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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."
A BSD-licensed program cannot use a GPL'd library, either. GPL is license-incompatible with everything else, not just closed-source.
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.