Well, I recently went down to the local book store to pick up a copy of O'Reilley's Qt Programming, as I saw Qt won some award for best cross platform development tool, or whatever. Luckily for me, the book was sold out, and when I returned to my office, I went to troll tech's site only to find out that all windows versions of Qt would set me back $1000+.
Well, that kind of rules out Qt for me, as I only have NT installed at work, and would like to do some spare time development once in a while. As a matter of fact, having just moved, this is the only computer I have available right now.
And really, I wouldn't want to GPL a project that I'd need to pay $1000 to get started on, given the fact that I'm bound to this platform for now.
Anyhow, I was going to comment on your second comment up there, about allowing Windows users to use cool, free software.
I think, that from a Linux/OpenSource advocacy standpoint, allowing or making OpenSource easier and more available on Microsoft platforms does more good than harm.
The thing most people are worried about when switching from one OS to another, is the availability of applications on the new platform, at least when we're talking about people interested in desktop computing.
Having projects ported from Linux to Windows is IMHO not going to have people getting more attached to their windows platform, it's probably going to make them more ready to switch, because you free them from the attachment to Windows applications.
It's pretty hard to "convert" a windows/mac user, who uses Photoshop every day, by saying things like "But listen, Linux has The Gimp". It would be dead easy to "convert" someone by saying "But listen, Linux also has Photoshop".
But easiest, it would be to "convert" a windows user that actually uses The Gimp on Windows. What's holding him back, right?
By making GPL development using Qt free for Windows too, troll tech wouldn't only get many more developers using their toolkits, they would also benefit the Linux/OpenSource community by making applications developed for Windows (like the one I was about to start. Hell, I'll just go with ncurses and cygwin. Who cares about GUI's, right;) easier to port, and also making crossplatform development to windows easier, giving the community the advantage of having familiar applications on a new platform.
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Well, I recently went down to the local book store to pick up a copy of O'Reilley's Qt Programming, as I saw Qt won some award for best cross platform development tool, or whatever. Luckily for me, the book was sold out, and when I returned to my office, I went to troll tech's site only to find out that all windows versions of Qt would set me back $1000+.
;) easier to port, and also making crossplatform development to windows easier, giving the community the advantage of having familiar applications on a new platform.
Well, that kind of rules out Qt for me, as I only have NT installed at work, and would like to do some spare time development once in a while. As a matter of fact, having just moved, this is the only computer I have available right now.
And really, I wouldn't want to GPL a project that I'd need to pay $1000 to get started on, given the fact that I'm bound to this platform for now.
Anyhow, I was going to comment on your second comment up there, about allowing Windows users to use cool, free software.
I think, that from a Linux/OpenSource advocacy standpoint, allowing or making OpenSource easier and more available on Microsoft platforms does more good than harm.
The thing most people are worried about when switching from one OS to another, is the availability of applications on the new platform, at least when we're talking about people interested in desktop computing.
Having projects ported from Linux to Windows is IMHO not going to have people getting more attached to their windows platform, it's probably going to make them more ready to switch, because you free them from the attachment to Windows applications.
It's pretty hard to "convert" a windows/mac user, who uses Photoshop every day, by saying things like "But listen, Linux has The Gimp". It would be dead easy to "convert" someone by saying "But listen, Linux also has Photoshop".
But easiest, it would be to "convert" a windows user that actually uses The Gimp on Windows. What's holding him back, right?
By making GPL development using Qt free for Windows too, troll tech wouldn't only get many more developers using their toolkits, they would also benefit the Linux/OpenSource community by making applications developed for Windows (like the one I was about to start. Hell, I'll just go with ncurses and cygwin. Who cares about GUI's, right