Trolltech to Extend Dual-License to Qt/Windows 436
scc writes "
Trolltech announced today
that Qt 4 will be available on Windows under the GPL.
While Trolltech has long dual-licensed
Qt on X11 (Linux, various Unixes), Mac, and embedded,
Windows developers have had no options other than a commercial license."
GPL Qt for Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
Didn't someone external to Trolltech port the GPL-licenced code to Windows and licence it under the GPL? Without special clauses in the licence to prevent that, that would presumably be allowed.
Or, do the X11 and Windows versions differ so greatly that such a port is an insurmountable task?
Aha! Interoperability! (Score:2, Interesting)
Screw application heterogeneity, write once, compile thrice, and run everywhere!!!
Kindows???? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is TrollTech trolling? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Kindows???? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yea! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is TrollTech trolling? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read it as prohibiting use of even open source programs built with Qt in a commercial setting without a commercial license, which would violate the GPL. It's clear from other posters in this thread that it's prohibiting only the development of closed source software without a commercial license.
Of course, I'm not entirely convinced that even resolving this ambiguity helps; I'm fairly certain that the GPL allows me to develop closed-source software from GPLed code for use in any setting I want to use it in, as long as I don't actually distribute the derived program to anyone else. (e.g., if an investment banker somewhere wants to write a program using Qt for his own use in his office, for a commercial purpose, without distributing the program or the source, the FAQ seems to prohibit that, but the GPL says it's perfectly fine.)
Re:Kindows???? (Score:5, Interesting)
Posted By: habacker
Date: 2005-01-27 14:21
Summary: source and binary snapshots of QT/Win Free Edition available
The QT/Win Free Edition is not far away from to be a full working release.
Maybe this is why Trolltech made this announcement? Trolltech propably had its reasons not to release the Windows version under GPL, but with this fork their reasons may be undermined. So maybe the guys at Trolltech thought "better done right (by us), than done buggy (by others) and give us bad reputation".
Of course this is just speculation and the close time gap between the KDE-Cygwin announcement and the Trolltech announcement could be just a coincidence.
Re:Is TrollTech trolling? (Score:3, Interesting)
Could the Qt people clear that up:
If a for-profit company wants to develop in-house, never-ever to be sold or released to the public, custom applications, do they need to get a license from Qt?
QXML / XPath (Score:2, Interesting)
XPath allows you to easily select part of XML DOM documents, simplifying your life...
XPath is powerful enough to become part of a programming language itself (Comega), in Microsoft's opinion...
However, last I checked, Trolltech doesn't think it's worth it. Booo!
PS., Designer and Qt are way better than WinForms!!!
Re:WinForms (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yea! (Score:4, Interesting)
GTK is still preferable for developing proprietary applications. The whole software world isn't suddenly going open source - and that's what keeps Trolltech in business as well.
Re:Is TrollTech trolling? (Score:4, Interesting)
Given the dual licensing, can you please answer a question that has made me wonder about Qt for years? If I submit to Trolltech a fix or new feature for GPL'ed Qt, you can't include it in the commercial-license Qt, can you? Does the commercial-license version include community-submitted changes? Does the GPL version include fixes and improvements not present in the commercial version?
Re:This is both GREAT and FRUSTRATING (Score:5, Interesting)
--
Simon
Re:Kindows???? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe this is why Trolltech made this announcement? Trolltech propably had its reasons not to release the Windows version under GPL, but with this fork their reasons may be undermined. So maybe the guys at Trolltech thought "better done right (by us), than done buggy (by others) and give us bad reputation".
I think this is exactly what happened, and I even have a guess as to why Trolltech didn't want to GPL Qt/Windows before.
I think the reason they didn't want to GPL it before was because then companies could write internal applications using Trolltech's nifty tools without paying them a dime. The tools are good enough that companies do buy copies for doing internal cross-platform development and even for Windows-only development.
Of course, people can, and do, use Qt/X11 and Qt/Mac for developing internal apps, and they often don't pay Trolltech anything for the privilege, but those are obviously much smaller markets.
Trolltech is giving up potential revenue by GPL'ing any version of their software, trading that revenue for developer mindshare, and banking on the portions of the revenue they don't give up. So, they decided that trading the (small) X11, Embedded and Mac revenue streams for mindshare was worth it, but trading the Windows stream wasn't.
However, that calculation falls apart if a Free port of Qt/X11 to Windows becomes available. When that happens, then the revenue stream from Qt/Windows for internal apps will dry up. As the value of those Qt/Windows dollars declines, it makes more sense to dual-license and trade for mindshare on Windows as well.
Re:It is "bad" for Linux, period. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's my point. In contrast, with Qt, I have to pay even for developing basic GUI apps. Therefore, if Qt became the default toolkit on Linux, it would put Linux at a big disadvantage relative to Windows and the Mac. Fortunately, Qt isn't the only toolkit on Linux.
Linux has really worked itself into a corner here.
No, Linux hasn't "worked itself into a corner" at all, because we do have Gtk+ and other toolkits that are covered by the LGPL. Those toolkits are friendly towards commercial use, and that's no accident. That's, after all, why most of the system libraries (C library, etc.) do allow closed source development.
There is a bizarre social aspect, a "we don't need your steenking commercial software" attitude that will probably keep it there, too. It's interesting to watch.
Linux needs commercial software much less than Windows or Macintosh because it comes with so much out of the box. And a lot of "steenking commercial software", we indeed don't need. A lot of "steenking commercial software" is also overpriced crap. But the small percentage of commercial apps that Linux needs and where commercial development makes sense, it support via toolkits like Gtk+.
Patents.NET (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't Mono v2 supposted to support WinForms?
There are two ways Microsoft can stop this. First off, Microsoft can pull the old "embrace and extend": make WinForms 2 and convince app developers to release WinForms 2 apps before Mono v2 can upgrade its WinForms reimplementation to match WinForms 2. This technique of continuously extending the Win32 API is what had held Wine back.
Worse, Microsoft might sue Novell, the corporate maintainer of Mono, for patent infringement and get an injunction against distribution of Mono v2. Novell is headquartered in the United States, a country whose courts recognize patents on an ordinary computer running a novel algorithm. Though Microsoft has permissively licensed the patents on the parts of the .NET framework standardized by ECMA, WinForms isn't among those parts [mono-project.com].