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

Hello Moto

[Dupple]

Let's hope Motorola sign up. Their UI is consistently inconsistent and awful

Re:Hello Moto

[jonwil]

I have a Motorola Z6 that contains QT binaries (most likely QT embedded) on it so they are already using it on their linux phones at least.

Re:Hello Moto

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean copyright law is inherently corrupt and restrictive?

Re:Hello Moto

[afabbro]

No, the GPL just presumes to attempt to restrict what I do with my code that has no GPL code in it. Which is within their rights, but thoroughly corrupt and domineering of them.

Which makes sense, as Stallman is the ugliest type of human being--the zealot.

cough Kettle, pot, black, what?

Re:Hello Moto

[gparent]

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.

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:Hello Moto

[ShieldW0lf]

No, the GPL just presumes to attempt to restrict what I do with my code that has no GPL code in it. Which is within their rights, but thoroughly corrupt and domineering of them.

Which makes sense, as Stallman is the ugliest type of human being--the zealot.

Stallman is a member of a Jewish political movement from the first century AD whose primary goal is to incite the people of Iudaea Province to rebel against the Roman Empire?

Re:Hello Moto

[ShieldW0lf]

I'm confused -- until this moment, wouldn't they have been hoping exactly this would happen, and cursing the fact that they had to deal with the GPL?

The whole point of the GPL is to strengthen those who are materially sharing your ideals while diminishing those who are materially acting against them. I personally believe in the ideals behind the GPL, and I personally think it sucks to see that those who are materially acting contrary to those ideals are sharing the benefits of this code.

I would like to see the day arise where the closed source commercial software industry dies because it's forced to re-invent more and more wheels that open source software developers do not have to re-invent and is unable to remain competitive. That day just got further away.

Re:Hello Moto

[rk]

Stallman is a member of a Jewish political movement from the first century AD whose primary goal is to incite the people of Iudaea Province to rebel against the Roman Empire?

No, he's a ground melee fighter armed with psi-blades, serving as the core of many Protoss forces, especially in the early-to-mid game.

Re:Hello Moto

[Nick Ives]

It's a bit of a stretch to call it immoral though. You don't like the terms so you don't use it and that's fair enough.

Re:Hello Moto

[aztracker1]

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.

Re:Hello Moto

[SanityInAnarchy]

I personally think it sucks to see that those who are materially acting contrary to those ideals are sharing the benefits of this code.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Samba? Or Wine?

I have somewhat different priorities -- I would rather see end-users benefit. Most often, this means I'd rather see something open than closed (I'm looking at you, Flash), but not always.

For example, many games, by their very nature (FPS, for instance), are only secure against cheating through obscurity. It might be possible to make a dual-licensed version of that work, given sufficient "trusted computing" to ensure that only the official binary is used in certain settings. A GPL3'd version wouldn't work at all.

I would like to see the day arise where the closed source commercial software industry dies because it's forced to re-invent more and more wheels that open source software developers do not have to re-invent

That actually has very little to do with open or closed, and everything to do with communication and cooperation.

I've been doing a lot of Rails work lately... Seems just about everything Ruby (especially Rails stuff) is MIT-licensed. The idea is that if an idea is good, and generic enough, you'll release it back to the community rather than try to maintain it yourself -- but when you use that stuff in your own proprietary project, you don't have to worry about licensing.

The net result is, only the stuff which is actually relevant to the site in question are at all subject to re-invention. And even then, not necessarily -- provide an API, and others will just use your service instead of reinventing it.

Nor is an aversion to the GPL strictly a proprietary thing. If you've got a large codebase in an OSI-approved, but GPL-incompatible license, it's a problem, and the GPL is about the least compatible FOSS license out there.

As a simple example: We absolutely do have to reinvent the wheel with ZFS, if it's to ever exist in the Linux kernel, largely because the kernel is GPL'd. And if btrfs ends up being good, and anyone wants to port it to OS X, BSD, or OpenSolaris, they're going to run into the same problem. We do each of those using things like FUSE, not for any technical reason, but to avoid licensing problems.

The only way to avoid reinventing the wheel is to follow sqlite's example, and go public domain -- or to define "proprietary" as "not using the GPL", which is just stupid.

Re:Hello Moto

[gbjbaanb]

I used to be with you here - public domain licences are better than the GPL (and to an extent I still think that, be altruistic and give your code away under a BSD licence is the ultimate is philanthropy), however, the GPL does have an important part to play in opening up software to the world in general. I think that, because the GPL mandates the subsequent free-ness of derived works, its asking for a kind of payment for using the code licenced under it. Obviously you don't have to pay that 'fee', but if you do, the cost to you (of re-using someone else's hard work) is to be similarly generous.

If everyone released code under the GPL, all we'd have to do is find different ways of being remunerated for it (probably in support and maintenance licences, which is where my company, a software house, make most of our money anyway), but the benefit of being able to use lots and lots of library and other code makes that an attractive proposition in itself.

We write a lot of code for windows, and I know if it wasn't for Microsoft producing a lot of libraries and frameworks, Windows wouldn't be nearly as attractive a development platform as it is. The GPL is nature's way of making Linux similarly attractive.

Re:Hello Moto

[ceoyoyo]

If you want to release your code under the GPL, great, thank you very much. If you want to release your code under a commercial license, or not release it at all, I also support that decision.

Allowing a GPL option for QT was great for the open source community. However, since QT is a library, the LGPL is a very good choice now that the owner of QT doesn't need the income from selling commercial licenses, and has an interest in having the library used more extensively. It's a good move on Nokia's part.

QT gets all the benefits of the open source community development, but is now also compatible with small closed source development that can't afford an expensive commercial license.

Re:Hello Moto

[CarpetShark]

Stallman is a member of a Jewish political movement

You mean... The Judean People's Front?

Re:Hello Moto

[mweather]

Use != distribution. That's not hair splitting.

Re:Hello Moto

[Kamots]

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.

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?

Re:Hello Moto

[ShieldW0lf]

The whole point of the GPL is to strengthen those who are materially sharing your ideals while diminishing those who are materially acting against them.

What kind of flawed logic is this? This isn't a game-of-life board, you know. There's nothing "the GPL" can do to "diminish those" who don't adopt it.

