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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."
Seriously though- Reasons to write applications for the gnome desktop environment are getting fewer every day. When QT4 became available under the GPL on all 4 major platforms- Windows/BSD/Linux/OSX the argument for GTK was weak. Now, I'd argue its virtually non-existent.
Well, thank heavens for that. Hopefully now the horrible, oldfashioned looking, bad file-selecting-dialogs GTK will slowly disappear. The number of times I've had to select something in /usr/bin, and have started to type /usr/bin only to have it try and go to /usr/sr or some nastiness.
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I use to be a KDE developer, and I have to say that I love QT/KDE platform (and still use it). But with that said, I find that OSS moves faster BECAUSE of friendly competition, not in spite of it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I love to see when a company understands that giving something away they will get ten times more in return. And nowadays that happens too rarely.
For a while it seemed that Nokia is about to lose to its competitors, because of Symbian and bad software. This will totally remedy it. I've also heard from Nokia insiders that they're actively dumping everything related to Symbian. It won't take more than couple of years and all their phones use Qt.
Seeing how well Apple has been selling iPhone applications, I can only imagine the potential Qt phones have in future. With Symbian that just wasn't possible, it was a total nightmare for the developers.
Think about Xfree. it was basically a closed monopoly. Then X11 grabbed it and opened it up further. Has it improved things? Absolutely. Basically, we NEED competition. GNOME is good competition, vs. say MS's form of competition (involving lots of dirty tricks and legal maneuvers).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So buy a commercial Qt license. These are still available have no GPL/LGPL in them.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
I really like Gnome better than KDE. You can run QT applications under Gnome just fine. :)
What I wonder is if we could see OpenOffice or Mozilla move to QT for the widgets
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I was thinking the same thing. While Konqueror is a nice browser I could never replace Firefox with it.
There is a QT port of Firefox but when I tried it it was still in the very early development stages and was unusable.
You mean copyright law is inherently corrupt and restrictive?
It's great that Qt becomes LGPL, but it doesn't mean that we should stop developing GNOME and GTK...
Seriously there's lots of business that depends on GNOME and/or GTK, and lots of reasons to keep them alive...
Competition among desktop environments is good and having two large desktop environments if probably a good idea... As it drives competition and innovation.
I'm assuming we're talking about development for Linux, or cross platform here, since this is QT. Two questions:
1) Why would you program in C# on Linux? Mono support is years behind the feature sets that MS is rolling out. There are a variety of languages/frameworks that are better supported than .NET.
2) What's wrong with GUI programming in C++? QT tools seem pretty nice to me, and objects are much easier to work with than a mountain of procedural code. C++ should also be plenty efficient for application space.
So, what advantages are there in using C/Gnome?
You wouldn't be able to do anything if it wasn't from the author. He's not restricting you, either, just sharing the product of HIS work. Once you understand that, you'll know why most people don't care about your freedom that never existed in the first place.
No, the GPL just presumes to attempt to restrict what I do with my code that has no GPL code in it.
Flat out wrong. The GPL restricts what you can do with other peoples code who have chosen to license it under the GPL. If you don't want those restrictions on your code then don't creative derivative works from GPL code.
Don't bitch because you can't leech other peoples code: Your code, your rules means their code, their rules.
Nick
The Ubuntu devs screwed up their KDE 4 packages in a bad way. That isn't KDE's fault.
Furthermore, KDE doesn't depend on video drivers. If the Ubuntu devs made a certain Nvidia driver a dependency, then they screwed up big time. KDE does not change your kernel or video driver in any way.
I'm not calling you a liar or saying you didn't have problems. I'm sure your box got hosed somehow, but it is more likely the problem was with Ubuntu's packaging.
It should also be noted that the QT 4/Nvidia problems have largely been remedies. Qt 4 used Xrender heavily, and Nvidia's driver had a piss-poor Xrender implementation. The forthcoming Qt 4.5 is supposed to move away from using Xrender all over the place, and the latest Nvidia driver has much better Xrender support to boot. openSUSE even provides a repo with weekly snapshots of the KDE 4.2 branch compiled against the weekly snapshots of Qt 4.5. In theory it is unstable, but I've had good luck with it so far.
I know I'll get modded Troll for this, but I don't care. Ubuntu has got some serious problems, and is very overrated. openSUSE puts out quality KDE 3, KDE 4 and Gnome desktops. They support all 3 currently (though KDE 3 is being dropped in the future).
Novell hires a large staff of developers that make quality packages, fix upstream bugs, backport features, etc. As much as I hated Novell for the MS deal, Novell is one of the best contributors to several upstream projects, and openSUSE is a fantastic distro.
I can't recommend it enough.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I'm confused -- until this moment, wouldn't they have been hoping exactly this would happen, and cursing the fact that they had to deal with the GPL?
The whole point of the GPL is to strengthen those who are materially sharing your ideals while diminishing those who are materially acting against them. I personally believe in the ideals behind the GPL, and I personally think it sucks to see that those who are materially acting contrary to those ideals are sharing the benefits of this code.
I would like to see the day arise where the closed source commercial software industry dies because it's forced to re-invent more and more wheels that open source software developers do not have to re-invent and is unable to remain competitive. That day just got further away.
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There's plenty of reasons to use GTK and QT, including pretty much every app that has no need for internet access (and some that are using it, but really shouldn't be.)
Never mind the hefty CPU load that AJAX apps can put on a system. Needlessly inefficient, even if we do have dual- and quad-core machines.
If you want to release your code under the GPL, great, thank you very much. If you want to release your code under a commercial license, or not release it at all, I also support that decision.
