Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0 413
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."
KDE4 for Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That doesn't work though (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That doesn't work though (Score:2)
Re:That doesn't work though (Score:2)
Re:KDE4 for Windows? (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
kde 4 plans (Score:2)
I guess that has been one of the major reasons to extend the GPL licensing for the QT-windows-version. Really, there's a lack of decent freeware software in windows (advertising/spyware-free, etc), most of the decent software in windows is comercial.
A windows version of all KDE apps means lots of people will use those apps, and unlike most of the 3rd party software, KDE software is (and fe
Re:KDE4 for Windows? (Score:2)
Whatever problems Linux has on the desktop, they are unrelated to KDE. I want to replace Explorer with KDE. Badly.
Wierd name (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wierd name (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.qtopia.net/modules/xoopsfaq/index.php?
To kill Gnome (Score:2)
Hmm... I never thought of it, but I wonder if the inverse is true. Gnome was created in response to the Qt licensing, no? Perhaps it was the GNOME guys who wanted to play a little naming fun with the Trolltech guys.
Either way, it adds a bit of fun depth to the (constructive) competition between Gnome and KDE.
Re:To kill Gnome (Score:2)
Perhaps it was the GNOME guys who wanted to play a little naming fun with the Trolltech guys.
more like squish. (Score:2)
ick.
eric
Re:more like squish. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wierd name (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sure, why not (Score:2)
Re:Sure, why not (Score:2)
Maybe people who get put in places of responsibility to make buying decisions have the capability to look at what they're actually selling, rather than going, "Eww! Their name has 'troll' in it!"
Re:Sure, why not (Score:2)
Re:Sure, why not (Score:5, Funny)
They're from Norway, dude. Anything with 'Troll' in it is popular there. They even named one of their biggest oil-fields [offshore-technology.com] "Troll".
So since Norwegians like trolls, obviously they don't call annoying people on the internet 'trolls'. They usually call them 'americans'.
Re:Sure, why not (Score:2)
Re:Sure, why not (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sure, why not (Score:3, Interesting)
QT is a cutie (Score:5, Interesting)
The Win32 and Gnome APIs are written in C, so though they are fast, they doesn't get any of the programming benefits of Object Orientation.
Thought it has a funny macro kludges in certain places, the QT API is absolutely a joy to work with.
Re:QT is a cutie (Score:3, Informative)
Is that kind of like Freshman Orientation? Show the objects around, get them used to the system, play volleyball with them, take them out behind the intramural fields and leave them to find their own way back...
Re:QT is a cutie (Score:3, Informative)
Re:QT is a cutie (Score:2)
Thought it has a funny macro kludges in certain places, the QT API is absolutely a joy to work with.
Yes, it is a joy. I am compiling it right now, and I even left my BitTorrent client open for everyone else downloading it :-)
They did make good on their promise to release it in the second quarter, which ends on Thursday. Still, I have a few GPL GUI applications I want to write for Windows, and it was worth the wait. Qt is much more pleasant to work with than GTK+ or Win32 API.
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
It is for a small time shop. But even carpenters purchase tools which are much more expensive than that. Shit, sewing machines are much more expensive than $5,000 for a good one.
Developers (not all, just many) are too stuck up if they cannot fathom paying $5000 for a tool which will take care of just about every tedious problem with their GUI program. And leave time for the real work (the application idea and implementation)
The fact that you can now rapidly prototype an application usin
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't use the rather inflammatory phrase "stuck up", but it basically comes down to a business decision: is it less expensive to pay TrollTech a multi-thousand dollar fee, or to get the necessary functions implemented without using Qt? For my company, the Qt was by far the cheaper, better option. Our Qt license paid for itself in the first year. We now have an app [lcsaudio.com] that runs well on every major platform, that was straightforward to write and is easy to maintain. Using a cheaper, less well-designed GUI toolkit would probably have doubled our development time, and coding our own portable GUI toolkit from scratch would have made things ten times harder. (of course making our app GPL would have given us the best of both worlds... but I couldn't quite convince management of that
(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)
Cost (Score:2)
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:2)
On reflection, every Qt app I've seen on OS X has looked like a bad port from Windows. Not one of them has the details correct. They all use custom code for progress bars, tabs, and menus, which are rather ugly and out of place. Most of them don't appear to use Metal, though.
Firefox integrates better than Qt does...
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Another satisfied user/customer here. I even convinced my bosses to buy a commercial Windows license for 3.1 a couple years ago (which I'm still using, btw). The rest of my colleagues are using Borland's C++ Builder, though I am more productive with Qt/KDevelop than they are with Builder (with one possible exception).