How bizarre that the same ontological mistake is made again and again: code is confused with living, thinking, entities (i.e., humans).

It's no different than if I believed that guns should be used for self-defense, and only for self defense, and so I gave away free guns with the restriction that only those not convicted of murder were permitted to use them. Assume for arguments sake that I'm able to enforce this.

Now, all those people who want a gun for self defense will no longer pay arms dealers for the guns. Instead, they will take them free from me.

Now, the arms dealers have a dramatic drop in volume of sales, because only those who are interested in murder and aggression will be buying from them. Maybe 2/3rd of the arms dealers go out of business, and the per unit cost of the guns goes up dramatically.

This scenario strengthens those who agree with me. Some have more economic power in their pocket because they saved money, others have a gun for self defense even though they have no money at all.

But it also weakens those who disagree with me. Indiscriminate arms dealers find it harder to make a profit, and murderers pay more for their guns, leaving them with less economic power in their pocket. Some of them no longer can afford one.

This is how the GPL works. In the general sense, it destroys economic value by destroying scarcity and creating plenty, but it also increases scarcity for those who refuse to be bound by its covenants.

Oh, and with regards to your ontological comments, stop being such an idiot. If I run you down with my car, and someone says "He was killed by a speeding car.", it's not a false statement, and it's not implying that the car is alive. Get your head out of your ass.

Re:Hello Moto

[EQ]

Splitter!

Re:Hello Moto

[osu-neko]

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.

Re:Hello Moto

[Haeleth]

The GPL is a true quid pro quo. It says "I will give you my code if you give me yours."

"Give back your changes to my code", on the other hand, is an unequal bargain. You can't realistically claim that a handful of bug fixes are of equal value to an entire library.

You don't have to like the GPL, but please stop spreading FUD. There is nothing "immoral" about a license that merely requires repayment in kind.

Re:Hello Moto

[WNight]

How is it not immoral to build a product you know is going to be sold with a EULA that purports to make it illegal to look disassemble, run on the OS of your choice, modify, etc...

That's pretty much trying to steal from the user, take their money and not give them what they expect from a sale.

Very little commercial software actually provides an honest product (no false disclaimers of liability, no exclusions of normal usage, etc). Not none, but certainly nothing that comes with a post-sale contract. Nothing that disclaims any actual use, and all liability.

Re:Hello Moto

[Brandybuck]

No, your app is not a derivative work of the library. GNU does not have the authority to rewrite copyright law. Just because they say it's a derivative work does not make it so. Unfortunately, GNU probably has a bigger legal team than you do. Winning in court is not about who is right, but whose lawyers are bigger.

Re:Hello Moto

[lgw]

The only safe work around for the GPL IMO (IANAL OMGWTFBBQ) if to *not* distribute anything GPLd. Distribute your code with a readme that directs the user where to get the GPL code. Even that makes me nervous.

I *really* like the Boost license

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person or organization obtaining a copy of the software and accompanying documentation covered by this license (the "Software") to use, reproduce, display, distribute, execute, and transmit the Software, and to prepare derivative works of the Software, and to permit third-parties to whom the Software is furnished to do so, all subject to the following:

The copyright notices in the Software and this entire statement, including the above license grant, this restriction and the following disclaimer, must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and all derivative works of the Software, unless such copies or derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor.

[warranty disclaimer snipped]

That's the entire license. The Boost team hired a lawyer to write this in such a way as to be calming and soothing to other lawyers. If you don't distribute your own source, you don't have to distribute the Boost source - simple as it gets.

Re:Hello Moto

[Draek]

The willingness to contribute code to a common repository must come about out of a rational choice. Because it's advantageous for me and for you. That's how cooperation comes about - when mutual interests are served.

Exactly. Hence the GPL, it specifies what is an acceptable exchange for the original developer to give up control of his work, in this case the code of all derivative works. Don't think it's enough of an advantage to you, then don't use it, you're perfectly free to do so.

The claims that someone who doesn't contribute to an open source project with a business-friendly license would have done so under the GPL are not provable.

But based on the ratio between contributors to GPL'ed projects and to BSD'ed projects, we can deduce a rough ratio. And things *don't* look good for your argument, from what I've seen.

hat's because the GPL as used in Linux regards the production of software by firms that sell per-seat licenses (Red Hat), or, in fact, hardware manufacturers that use Linux for their own reasons, such as competing with other Unices (e.g., putting Sun Microsystems out of business).

So in other words, they use Linux and promote it because it's advantageous for them to do so?. Fuck, remove your dumb "OMG the GPL is a religion with RMS at the head!" comments, and you'd make a great argument *for* the GPL.

Re:Hello Moto

[aweraw]

It attempts to force ideological conformity.

Only in the sense that you're being forced to incorporate GPL code into your project.

Re:Hello Moto

[aweraw]

Under their definitions of "use" and distribute

Their definition - where 'their' is the person licensing the code. Just because they are words which can be used in contexts different from those implied by the licenser, doesn't mean that they are incorrect definitions. In the context of the GPL, they are the correct definitions.

The GPL says that the same terms must also infect any code that links to it. Hence the immoral aspect of it and why I advocate against it.

It's not immoral, because no one is forcing you into that position. You have to willingly submit to the terms in order to be bound by them... i.e. no one is forcing you to distribute code under the GPL, unless you take their GPL'd code and willingly incorporate it into your own.

By your logic, any consensual act you don't like the ramifications of is immoral...

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!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:time to port gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

GTK+ is object oriented C. (Yes - object oriented C.) It relies on a ton of crazy libraries to work. It's only cross-platform if you mean "Windows and Linux" and even there "cross-platform" is a giant stretch.

Versus Qt, which is C++, has a much cleaner set of interfaces, and is really "cross-platform" on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

The only reason I ever used GTK+ over Qt was due to licensing concerns. (And not just for closed software, also due to GPL/Apache licensing incompatibilities.)

So, yes, Qt is much better documented and much cleaner than GTK+.

Re:time to port gnome!

[puetzk]

Qt Designer is part of the core package, and is excellent.

Re:time to port gnome!

[AlXtreme]

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.

