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Harmony Rides Again
MarkX writes "This morning Adam Richter announced a new CVS repository for the GNU Harmony Project. The Harmony project is an effort to creat a Qt source compatible library under the LGPL. This project was started some time ago and was disbanded when Qt went open source, but has recently been revived. The web page is back up also. The project is looking for programmers and various other help. "
The open source community insists on recasting tools and libraries while avoiding at all costs the task of building applications people want and need.
How many times can you rewrite a windowing toolkit? Stop right now and work with what you have. Its the trade off most businesses deal with to get some product, any product, off the ground.
Linux has plenty of great options without having to squander resources like this - I expect developer interest to be about zilch anyway, but thats my 2 cents.
Why is this a disadvantage? People pay significant amounts of money to MS and other providers of commercial development tools anyway.
Would you rather have large corporations just leach off free software
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
people are doing? They are giving the effort of their free time away. Why is this a problem? Why can't they do what they want?
As far as rewriting a windowing toolkit, I guess it needs to be rewritten as many times as necessary to get it right. Why is that a problem? Since "right" means different things to different people, hopefully there will multiple, differently designed, technically excellent windowing toolkits. Why is this a problem?
This is an honest question: in what way does the QPL fall short of GPL such that a GPL version of Qt is necessary?
-Eric
The ideological rivalry between KDE and GNOME
has spurred on both projects, and thus helped
the community. Of course a freer qt library
would be useful, so, if these guys want to do
that, let them.
AFAIK it's the patch issue. People complain that changes to QT must be distributed as patches.
In practice this is how open source works anyway. If somebody fixes a bug in the kernel, do the redistribute the whole kernel? NO! They send a patch to Linus and maybe others who need it right away.
I suspect the real reason is that there is still a lot of bitterness left over from the QT flamewars.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Differences:
1. When you release a patch to a QPL piece of software, you must release in patch form, GPL you can release either a patch or a who new ball-o-source. Distribution of binaries are identical.
2. If you want to link a commercial app against a QPLed library you own TT some money. If you want to do the same with the GPL, you're out of luck. That's why the LGPL exists.
3. With the QPL if you make a patch you need to send it to TT. In the GPL, GNU has to download it from your ftp archive.
Other than that, there are no differences. I prefer the QPL in some ways to the GPL. It seems a reasonable way for TT to make moeny, and help free software. I think if TT fails future libraries of its type will be released in with commercial licenses like Motif, which would suck a lot (hopefull I can expunge all Motif from my system by the time I graduate and thus don't have that whole university license thing going on). If people want to make a QT clone, that's fine. I for one won't be running to use it. It seems rather silly, but if some GPL Nazis refuse to expirience the bliss of QT without it, I guess it is necessary silliness.
Fair enuf... you don't like it don't use it.
Now... some people are working to make it completely free and settle down all the fuss about it, and that's the answer they get??? You can't tell people what to program or not, it's THEIR choice... pay them, and they may program something for you... otherwise, it's called a challange. Maybe like linux was... and I'm sure people were saying stuff like what a waste of resources, we already have windows, DOS and mimix, what's the need for yet another operating system?
The challange here is to make KDE free because it has the potential of becoming the desktop for less *nix litterate administrators...
I don't use it, but I keep an eye or two on it... And harmony's definitely the way to get KDE to become a free window manager like the rest of linux is...aren't you tickled when you hear that one of the main parts (to some people) of Linux isn't free when all the other major components of Linux are?
And just think about another thing... it doesn't really matter what you're coding, it's still a good way to attract attention on you when you're looking for a job... and surely effective!
So then again, you don't like it? don't use it.
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
I noticed that the Harmony page is being hosted by yggdrasil (Creators of the "Plug & Play Linux Distribution", which has faded away for you newbies)
I wonder if maybe yggdrasil is trying to make themselves relevant again by emulating what Red Hat did with GNOME?
What does Yggdrasil do these days anyway? From their web page, it doesn't appear they've produced a distribution since 1997.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
> Don't forget, Harmony is adding the other thing that Qt (and thus, KDE) lacks, real (widget-level) theme support
That's old. Qt 2.0 has great support for widget-level styles (or themes.. whatever). KDE 2.0 will have "plug-n-play" widget styling.
Just for kicks, I did a screenshot with my KBiff app with Qt 2.0. This is what it looks like with a MacOS (Platinum) theme:
http://home.sprintmail.com/~gran roth/kbiff-mac.jpg
"The open source community" doesn't insist on doing anything, because it has no single spokesperson, it's a bunch of individuals.
With a handful of noted exceptions who are paid for their time, open source software is developed by those who feel like it. Volunteers. Anyone who's ever had anything to do with managing volunteers knows that it's near impossible to get them to do something they don't want to do, and almost has hard to keep them from doing something they do want to do.
If software development were all centrally directed, then yes, it might make more sense to assign the folks who want to work on Harmony to working on something else. In the real world, that isn't going to happen - for them it may be Harmony or nothing, and so the most efficient allocation of resources is for them to work on whatever the hell they want to. They'll learn something from it, they'll generate code that may be useful in ways that Qt can't be, and the universe of free code will be that much larger than if they'd been "ordered" to, say, go work on a Microsoft Project clone for Linux (because they probably wouldn't have listened to those orders).
The folks who ran the former Soviet Union were no doubt convinced that a command economy was a far more efficient way to allocate resources than the chaos of free market capitalism, and at first glance it certainly appears so. But they were clearly wrong, as Adam Smith could have told them.
Maybe Harmony is a "waste" of resources, but those resources belong only to those who volunteer to be involved.
-- Alastair