Allowing a GPL option for QT was great for the open source community. However, since QT is a library, the LGPL is a very good choice now that the owner of QT doesn't need the income from selling commercial licenses, and has an interest in having the library used more extensively. It's a good move on Nokia's part.
QT gets all the benefits of the open source community development, but is now also compatible with small closed source development that can't afford an expensive commercial license.
Use != distribution. That's not hair splitting.
The definition of derivative work is the issue.
I'd love to be able to utilize GPLed code, provide the code, credit the author(s), and create a work that utilized that functionality, intact, as an accoutrement to the rest of the application.
Unfortunantly, a strict reading of the GPL leads me (and my companies OSS group) to believe that this would mean that my entire application is a derivative work that would fall under the GPL. I've gotten around this in the past by having the GPLed code in a plugin form that is dynamically specified and then dynamically loaded so that the application is significantly distanced from the GPLed code.
Perhaps that's not how the GPL is intended to work, but there's enough leeway in interpreting it, that you have to be really careful.
The problem is that you're criticizing the GPL for not living in your perfect dream world.
I think the GPL is way better, because I know, that in reality, businesses tend to rip you off, fuck you in every hole, and leave you bleeding on the street, (metaphorically speaking) if they just can!
It's the rule of profit maximization. The first rule of every business. And more often than not, it's unfortunately the only rule.
And that's exactly why we need the GPL to enforce giving back something. Because in reality, businesses will not give back anything. Why would they? To lose money and then to lose against their competition who is winning because they are not giving anything back? Makes no sense.
But why would you care about your reality, if you can perfectly continue to rant about your dream world not coming true, while ignoring it?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No, the GPL just presumes to attempt to restrict what I do with my code that has no GPL code in it.
Um, no, that's simply not true. The GPL presumes to tell you what you can do my MY code. You are perfectly free to accept the license terms or not. Your own code is unaffected by anything other than your own decisions and their consequences. You're just not allowed to deny me the right to control what's done with *my* code. If you think you should have that right, you're certainly more corrupt and domineering than RMS.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
"I wasn't necessarily saying Vala was an app development language (although it could be)."
GNOME devs are already writing full apps with it, so it is being used as such.
"If Gtk used some other language like, say, Python, with Python GTK widgets and so forth, then how would Java, C#, or even C or C++ have access to these components?"
yes, i understand that is what has driven Vala's design and implementation. i just don't agree with the "we'll wedge another home grown language in between the C and the other languages" approach. i think it's overly complicated and limits the number of people who can (and will) hack on it.
time will tell if i'm smoking crack or not, of course .. =)
"Vala isn't actually a language in the same sense as Python, C# or Java is. It's really just a syntactic extension of C and produces plain, simple, C code."
that is produces C is both a feature and a bug. it makes debugging much more awkward (and for a while wasn't even possible at all! how do you go from your generated C to your Vala code in gdb? there's a plugin now for gdb, but really .. oy vey!) and you lose all the interesting security possibilities of managed code.
"How will using Javascript help in GTK development or building custom widgets or extending GTK and its reach?"
it's simply a language that is well known. pick a different well known language if you wish. make your own runtime if you wish. certainly add your own sugar on top (see QScript for a really nice example of how that can all be done with JavaScript). there's nothing particularly magical about the Vala syntax, except that it's a new language specific to one toolkit.
which is precisely my point.
"it will be possible to extend and improve GTK to equal Qt while still maintaining the ability to use it from any language binding."
let's do this then: let's come back to this in 2-3 years (it takes time to get these things going, i know) and see if that theory works out.
my theory is that it will just be one more baroque tool that people working with Gtk will have to get their head around (and people complained about moc with Qt; they ain't seen nothing yet ;) thereby limiting the pool of candidate developers. as a non-transferable skill it won't gain much in the way of value that might cause people to learn it "just because", and yet people will write applications with it. i expect to see more and more vala usage in Gtk+/GNOME (because, well, that's already happening =) and it will cause the project to become more insular rather than less.
i do expect that those using it will get more done with vala than with plain C, but not to an extent that will make up for the number of people lost by not choosing a language syntax that is already widely known or a language that avoids compile cycles, dealing with the intricacies of C debuging, etc.
given that it's homegrown, it will also soak up resources maintaining and extending vala itself that could be put elsewhere.
combined, i expect individual efficiency of existing contributors to increase due to vala, but the overall effect on the project to be a net negative. i predict that in a few years vala will get quietly binned. bonobo 2.0 if you will: a cool idea that "just has to work, it's so well designed and advanced!" but which just didn't pan out in reality.
again, i could be wrong. and i certainly don't want to see the GNOME team falter. but vala gives me the heebie-jeebies.
You didn't get modded down because you said Linux is not good, you got modded down because of saying "Kopete is terrible" and no extra explanations, not to mention the insistent spam on the rest of the thread about your stupid attempt to call the GPL immoral mostly because you don't understand it. So, perhaps the sentiment from the guy who modded you down was not an "I disagree" but a "I hope this is a troll, else my faith of humanity would be gone"
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Under their definitions of "use" and distribute
Their definition - where 'their' is the person licensing the code. Just because they are words which can be used in contexts different from those implied by the licenser, doesn't mean that they are incorrect definitions. In the context of the GPL, they are the correct definitions.
The GPL says that the same terms must also infect any code that links to it. Hence the immoral aspect of it and why I advocate against it.
It's not immoral, because no one is forcing you into that position. You have to willingly submit to the terms in order to be bound by them... i.e. no one is forcing you to distribute code under the GPL, unless you take their GPL'd code and willingly incorporate it into your own.
By your logic, any consensual act you don't like the ramifications of is immoral...
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