The argument was primarily a licensing one: LGPL versus GPL. Going for GTK+ because it was LGPL wasn't a weak argument.

With both QT and GTK+ being LGPL, the argument will be about toolkit quality, third-party support and language experience (C++ versus C). This is a much more useful comparison, and as a developer well-versed in GTK+ I'm looking forward to using both.

From QT4.5 onwards, the best tool for the job wins. Thanks Nokia!

Re:time to port gnome!

[vurian]

Actually, thanks to http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/license-gpl-exceptions.html, there were no licensing incompatibilities with Qt and the Apache license.

Re:time to port gnome!

[robot_love]

I second this. It takes a bit of time to learn to use Qt Designer, but it saved my hours in the long run. And it's not really that hard.

Re:time to port gnome!

[betterunixthanunix]

Qt has a better set of widgets, at least for some applications. I have a friend who works for a major financial services company, which standardized on GTK only to discover that certain table related widgets were just not available, but were available in Qt.

I am told, though I have not tried it, that it is harder to develop multithreaded programs in GTK than in Qt. This matters a lot more than people like to think; how many times have you seen a UI not getting updated because of some background operation, and then had some uninformed user think that the program was freezing or crashing?

Finally, while both are object oriented, GTK is written entirely in C. Object oriented programming in C is pretty harsh, and the only other option you really have is to use the Python binding, which introduces a whole new set of issues. Qt is a C++ toolkit, which makes for much cleaner code when it comes to object orientedness. They did extend C++ somewhat with MOC, but that just introduces some new keywords that fit in very well with the general structure of C++.

Re:time to port gnome!

[IceFox]

Should be out before summer, on #qt people are saying March.

Re:time to port gnome!

[Cthefuture]

There is also now Qt Creator which show some promise as a cross-platform IDE.

Re:time to port gnome!

[wild_berry]

Qt Creator is the official Qt IDE. But don't overlook KDevelop, which provides great autocomplete and semantic tools for your program code, if you're going to go a bit further than Qt 4.4 and use some of the KDE4 libs.

Re:time to port gnome!

[washort]

"Not using C++" is still an argument for GTK.

Re:time to port gnome!

[SpinyNorman]

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.

Re:time to port gnome!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Presumably your "arguments" don't include the vast developer and language support for Gtk?

Also we're using and compiling Gtk on Windows just fine. It even has nice native look and feel.

Re:time to port gnome!

[pembo13]

Gtk is mostly a widget toolkit. You get a lot more with Qt. And I find Qt Designer to be much more thorough than Glade.

Re:time to port gnome!

[jbolden]

If I recall, Gnome was created because people didn't feel the Qt/KDE license was "Free" enough.

It wasn't that. It was that the Q public license was incompatible with the GPL. QT was Q public and KDE was GPL. KDE is clearly a derived work of the Q public license. That means as far as Debian legal was concerned redistribution of KDE was a license violation.

TrollTech handled this by licensing QT under the GPL (they actually first went through the QPL but that didn't solve the problem). That fixed the legal problems but it meant that any and KDE app had to be GPLed because the userspace exemption (as per Linux kernel) wasn't there. Now KDElib is LGPL which means with QT being LGPL you don't uneed the exemption.

Re:time to port gnome!

[SpinyNorman]

Just to clarify for anyone new to Qt...

Qt Designer and Qt Creator are two entirely different things.

Qt Designed is drag-n-drop interactive GUI design tool that lets you design the GUI portion if aplication windows, dialogs, etc without coding. You just drag widgets and layout managers off a menu and drop them into the interface your building. It's an awesome tool. Your interface gets saved as a ".ui" file from which Qt automatically generates the corresponding C++ code as clean C++ classes. To add callback/etc behavior, or to further customize the GUI, you just subclass the generated classes and take it from there. It's done very well so that almost always you can further change the user interface using Qt Designer without affecting the subclasses you've added. Qt Designer has been there since early on and just keeps getting better and more powerful.

Qt also includes a tool "qmake" that makes building Qt apps ridiculously easy - qmake takes a high level ".pro" file that lists the various types of file making up your project (source files, header files, Qt designer .ui files, resource files, etc) and what type of target you're building (application, DLL, etc), and from the .pro file generates a Makefile that you then run using your normal make program (e.g. GNU make, or mingw32-make under MinGW).

Qt Creator is an IDE for development of Qt based applications, and seems to deliver the expected functionality of an IDE. It's pretty much brand new, and I havn't personally used it (nor intend to since I don't find IDEs to help my productivity).

Re:time to port gnome!

[Enderandrew]

Thanks for the clarification. I recall reading that years back, but I didn't recall the specifics.

GTK wasn't designed to power a full desktop platform originally. Gnome is at a crossroads where they either completely rewrite GTK, they bandage it while trying to preserve some compatibility, or they consider a move to Qt.

The single largest objection I hear from Gnome devs about Qt isn't that Qt isn't a good toolkit, but rather that they prefer to code in C. Color me ignorant, but aren't there language bindings that allow you to use Qt in C?

I'd really love to see a proof-of-concept simple app like GEdit converted to Qt, but I assume that would also mean porting the Gnome libs to Qt first.

Re:time to port gnome!

[Hairy Heron]

How about people who don't want to use that monstrosity of a Frankenstein language known as c++ and prefer to program in c instead?

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.

Re:time to port gnome!

[Abreu]

The Linux kernel has flourished without any real competitors for while now...

Re:time to port gnome!

[Jeremi]

All in all you have to understand pretty much everything about the Qt loop engine to do multithreaded Qt programming.

Not really, no. What you have to understand is that unless the Qt documentation explicitly says otherwise, the Qt GUI APIs are off-limits to your non-main threads. But most of the time your non-main threads are there to do non-GUI background tasks anyway, so that usually isn't as big a problem as you might think.

Re:time to port gnome!

[RiotingPacifist]

Last time i checked kubuntu still had 30% of ubuntus users (or 40% if you want to play numbers) but it is poorly maintained.

Re:time to port gnome!

[swillden]

C++ is perhaps better than object oriented C, but it is generally much much easier to use a C library from some other language than a C++ library

That's not really relevant, since there are Qt bindings for all of the major languages, including Java, Python, C, Ruby, Perl -- even Haskell.

if it is possible to use C++ at all

Wherever it's possible to use C libraries, it's possible to use C++ libraries. If nothing else, you can always just wrap the C++ code in C code and call that, but it's usually not that bad.

