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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
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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.
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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."
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"