Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0

lypanov writes "Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video (Bittorrent download, Ogg Theora version). Read the Qt 4 Overview and the online Qt Reference Documentation for more information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4."

Re:How is this going to work for trolltech?

[pebs]

I'm sorry, I could see how having their BSD/Linux versions open and their windows versions closed could keep them in business; but now that they don't have any income generating platforms left, aren't they going to be out of business next week?

They will continue to make money the same way they always have, by selling commercial licenses. There are plenty of companies/people who want to use Qt that who can't or won't use a GPL licenses for their projects. This change simply means that we will see more Qt-based free (as in GPL) software for Windows.

Re:KDE4 for Windows?

[Sleepy]

Will the KDE library be available for windows now?

Wrong question. Nothing legally prevents a native, GPL, KDE for Windows.

The problem I bet is all the dependencies. I suspect someone will tackle native KDE/Win, but if so it will take a long time, because Windows coders won't get excited enough to help until it's far enough along development.

It'll take a while for Qt apps to get built for native Windows (longer than it did for GTK apps like Ethereal to be ported to Win32 native)

Re:How does QT survive.

[alienw]

If you don't make enough money from your commercial software business to afford a one-time expense of $2000 (the light version includes everything you need in a toolkit), you have no business writing commercial software. I mean, that's only about two weeks of one developer's salary. You'll spend about 5 times that in lost productivity if you use VC++ alone. The $3000 version includes XML, databases, networking, and a ton of other stuff which is definitely worth it if you need it. Not to mention you get full source code.

Re:How does QT survive.

[k98sven]

Troll indeed.. Let's see.. you're comparing a cross platform GUI toolkit against:
1) A toy programming language
2) A C++ compiler and IDE

That's not apples-and-oranges. Those aren't even fruit!

Re:How does QT survive.

[SassyDave]

Not to start a flame-war, since I've heard lots of good things about wxWidgets, but just look at this code:

wxWidgets:

str.Trim().Trim(false);

Qt:

str = str.stripWhiteSpace();

Notice that Qt manages to do it in a sane fashion, with a single, readable method call. wxWidgets requires two calls, one with a boolean parameter? This leads me to number 10: Sane and readable APIs.

The GNU GPL is a commercial license.

[jbn-o]

From the /. summary:

Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses [...]

I think what was meant here was proprietary licenses, not commercial licenses. This is a rather common misunderstanding that stems from not seeing the GNU GPL as a license under which one may do commercial work [gnu.org]. But many developers and distributors have done commercial activity involving GPL-covered works over the years. What the GPL prohibits is distribution of proprietary derivatives, hence the GPL is not a proprietary software license.

Re:Sure, why not

[k98sven]

Ironic how you proved the point by not being able to take a joke..

Re:Both the founders are married and have great wi

[Medieval_Thinker]

Ummm...

What you don't understand is that this is how marriage works. My wife left a good job so I could make a career move. I supported her as she went through grad school and the process to become an Episcopal priest. Right now, she is at home with the kids while I am presenting at a conference.

We have been married 23 years, and I claim that this sort of thing is more typical than you might imagine. We have both realized dreams because of the support of the other.

Re:QT is a cutie

[Beale]

You try running GTK apps under windows and you'll see the meaning of the word "clunk".

Re:The problem with Qt

[TampaDeveloper]

Perhaps "making sure" was the wrong phrase. But there is alot of competition when it comes to GUI toolkits. So first and foremost critera, for me, is the quality. But next question is "how many platforms will it run on". I'm well aware that I can re-write my GUI and port ot any platform. But I'm an American. I want it for free and I want it right now. So if I can find a toolkit that appears to offer what Qt can, plus allows me to do a simple recompile on more platforms, then I will choose that toolkit. If, otoh, you can demonstrate that the quality of Qt is superior, then quality trumps # of supported platforms. If I wanted it to run on EVERYTHING, I would choose Swing. It would not surprise me one bit if someone IS working on a Swing port for Commodore 64. But I have decided that I prefer the quality that a native C++ toolkit provides me. I have written great Swing apps, so please no flames. But my critera for choosing a toolkit includes the number of deployment platforms it supports. Why is this invalid? If someone expressed an interest in buying my software for a Palm, why should I lose that sale because I don't have the time to port it to Palm? Just as important, why would I want to spend the time and money to port it to palm if I can find a toolkit of equal quality which does that job for me?