More..

[Thyamine]

FYI: This article needs more acronyms. STAT. ASAP.

Ars Technica report

[Eukariote]

Ars Technica has a good report on this development: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html

Re:Ars Technica report

[spitzak]

The main problem is that the LGPL forces you to use Qt as a shared library if your program is closed-source. You cannot statically link with it as this violates the LGPL (technically it requires that end users have some method of relinking with a new version of the LGPL code, but the only practical solution is a shared library, as object files make your distribution twice as big and makes reverse-engineering your program a lot easier).

This is a problem for commercial developers who want to distribute a program to machines that don't have Qt installed.

It also is a problem for developers that want to modify Qt as they have to figure out how to make it call their own version and not cause DLL hell.

Re:Ars Technica report

[spitzak]

Replying to myself:

Personally I think the LGPL is not doing what it was intended to do, because when it was written they were thinking only about libc and not libraries that might not be included with the operating system.

Static linking should be allowed. The requirement that should be enforced is that if you modify the code in the LGPL library itself, you have to distribute the modifications. The rules are a bit more complicated so that you are not allowed to modify it to call a pointer that is set to point at a secret implementation, and other tricks.

The LGPL requirement for shared libraries is actually a big hindrance to complex libraries. It pretty much requires the binary api to be frozen. As anybody who has tried to write anything that complicated knows, that is quite impossible.

The other popular solution is to add a "linking exception" to the GPL/LGPL. Something called Classpath has the most popular wording. This pretty much makes the LGPL work like most people expect. One problem with this is that the "linking exception" completely hides all the differences between the GPL and LGPL (ie the result is exactly the same if you add the linking exception to either one). But without the name "LGPL" people don't think they can use the code in closed source. I think it would help a lot if GNU would standardize the wording of the "linking exception" and make it commonly known, so that people who see "GPL+linking exception" would know that it is even more useful than LGPL.

It's official...

[sznupi]

...no reason for Gnome to exist anymore! ;)

Re:It's official...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I hope I am) but since KDE and it's libraries is based on the GPL'ed version of QT, it is itself GPL'ed, which means that you need to GPL your code is you want your app to integrate with KDE..????????

The KDE libraries have always been LGPL.
Read http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Policies/Licensing_Policy for details.

Re:It's official...

[Tatsh]

...no reason for Gnome to exist anymore! ;)

KDE is Qt-based but with a lot of CRAP added on top, just for desktop integration reasons, much like GNOME on top of GTK+. I do not need GNOME to run many GNOME apps; this is not so much the case with KDE (at least with version 3).

I love Qt 4 by itself. It's stylish, looks good on Windows and Mac, very portable and a VERY easy API IMO. (Only thing I do not like very much is C++.)

My problem with desktop environments (which is the problem interoperability is SUPPOSED to solve) is there is barely any. You might be able to IMPORT settings from one desktop email app to another's (say they both use MBOX format). I found that KMail imports Thunderbird MBOX files terribly. Besides, if you have Kaffeine for a media player, how do you import those settings to another? Do we need standards here too (a standard settings file for media players)? (Personally I think it is a bit over the line, but could be very useful). Maybe a whole set of standard preferences files?

Right now I cannot move to KDE 4 or GNOME. I am a little bit stuck on KDE 3 (at least till KDE 4 can do everything correctly) and my life is in Kontact. I love KDE, but the ability to switch at any time with ease would be great.

Let Joy Be Unconfined

[netpixie]

Whilst being very good at code and generally geekery, Trolltech are total rubbish at the support game, leaving paying developers (i.e. me a few years ago) feeling massively shafted when being told "here's the code, fix it yourself". WTF am I paying for If I have to not only find your bugs, but fix them as well?

Now everything is back as it should be - free code and no support, the way God intended.

Re:Let Joy Be Unconfined

[DrinkDr.Pepper]

Trolltech are total rubbish at the support game

As a commercial licensee, I've found Trolltech's support to be very good. Actually, they are one of the best I've dealt with.

So which is better "free code and no support"; free code and expensive support; or no code and no support (e.g. the way MS does it)?

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.

Wierd...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not every day that a cross-platform GUI framework suddenly turns into (becomes) a licence...

Large uptick in Qt usage?

[Mad Merlin]

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.

Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?

[GooberToo]

The only complaint I've seen before about Qt is that it's too expensive for proprietary apps

Then you've not been listening. Many don't like the noteworthy long start up times of Qt apps compared to say Gtk. Many don't like the need for obtuse tools like SIP. I know for a while they were working to address the long start up times I've not followed where that went. Perhaps it's no longer an issue.

Frankly, the API of Qt make Gtk look like a pile of vomit, but simple fact is, Qt is not the perfect GUI programming environment.

Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?

[vurian]

Nothing human is perfect. However, having used GTK, wxWidgets, XForms, V, Motif, MFC, Borland VCL, Visual Basic, Swing, AWT, GNUStep and Qt, I have to say that Qt beats the others consistently in look & feel, ease of development, clarity of documentation, orthogonality of API and breadth of features. Not to mention cross-platformity :-) Plus, the tools, like Designer, Linguist, Creator and Assistant are top-notch.

Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?

[arendjr]

Then you've not been listening. Many don't like the noteworthy long start up times of Qt apps compared to say Gtk.

Long start-up times have been fixed ever since Qt4 was released quite a while ago.

Many don't like the need for obtuse tools like SIP.

I've never used SIP myself, but it's that tool for generating bindings for other languages, right? So that's only required if you're generating your own bindings. And even then I fail to see how that's worse than writing the bindings by hand...

Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?

[IceFox]

On the startup issue I think it was many times applications and not Qt that were slow. For Arora ( http://arora-browser.org/) I spent time making it startup very quick. I wanted to be able to launch the browser from nothing whenever I clicked on a link. Feel free to check it out yourself and see how fast startup can be. Qt 4.5 has improved performance across the board and no doubt some of that will help on startup also.

Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?

