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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."
The only complaint I've seen before about Qt is that it's too expensive for proprietary apps, and that's not an issue anymore. I won't be surprised to see a large uptick in Qt usage now, and that's a big plus for cross platform apps, as Qt is quite portable.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Over the years I have said many times that TrollTech should have lowered their prices considering things like the Apple Developer's kit and MSDN are significantly cheaper for more functionality.
I have been in need of a good GUI toolkit for years. I have used just about all of them but for my own projects I either use the native toolkit of the OS I'm working on or FLTK for cross-platform stuff. Qt is much more functional than FLTK though with all their SQL and other utility classes. This is really cool. I bet Qt is now going to become the defacto GUI toolkit for everything.
I wonder how long until someone makes a Qt version of GNOME (ha, I can't imagine how much work that would take). You could start with making a Qt version of The GIMP.
Since GNOME is currently brainstorming over how to make GNOME 3, I'd say this announcement come right on time.
Let's focus on the applications and not on reinventing the wheel.
The toolkit feud has gone on for far too long. Let's share a common toolkit. GNOME is using more Vala and C#/Mono these days and Vala/C#/Mono on top of Qt would make gnomies very happy I think.
Re-implementing GNOME on top of Qt with the traditional focus on HIG should not be all that hard.
This is an exiting opportunity for GNOME. I wonder if they'll embrace it and make the Linux desktop go forward.
Open source desktops fail really hard from a strategic point of view because of the split between GTK and Qt. They store l10n and i18n settings in separate places, they look different, the dialogs have different configurations, etc. It creates a desktop that feels less unified, more like a bunch of random applications than a single system.
Of course, porting GNOME would take so long that people would forget that GNOME even exists. The unfortunate reality is that this split will only be resolved when either GNOME and all of the associated GTK applications die, or KDE and its associated applications die (unfortunately, that would mean a loss of K3B, one of the applications that made open source desktops usable for non-technical users).
Palm trees and 8
I wonder what will happen to PyQt? They have traditionally offered the same licensing as Trolltech, but at a much cheaper rate. I'm curious to know what Qt's change to the LGPL will mean to them.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
With this development, I hope Firefox and Adobe developers will jump on board...fast. I would also like to see the folks at OpenOffice.org on board the QT bandwagon as well. The interfaces I see on Openoffice and Adobe's PDF reader would look better with QT in my opinion.
I have a hunch Nokia is looking at XCode and Apple instead. After all, the main battle for them is in the mobile market, and Apple made a big deal about the iPhone being based on OS X. So this is a bid to win over the talented developers.
QT is available on more platforms, true, and it always has been. Still, XCode was free for anyone with a Mac, and the developer kits for the iPhone only required that you own a Mac and that you registered as a developer.
Qt supports more than just Windows/Linux/Mac OSX... It also supports embedded applications (Qt/Embedded - used for Qtopia, which assumes nothing more than a framebuffer graphics interface), and most recently also Windows CE.
I think Google's decision to go with their own graphics API for Android is looking very much like "not invented here". The Qt API is excellent (I've been using the free version for years), and it's available pretty much everywhere. Now with LGPL licensing, any remaining objection has pretty much disappeared. Qt Jambi (the Java API for Qt) would be perfect for Android.
No one forces you to use GPL libraries. Though I agree that LGPL is much more appropriate for base libraries. This is probably the main reason I haven't used GPL libraries like Qt and don't use mySQL as a database engine. I understand in the case of mySQL it's different, legally vs. what mySQL AB likes to interpret, but I respect their position, and don't use their product for a lot of things.
I don't have a problem with the GPL, I usually use more liberal licensing like BSD, Creative Commons Attr. or MIT myself, and find GPL incompatible for inclusion. If you use GPL code, your code is GPL, it's that simple... if you don't like it, don't use it. There's LGPL, MPL, BSD, MS-PL and a host of other options. You have no place to bitch about it. I like the GPL for applications, it prevents people from subverting your application without giving back (not so great in web/SaaS models though). I think that SaaS using modified GPL apps does subvert GPL a bit. It's a balancing act, trying to preserve your rights as the original developer, while allowing people to utilize your code.
I happen to kind of like MS's MS-PL license. It's kind of like BSD with a nuclear deterrent clause (anti-patent/anti-lawsuit). I feel it's probably more appropriate in most cases over BSD. Since it would allow you to protect yourself, at least a little, from the patent trolls. Sure it works better for larger companies like MS, but is a kind of cool idea just the same.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Interesting point.
Nokia DOES presume to tell you what you can do with your LGPL code. Read this quote:
"Can I switch from using Qt under the LGPL to commercial afterwards?
"Users of the LGPL versions of Qt need to comply with the LGPL licensing terms and conditions. Qt's commercial license agreement contains a restriction that prohibits customers from initially beginning development with the LGPL licensed version of Qt and then transitioning to a commercial version of Qt."
Wow! How do they know how you "initially" began development?
It seems as though some lawyer or marketing guy with no technical understanding got involved.
How does this affect the open source cross-platform GUI toolkit WxWidgets?