dont make it more "central" than any other toolkit out there.
- software encumbered by patent law,
- software encumbered by anticircumvention law, or
- software that nearly everyone is presumed to have seen, making it prohibitive for a room to be made clean.
The third item is what made it difficult for Compaq to find good reverse engineers for its IBM PC BIOS cloning project: too many developers of application software for IBM PCs had already read through it, raising a rebuttable presumption of subconscious copying. This also causes trouble for developers of musical works, who are presumed to have heard their competitors' works on commercial music radio: see Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton.Again, last time I checked, Windows Vista was not a platform but an OS. The platform here is Win32. Similarly, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbons is an OS, whereas Linux is a platform. Concerning Windows Mobile 5/6 (forgot 2003) these are OS. The platform is Windows CE. So to be exact, VS2005 supports only two platform, where Qt supports X11, Mac OS X, Windows (Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, NT4, Me, 98 !!!), Linux Embedded and Java, i.e. 5 different plaforms. GNU/
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
That said, if you can't afford Qt, then you just shouldn't be using it for a commercial product. It's a full featured and very good quality C++ library, and those don't come cheap. There are always other simpler, "budget" alternatives, such as wxWidgets.
I am not a Trolltech employee, but I do work closely with them.. I have a commercial license. What you are telling me does not describe Trolltech. Not at all. I have never heard of a workstation inspection. What I have heard instead, is offering waivers for those developers who genuinely did change their mind later on. And I have seen cheaters. I have seen companies release a signficant product two months after purchasing a single license.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yes you can. If software does not see a public release, it has no license; the GPL explicitly differentiates between private software for your own use and that which is made available to the public. Trolltech make the same distinction.
You can develop the software using the free library, as long as it does not see the light of day outside of your own use. There is no need to license software that will never leave your desktop or be used by anyone outside of your company. If you need to entertain a commercial release, then you can buy the commercial license and recompile/distribute that software with the commercial library.
I know a couple of projects which have especially done it this way; the software used was internal and used the free, non-commercial Qt library built from source. When it was decided to be released, due to licensing of other parts of the software it needed to stay closed source. So a license was bought.. and the software was released. Trolltech, nor any software company, would fault you for not planning to use commercial software, and there is no API difference in the commercial Qt and free Qt which means you must code for one and not the other.
So, don't be stupid. Just code it for free, now, for your own use (the licenses permit this) and then get a commercial license *IF* you see the need for a public binary release at the time. But you do not need to plan that ahead.