Slashdot Mirror
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."
A BSD-licensed program cannot use a GPL'd library, either. GPL is license-incompatible with everything else, not just closed-source.
I am told, though I have not tried it, that it is harder to develop multithreaded programs in GTK than in Qt.
Nope.. it's probably easier in fact... but that's not the point here. Lots of people compare GTK programming in C, with Qt programming in C++.
Qt programming in C++ is quite nice (not counting the MOC mess horror). GTK in C looks horrible, but with the C++ bindings it looks nice. GTK is a more - umm - bindable (for want of a better word) toolkit... it is shockingly easy to make bindings for. There are still all the issues around the C++ ABI which makes KDE (NOTE: not Qt itself, although it affected) such a horrible big-blob-o-code and a disgusting mess written by people who've never done a day's computer science.
So it's not as simple as licensing. However, this release is good news. There are a great many nice things about Qt (which is why it is quite popular for mobile stuff)... we'll really just have to see what comes out of it all. A unified desktop is not, I suspect, one of them... at least not for a good long while. Still, it may revitalise KDE's future - which was already looking bleak, but after the v4 debacle is/was looking desperate. This might give it another chance.
Bzzt, wrong. I don't want to be using different apps when "integration is important". I want it to work. That's one of (many) reasons I don't use a Linux desktop.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Color me ignorant, but aren't there language bindings that allow you to use Qt in C?
Probably but every binding I've seen for QT sucks, including the commercial binding for Java that trolltech themselves wrote. Note that Trolltech even admits it sucks. QT is designed top down and bottom up as a C++ library not as a library that happens to be implemented in C++. QT gets advantages from not having to have language abstraction but also gets disadvantages in that binding are: really buggy and complex or low featured.
I think the Gnome developers are being fair. If you use QT you want to use C++.
Crazy libraries... you are an idiot. GNOME/GTk has always been split along functionality grounds into separate libraries - why... because those libraries can be used in other apps without everything else, plus it makes maintenance and development easier. KDE doesn't do this... why... it's because of C++ and the ABI stability issues surrounding it, plus the fact that the average KDE developer tends to be a 17 year old fanatic whose experience of coding comes from Visual Basic. Hence the KDE model of massive libraries with everything and its dog lumped together.
I agree. Hence why it is my primary desktop, even though I really would like a Linux desktop that didn't suck.
(I'm amused that the post you replied to was modded troll. Do people really think that Linux integration doesn't suck?)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Let's put it like this: Since we migrated our software to GTK, the free support I've had from the GTK mailing list has been head and shoulders above any "support" I ever had from Trolltech, and that was when we were paying them.
Obviously you are a happy camper, and I'm pleased, and I'm even more pleased that you never ended up in the situation we did where the "guarantee that someone is going to answer" failed to materialise.
The tuth is, paying Trolltech only ever increased your chances of getting a decent answer, it never guaranteed it.
The happy situation now is that they can carry on providing the same crappy, random, non-deterministic, substandard, unhelpful "support" as they have been doing all along, but now they won't be charging through the nose for it.
Which can only be good.
Disagreeing with you isn't trolling, buddy.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."