[radtea]

GTK, wxWidgets, XForms, V, Motif, MFC, Borland VCL, Visual Basic, Swing, AWT, GNUStep and Qt,

I've used most of those, although NEXTStep rather than GNUStep. I used Qt very heavily in the late 90's and early 2000's, but moved to wxWidgets a few years ago, in part due to Qt's licensing costs, and now never plan to go back.

I've found wx easy to use, well-documented, well-supported across platforms and languages (using wxPython heavily at the moment as well as C++) and generally lighter weight than Qt.

The things wx "lacks" are things that I don't need and don't want anyway, like a nice GUI builder--although arguably BOAConstructor fits the bill for wxPython, and I guess maybe DialogBlocks for C++. I use code generators for all my UI coding, which gives me far more flexible and robust layouts much more rapidly than a GUI builder can.

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:It's not great news for everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...I think Nokia, who now owns Trolltech, will be paying their bills.

Wow, great news

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wow, great news

[sucker_muts]

You could start with making a Qt version of The GIMP.

A lot of people don't know this, but GTK stands for 'The GIMP Toolkit', and Gnome used this toolkit. Not the other way around! :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gtk

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Die Gnome

[kenp2002]

Perhaps now we can finally get enough momentum to end this Gnome\KDE battle and get KDE to win so we can settle on ONE desktop environment so we can get back to writing 40 different window managers.

QT + KDE = 1 Desktop Standard Linux (hell even Windows) folk can get behind.

Gnome + KDE = Goblin Desktop (You can thank me for coming up with that name

Merge the teams, move forward with KDE and lets get Linux on the desktop in earnest.

Re:Die Gnome

[LWATCDR]

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 :)

Excellent news!

[apodyopsis]

Excellent news!

And a sensible move - the best way for any technology to become a standard (defacto or otherwise) is for it to be freely available and demonstrably good.

Now this is both we can predict swift adoption of it. Some firms may view Linux as a hobby, but even that is changing - my new job I started last week has two Ubuntu PCs in this very room I am typing from.

Re:Excellent news!

[urbanRealist]

Some firms may view Linux as a hobby

I am working on a Qt application right now. Previously, we planned to release only for Windows since each additional platform cost extra in licensing fees. Now, we can support Linux and OS X as well.

Strategy fail

[betterunixthanunix]

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).

Re:Strategy fail

[siride]

What? Within a desktop, everything is more or less consistent. Yes, there is some inconsistency *between* desktops, but if you avoid using programs from another desktop, it's not a problem. Also, there are themes that make the apps look the same, and the copy/paste problems were solved years ago. Honestly, I have no trouble using mixed apps on the same desktop.

Re:Strategy fail

[betterunixthanunix]

"if you avoid using programs from another desktop"

Which is just not possible. Where is the CD burning program in GNOME that beats K3B? Where is the music player that beats Amarok? In the other direction, where is the office suite that beats OpenOffice.org? You cannot avoid mixing GTK and Qt apps on a desktop without hurting yourself.

"Honestly, I have no trouble using mixed apps on the same desktop."

Just three days ago at FUDCon, I saw someone try to use KGPG on their GNOME desktop. He had localized GNOME in Dutch, and when KGPG pops up...everything was in English. The localization settings are stored in different places, which is a problem that goes beyond "installing themes to make it look the same." There is also the failure to have OLE across Qt and GTK, which has so far only been solved by disparate hacks in specific applications, and only works for certain cases. The copy and paste problems being solved was a good thing, but that is only one of many issues that arise from mixing GTK and Qt apps on a single system.

Re:Strategy fail

[jbolden]

People who are picky enough to care about which text editor and which IRC client can handle the notion of different apps using different structures where integration is important. For example on a Mac I use TextEdit when I want integration and VI when I want features.

Re:Strategy fail

[buchner.johannes]

That is the chance and duty of freedesktop.org. Combining the parts that are common and the platforms can agree upon. Defining the standards (like trash, cache, drag+drop, etc.).
It is getting better and better (e.g. I think KDE+GNOME both use DBUS now? ), some services/libs (NetworkManager) are already commonly used.
What I'd really like to see is a common password storage.

Re:Strategy fail

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

What I'd like to see is a decoupling of basic stuff like dialogs from the toolkit.

the idea is that filechoosers, print dialogs and other stuff like that should be separate applications, that comunicates with the calling app using a standard way, adopted by all.

this way GTK, QT, GNUStep, etc. apps. all would have _AT LEAST_ those items in common. that'll make the user able to use muscular memory to use those elements no matter wich toolkit was used to build the app, something that we don't have right now.

Re:Strategy fail

[should_be_linear]

There is possibility that major GUI appications will move gradually towards managed code (Java) so QT + GTK would become only sort of low-level windowing library sitting between X and Java apps. Major IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans) are proof-of-a-concept, except startup times issue, which certainly should be addressed by Sun VM. I would welcome such transision but it will not happen in next 5 years, thats for sure. There are just too many C/C++ apps in Linux to rewrite and some of them (Office, Browser) are really complex.

Re:Strategy fail

[Per Wigren]

AFAIK it's only using GTK to graphically draw the widgets, not to do layout or things like that.

Re:Strategy fail

[simcop2387]

a properly configured distro using gtk-qt (or qgtkstyle if you use gnome) doesn't have the problem of things looking different, as far as different configurations i agree completely. As for the l10n and i18n i don't believe that matters at all as there isn't a standard for any other platform as far as i know (i could be wrong about OSX)

Re:Strategy fail

[betterunixthanunix]

It has nothing to do with packaging. He had the Dutch i18n packages installed, but the package manager does not (and should not) go into a user's home directory and start messing with their settings. The problem was that after setting his l10n in GNOME, the change is not reflected for KDE/Qt; the original system install was in the US-en locale, he made the change afterward, which is not uncommon.

Re:Strategy fail

[Tubal-Cain]

What I'd really like to see is a common password storage.

It's called a .txt file. In the ~/.secretstuff/ directory.

Re:Strategy fail

[pieleric]

Which is just not possible. Where is the CD burning program in GNOME that beats K3B?

Brasero, it's there now. I was honestly a fan of K3B, but version 0.9 of Brasero is great. It looks like it has as many features as K3B, but everything is damn simple and clear.

