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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."
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.
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
...no reason for Gnome to exist anymore! ;)
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
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.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Could someone summarise the difference between the LGPL and the GPL? Thanks.
LGPL allows closed-source programs to link with the library in question.
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.
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.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
So buy a commercial Qt license. These are still available have no GPL/LGPL in them.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
"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.
Palm trees and 8
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.
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.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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?
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.
Nick
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.