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Qt Becomes LGPL
Aequo writes "Qt, the highly polished, well documented, modern GUI toolkit owned by Nokia, will be available under the LGPL starting with version 4.5! It was previously only mainly available under the GPL and a commercial license. Selling licenses was an important part of Qt under Trolltech as it was the company's main source of income, but Trolltech is a fruit-fly compared to Nokia, who want to encourage and stimulate the use of Qt Everywhere [PDF]. This is fantastic news for all commercial developers looking to create cross-platform applications without the need to buy a $4950 multi-platform license per developer."
While competition is generally a good thing I think the fight between Gnome and KDE has seriously hampered the adoption of Linux on the desktop (even if there hadn't been a fight I don't think we would see widespread Linux use on the Desktop but it would be greater than it is). The problem was that they were both good, for different reasons, and both had a good developer base the end result of which was a battle neither side could really win and we all lost from.
While I would hate to see Gnome consigned to the dustbin I think it's about time they gave up and admitted that KDE has won (flame away). I admit that KDE isn't perfect, far from it, but KDE4+ is streets ahead of Gnome now and the big hurdle to widespread use by companies has now vanished.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Rather than you attempting to restrict what people do with their computers :) How horrible it is that someone might tell you not to restrict others! That's telling someone what to do! It's bossy and mean!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Fact is, KDE 4, even 4.2, still has some horrendous UI issues that the developers just dismiss. I switched from GNOME to KDE to avoid Mono/.NET, but with KDE 4 I feel like they're heading even further in the wrong direction as far as UI design is concerned. KDE 3 had too many settings but behaved more or less as you'd expect from other UIs; KDE 4 has hardly any settings and behaves in weird and freaky ways unlike any other desktop environment.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The GPL doesn't tell you what you can do with your code. It doesn't cover use of the code at all, only distribution.
The GPL is nature's way of making Linux similarly attractive.
The GPL isn't the reason why people use Linux (barring a small handful of nutjobs, the type that make up a significant amount of BSD users). People use it because it's better.
...every binding I've seen for QT sucks, including the commercial binding for Java that trolltech themselves wrote.
Bullshit.
Note that Trolltech even admits it sucks
Double bullshit.
Your last sentence might be informative, but still you're mostly trolling.
Why the heck is this modded down as a troll? Yet more evidence that the Slashdot moderation system is seriously broken.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yours do seem to be getting modded up, yes.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."