Where is the music player that beats Amarok?

Unfortunately neither Banshee nor Rhythmbox can beat this one. Hopefully, competition will push them to become better!

Re:Strategy fail

[Bob54321]

Where is the music player that beats Amarok?

Unfortunately neither Banshee nor Rhythmbox can beat this one. Hopefully, competition will push them to become better!

Exaile? Maybe not now Amarok2 is out.

Re:Strategy fail

[g2devi]

> Which is just not possible. Where is the CD burning program in GNOME that beats K3B? Where is the music player that beats Amarok? In the
> other direction, where is the office suite that beats OpenOffice.org? You cannot avoid mixing GTK and Qt apps on a desktop without hurting
> yourself.

This is the key difference for the desktop split. Why do you mean by "beat"?
If you want a no-nonsense desktop and desktop apps that allows you to do your work without getting in your way, then GNOME and GNOME apps beat KDE and KDE apps. Personally, I can't stand either K3B and Amarok.
If you want a pimped up desktop and desktop apps that allow you to do anything you want, then KDE and KDE apps beat GNOME and GNOME apps.

If one or another need dominates, except for one area, then you have a mix.

I personally have a pure desktop...not out of ideology, but simply because GNOME and GNOME apps works better for me. I'm sure plenty of KDE lovers have a pure KDE desktop for the same reason.

If, for some reason, GNOME decided to migrate to Qt (theoretically, it is possible if GNOME 3.0 moves to be more IDL driven and Qt components could be modified to support any missing feature that GNOME needed), GNOME and GNOME apps would still exist separate from KDE and KDE apps simply because GNOME users and KDE users are different.

Re:I'm not a copyright lawyer

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone summarise the difference between the LGPL and the GPL? Thanks.

LGPL allows closed-source programs to link with the library in question.

Re:I'm not a copyright lawyer

[Constantine XVI]

If you have a piece of GPL code in your program, all of the program must be GPL. LGPL only applies to the LGPL code and any changes you make to it (your original code can be under any license)

Way to go, Nokia!

[Dexter77]

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.

PyQt?

[robot_love]

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.

Finally!

[Aladrin]

I considered QT when I was looking for a good GUI for an open source project I was considering, but ended up rejecting it on licensing agreements. It has actually gotten better licensing twice since then, and now I would actually choose it.

That project, sadly, never happened because I never found a GUI toolkit I thought would do what I needed. How many other projects were similarly stalled like this?

This is indeed good news.

Re:A GUI for MySQL?

[hobbit]

At last! Qt has gone LGPL! The final obstacle to our creating a front-end for MySQL has been removed!

What on earth are you talking about?

KDE is a perfect cross-platform environment

[oever]

One year after Nokia bought Trolltech, they've released Qt as LGPL. This positions Qt and KDE in an excellent position for cross-platform application development for FOSS *and* commercial projects. KDE libraries were already licensed under LGPL. This means the entire stack is now LGPL.

In the mean-time, Qt Creator, an IDE for developing Qt applications, has been announced. This will be all you need to write cross-platform applications with Qt.

Qt Jambi (java bindings for Qt) will also available under LGPL. Qyoto (mono bindings) and the other bindings (Perl, Python, Ruby) will be able to make releases under LGPL now.

These are exciting times!

Re:KDE is a perfect cross-platform environment

[Enderandrew]

Yet when Nokia purchased the Trolls people insisted they would try to close up Qt and fight FOSS. Nokia did oppose open formats in HTML 5 for some crazy reason, but maybe Nokia isn't so evil after all.

That would be a disaster

[WindBourne]

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).

Re:That would be a disaster

[stilborne]

"The desktop should absolutely be configurable to the point where it could look like either GNOME or KDE"

that desktop is called "plasma". we'll be introducing layout switching for plasma in kde 4.3 letting you change between (or add to existing) layouts with the click of a button. you can already swap things about by hand, since the support for this was built into the design from the start, but making that part of the machine user accessible is kde 4.3 material.

plasma itself has no assumptions (or, really, knowledge) about what "must" be there. you can have 0, 1, 2, or N panels; any number of desktop activity layouts; even per-virtual-desktop layouts (experimental feature in 4.2; we hope to iron out the wrinkles and then expose it in the UI for 4.3) ..

so .. yes. we're going there. =)

Re:It's good news, but is it too late?

[ardor]

Qt beats wxWidgets by a wide margin. The API is much cleaner, documentation is a lot better, and wxWidgets has nothing like QGraphicsView (actually, *no* toolkit out there has anything like this).

You are right that Qt uses very umm... baroque C++, but the fact is that it is a very good toolkit, the best opensource one out there. Using new features don't guarantee a top result, and vice versa.

No copyright assignent

[dfdashh]

From arstechnica:

To further reduce the barrier to participation, Nokia plans to accept code from contributors without requiring copyright assignment.

If they do what this article suggests they will, this is a big step towards better code and community involvement. Go Qt, go!

Jump onboard Firefox and Adobe!

[bogaboga]

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.

Re:Jump onboard Firefox and Adobe!

[pak9rabid]

XMAS comes early, my friend.

Re:Jump onboard Firefox and Adobe!

[bjkinney]

I was thinking the same thing. While Konqueror is a nice browser I could never replace Firefox with it.

There is a QT port of Firefox but when I tried it it was still in the very early development stages and was unusable.

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:Very nice! It's death of RIA!

[Yosho]

Um, wxWidgets has been around for many years, and it can be used to write decent-looking GUIs for OS X, Windows, Linux, and many more operating systems.

While I think Qt's API is a bit nicer, it was already pretty easy to make cross-platform GUIs.

Re:Yeah but KDE doesn't work.

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

Try comparing KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.2... no, seriously, if you liked KDE, give it another try. KDE has come a long way from 4.0 to 4.2. Many things are much more polished and the whole experience is now very nice (obviously, YMMV). The only thing I am still missing is the printing infrastructure of KDE 3.5.

GTK is not the target...

[Saint Fnordius]

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.

Re:Yeah but KDE doesn't work.

[bmcage]

Over my dead body. I can't stand KDE 4.0.

Can you send us your address?

