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."

Comments

time to port gnome!

[SolusSD]

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.

Re:time to port gnome!

[JimDaGeek]

Firstly, without competition, things tend to languish.

Competition is great, however GNU/Linux should not be competing against itself. There is too much fragmentation in Linux-land, 10 apps that all try to do the same thing, but each one does certain aspects better, yet none get it all right. Instead consolidate all that effort to 2 or 3 apps.

Linux gets to compete against Windows and OS X. Are you old enough to remember the Unix-wars? All the big Unix versions were all doing things their own way whilw MS and Apple were working on more consistent offerings. We all know what happened to the major Unix players.

Sadly, Linux desktop seems to be repeating the past. Constantly reinventing the wheel with tons of yet-another-app-X syndrome.

I have been using Linux since early Red Hat days. Then I used Slack, built my own Linux based on LFS for about 2 years. Then on to Gentoo, then to Fedora then finally Ubuntu.

Ubuntu made things a lot better IMO, however it still suffers with a felling of many apps tacked together instead of a more cohesive product. This was the main reason I switched to OS X 2 years ago and have been happy with that choice.

I still find myself missing Linux and would love to see a more unified final product. I don't want to have to be bothered with looking for a Gnome/GTK+ based app for Ubuntu so it works/integrates best.

There have been too many times I where I couldn't find a good Gnome/GTK+ based app but found it with a KDE based app. However, that one app pulls in a lot of KDE based bloat that I don't want/need. So I would try to switch to KDE from Gnome for a while, but found the same issue where I would have to pull in/use a Gnome/GTK+ based app.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Hurrah

[caluml]

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.

It is a mistake to even think of porting

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Kills any idea of using Qt in our products

[oever]

So buy a commercial Qt license. These are still available have no GPL/LGPL in them.

Re:congratulations to Nokia

[darkvizier]

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?

Re:Hello Moto

[Nick Ives]

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.

Re:Yeah but KDE doesn't work.

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Hello Moto

[Hurricane78]

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?