I wonder if you ever had to develop new widgets based on GTK ... This post should get developers quite excited.

Let's hope both GNOME and KDE lives on...

[jopsen]

It's great that Qt becomes LGPL, but it doesn't mean that we should stop developing GNOME and GTK...
Seriously there's lots of business that depends on GNOME and/or GTK, and lots of reasons to keep them alive...
Competition among desktop environments is good and having two large desktop environments if probably a good idea... As it drives competition and innovation.

Re:Constrained by the LGPL?

[otis wildflower]

Presumably, if folks want to make changes to the libraries themselves, they'd need to make those changes public when redistributing the binaries.. Sort of defeats the purpose if you ask me, but I'm sure there's potential customers who would demand commercial licenses for dopey legal reasons, and perhaps they'll only offer support on the non-LGPL?

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?

We all know why GNOME is ill

[Improv]

It caught Mono through an ill-considered tryst with Miguel ;)

Re:Yeah but KDE doesn't work.

[tjstork]

Screwed up kernel... BTW, what distro are you running, and what version of KDE 4.x did you run?

I am running Ubuntu Hardy Heron with nVidia drivers. The problem was the KDE, and I think it was 4.0, went and updated my kernel. This in turn hosed my nVidia drivers for some god aweful reason and brought down my whole desktop.

I used to use OpenSuse before Ubuntu and that was where I really liked KDE the best. It was nice because under OpenSuse you could switch between KDE and Gnome quite effortlessly and this has never really worked under Ubuntu. However, there's a lot that I do like about Ubuntu, in particular, the whole package management system is out of this world good compared to OpenSUSE when I used it, and honestly, I think Gnome desktop just looks a lot more polished even though KDE has a lot of features to it.

Nokia did not purchasee Trolltech for reselling Qt

[Khopesh]

Nokia never insisted anything of the sort.

While they may have opposed the HTML 5 standard, their opposition is based upon their relationship with Webkit (recall that Nokia is one of the big players backing Webkit ... in addition to the fact that Qt now bundles a derivative of it).

When Nokia purchased Trolltech, they promised not to change much. That's the opposite of what you just claimed. Those of us heavily entrenched in the Qt world knew that there was likely to be a shift in priorities ... the profitability of Trolltech was measured in digits that were not significant to a massive company like Nokia.

They bought Trolltech for the IP rights on the phone operating system Qtopia (now Qt Extended) because it enabled them to get back into the smartphone game (which they've been losing to Apple, RIM, and soon Google). The purchase was not for direct Qt profitability.

Disclaimer: I work for the biggest Qt shop in North America, www.ics.com (and we're already under heavy load, so that link is cached).

Re:Nokia did not purchasee Trolltech for reselling

[Enderandrew]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5#Ogg_controversy

I realize that Nokia bought Trolltech for Qtopia. Nokia is now trying to push a mobile GTK platform while owning the Qt platform. I did think it was a really smart move to give Nokia n810 tablets to KDE devs. Then the KDE devs worked on getting KDE 4 to work on the n810. Nokia could easily ship a full KDE 4 based desktop on future smart phones and tablets.

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:I'm not a copyright lawyer

[torstenvl]

Totally wrong. You didn't read the link.

What the FSF means by "compatible" is that you can include BSD code in GPL projects. However, you CANNOT include GPL code in BSD-licensed projects. My comment stands.

meanwhile

[Lord Ender]

Rich Internet Application platforms, like Adobe Flex, are making it easier to get rid of client-side GUI libraries entirely.

Have a browser? Most apps can be done in AJAX, the remaining apps can be done in Flex. Why use GTK or QT?

Re:meanwhile

[Microlith]

Whoops, your server just died.

There's plenty of reasons to use GTK and QT, including pretty much every app that has no need for internet access (and some that are using it, but really shouldn't be.)

Never mind the hefty CPU load that AJAX apps can put on a system. Needlessly inefficient, even if we do have dual- and quad-core machines.

How would *you* know?

[Mathinker]

> You'd be the first I've seen. Kopete is terrible.

How would you know?

You should put a bit more effort into making your trolling consistent, no?

Re:How would *you* know?

[Vexorian]

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"

Re:How would *you* know?

[Mathinker]

> "Troll" is not a synonym for "disagrees with me and therefore is bad".

I totally agree with that. "Troll" like everything else is a judgment call. You came across like a troll. See Vexorian's post for more explanation.

Personally, I didn't judge you a troll for the "I don't use Linux" post; in fact, I have no problem with people for whom Linux doesn't cut it and I am very aware of some of the reasons which might cause that.

The "Kopete is terrible" post by itself also didn't bring you over my threshold, but the combination of the two passed the threshold.

One of the big differences between the FOSS world and Windows / MacOS is the rate at which applications can evolve feature-wise and interface-wise. For some, this is great, for others, a catastrophe. This makes me doubt that anyone who uses Windows (and I assumed Windows without FOSS, given the complaint of your post: "integration") as their primary computing platform would be able to properly pass judgment on any particular FOSS application.

Next time, qualify with "Last time I tried Linux, in Monthname Yearnumber, Kopete was terrible. " and you will be much less likely to be judged a troll.

Re:Kills any idea of using Qt in our products

[oever]

Qt requires people that contribute to give them a permissive license. That is good enough for inclusion of the code in the commercial version.

Weird license restriction:

[Futurepower(R)]

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?

QT vs iPhone SDK vs Android SDK

[EmperorOfCanada]

This all boils down to Nokia having to compete with the other key smartphone SDKs basically being free and popular. If lots of people learn to love QT for the various computer OSs then they will then have the skills ready for Nokia development. But corporate development just doesn't sit well with GPL so the LGPL is the only real option. If anything this might be a huge win. The iPhone makes you use at least some Objective C and Android gets all Java on your ass. But for really cool killer apps you might want to use C++ to do something really cool on the tiny processors found in most handsets. What would be really cool and daring for Nokia would be to make QT for iPhone. Then people might port their apps to both iPhone and Nokia.

Re:Kills any idea of using Qt in our products

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your company has a very silly policy.

At first glance, it sounds that way, but we have to be careful because we don't know all the details. I've seen companies rejecting all sorts of external software based on apparently permissive licence agreements. One example is companies that produce libraries rather than end-user products, who can't necessarily impose any changes on their entire customer base without rewriting every contract they ever signed; this can be triggered by something as simple as a required attribution clause in the licence of a sub-library.

QT 4 bindings for Ruby

[chrysalis]

Here: https://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=181&release_id=23283

No need to stick with C++ and Java, the QT bindings for Ruby work like a charm.

Re:Kills any idea of using Qt in our products

[Tetsujin]

However, the company has a strict policy of no LGPL or GPL software. Nothing more restrictive than BSD or Apache when it comes to using free software.

Your company has a very silly policy. I've worked in quite a few places that did commercial closed-source development, and none of them had any problems with LGPL; after all, it was written precisely so that closed-source apps can use it! Why waste time re-writing the code somebody has already written before, and allowed you to use?

They may have been feeling very cautious about the possible issue of developers not only "linking with" but actually "deriving from" LGPL code...

Basically when code is open-source, but with a license restrictive enough to make the lawyers uncomfortable, there's a bit of a liability there - the developers, of course, have total freedom to read and learn from that code. But not all of them will be disciplined enough, when reading a piece of code which does exactly what they need a closed part of their app to do, to not reuse that information inappropriately.

Some would be careless enough to misinterpret the LGPL and either link it improperly or reuse it within closed portions of the code. Aggressively warning employees to avoid GPL/LGPL code is easier that teaching the proper discipline in handling it - and even if a violation didn't wind up costing them a lot of money, it does tend to raise a bit of a stink when it's discovered...

Re:KDE 4 has major UI issues

[stilborne]

"rather will use it as the desktop containment"

having actually seen packages of 4.2, i can tell you that this is incorrect. i do expect *some* distros out there to do this, however. that's sort of why we have the feature there, of course. =)

"it takes time to rewrite the entire KDE project. "

just to put this into perspective, the only full rewrite is of the desktop shell. we added a lot of new library frameworks (Phonon, Solid, ThreadWeaver, Nepomuk, etc, etc.) did a massive amount of work on the existing libraries (particularly so that libkdecore doesn't require a GUI, sorted the functionality out properly so that they aren't massive globs of semi-random class collections, etc), introduced a number of new apps (akonadi, dolphin, the new printer configuration tool, numerous games, some edu apps ..) and obviously ported everything to Qt4. massive, massive effort, but it wasn't technically a rewrite, with the exception of the desktop shell.

Re:Vala makes the creating widgets argument moot

[caseih]

Vala is hardly a failure if you examine why it exists and what is used for (and how it relates to the post I was originally answering). Well Vala is really syntactic sugar over C and the existing gobject facilities. So yes, memory management isn't going to be like C#, and it's not like C++ either, alhough C++ doesn't have a garbage detector or a cycle detector... nothing big ever gets written in C++ for those reasons. Like Qt Apps. Right. Big applications can and have been written in straight C with GTK and have done fine. Worst case, Vala just makes writing such applications easier, though you do have to manage memory yourself.

But I should have been more clear when I was promoting Vala. Vala could be used to write big apps I'm sure, but like you say with real nice languages like Python, there's really no point. However I was addressing the concern expressed that creating new widgets in GTK or even extending widgets is very painful in C. Vala is intended to address this and make it easier to develop GTK libraries and extend GTK. That's the point.

Sure if you want to compare GTK to Qt you'd be better off to compare GTKmm to Qt. But of course if you were to write widgets in GTKmm you're locked to C++ and can never offer them to other languages without a port.

Re:Vala makes the creating widgets argument moot

[stilborne]

"I wasn't necessarily saying Vala was an app development language (although it could be)."

GNOME devs are already writing full apps with it, so it is being used as such.

"If Gtk used some other language like, say, Python, with Python GTK widgets and so forth, then how would Java, C#, or even C or C++ have access to these components?"

yes, i understand that is what has driven Vala's design and implementation. i just don't agree with the "we'll wedge another home grown language in between the C and the other languages" approach. i think it's overly complicated and limits the number of people who can (and will) hack on it.

time will tell if i'm smoking crack or not, of course .. =)

"Vala isn't actually a language in the same sense as Python, C# or Java is. It's really just a syntactic extension of C and produces plain, simple, C code."

that is produces C is both a feature and a bug. it makes debugging much more awkward (and for a while wasn't even possible at all! how do you go from your generated C to your Vala code in gdb? there's a plugin now for gdb, but really .. oy vey!) and you lose all the interesting security possibilities of managed code.

"How will using Javascript help in GTK development or building custom widgets or extending GTK and its reach?"

it's simply a language that is well known. pick a different well known language if you wish. make your own runtime if you wish. certainly add your own sugar on top (see QScript for a really nice example of how that can all be done with JavaScript). there's nothing particularly magical about the Vala syntax, except that it's a new language specific to one toolkit.

which is precisely my point.

"it will be possible to extend and improve GTK to equal Qt while still maintaining the ability to use it from any language binding."

let's do this then: let's come back to this in 2-3 years (it takes time to get these things going, i know) and see if that theory works out.

my theory is that it will just be one more baroque tool that people working with Gtk will have to get their head around (and people complained about moc with Qt; they ain't seen nothing yet ;) thereby limiting the pool of candidate developers. as a non-transferable skill it won't gain much in the way of value that might cause people to learn it "just because", and yet people will write applications with it. i expect to see more and more vala usage in Gtk+/GNOME (because, well, that's already happening =) and it will cause the project to become more insular rather than less.

i do expect that those using it will get more done with vala than with plain C, but not to an extent that will make up for the number of people lost by not choosing a language syntax that is already widely known or a language that avoids compile cycles, dealing with the intricacies of C debuging, etc.

given that it's homegrown, it will also soak up resources maintaining and extending vala itself that could be put elsewhere.

combined, i expect individual efficiency of existing contributors to increase due to vala, but the overall effect on the project to be a net negative. i predict that in a few years vala will get quietly binned. bonobo 2.0 if you will: a cool idea that "just has to work, it's so well designed and advanced!" but which just didn't pan out in reality.

again, i could be wrong. and i certainly don't want to see the GNOME team falter. but vala gives me the heebie-jeebies.