Unfortunately, the entirety of Builder costs about as much as just the Qt license. Considering that, for my Windows-only counter
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:2)
Bittorrent at its best (Score:2, Funny)
Nice icons, too! (Score:5, Interesting)
one of us (Score:2)
I consider a huge ego a prerequisite to being cool. It's a warlord thing, so lesser beings might not understand.
As for attempting world domination, that just comes along with the super powers. You get some free time, you get that old itch to conquer, and one thing leads to another.
Re:Nice icons, too! (Score:2)
Steve Jobs does icons?
Re:Nice icons, too! (Score:2)
Re:Nice icons, too! (Score:5, Funny)
Cheers,
Ethelred
BitTorrent Link - Corrupt Movie? (Score:2, Informative)
Ogg Vorbis+Theora version works fine. (Score:2)
The Ogg Vorbis+Theora version [kde.org] works in Totem and Helix Player (better in Totem than Helix Player on my Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux machine, actually).
Thanks to whomever made this version available. I appreciate distributing something for FLOSS users in FLOSS codecs.
Re:Yeah (Score:2)
REALLY cheesy movie though. I was hoping for a demo of rapid prototyping of some sort or something...
meh...
Re:Yeah (Score:2)
You sicko!!
Re:Yeah (Score:2)
Downloaded the Ogg Theora direct link and it played under Kaffeine without problems.
It is as bad as QT is good.
More interesting... (Score:2)
at present, the only way to compile KDE for windows is by compiling it under windows (which requires that you have windows).
and that means you have to utilise a specialised forked version of kde source code, which has a bastardised version of configure, called configure.bat.
yerk.
Re:More interesting... (Score:2)
Re:More interesting... (Score:2)
Trolltech also provides... (Score:2)
vote! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:vote! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:vote! (Score:2)
Wow, lypanov, nice article (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, you must've gone to an awful lot of work to copy that blurb verbatim from the Dot [kde.org].
</sarcasm>
Re:Wow, lypanov, nice article (Score:2)
Cheeziest theme song *ever*... (Score:2)
Compiler (Score:2)
Re:Compiler (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Compiler (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/windows.html [trolltech.com]
For the click-alergic people:
Please note that the Open Source Edition of Qt will support the MinGW compiler. Visual Studio support and integration is provided with the commercial Editions of Qt.
They also provide a package that will install the binaries, and tries to install the right version of MinGW. A Torrent is:
http://www.trolltech.com/torrents/qt-win-opensourc e-desktop-4.0.0.mingw.exe.torrent [trolltech.com]
Perl/Qt and PyQt (Score:2)
The legal jargon surrounding the use of scripting languages and Qt is still kind of vague. Buried very deep in their FAQ section is the question Can I develop commercial applications with PerlQt or PyQt or other Qt wrappers? [trolltech.com] which isn't that helpful.
It still doesn't discuss in-house applications that are meant to solve production needs, but will never be sold or given away because the code is: too customized, reflects a particular business model, and/or not well polished. Perl/Qt is so much better than
Re:Perl/Qt and PyQt (Score:2)
Take a look @ WxWidgets as well. (Score:2)
http://www.wxwidgets.org/ [wxwidgets.org]
I have been using wx for a few months and love it.
Cross platform (Win32, MacOSX, Linux).
Very mature (12 years old) platform filled with lots of classes for most things you could think of.
And the seller point, no need to give away your source if you want to write something commercially at zero cost.
This doesnt mean QT isn't any good, but Wx h
Re:Take a look @ WxWidgets as well. (Score:2)
This is one of the reasons my open source code stays in the public domain. Yes, people could try to screw me over. I'd rather take that chance than unwittingly screw someone else over. When I wa
The GNU GPL is a commercial license. (Score:4, Insightful)
From the /. summary:
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.
MVC, yay! (Score:2)
Re:Whats up with slashdot? (Score:2)
Re:Whats up with slashdot? (Score:2)
Maybe it was better that it didn't go through...
Re:Whats up with slashdot? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Whats up with slashdot? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm going to infer that because you read the Amazon patent story, and subsequently read a goof-off story, you might be interested in reading El Reg [theregister.co.uk]?
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2)
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:5, Informative)
2) QT is GPL'd, not LGPL'd, so whoever wishes to use it in closed-source software must buy a license to do so. This means TrolTech can afford to continue developing it full time, while still getting it well-used in open-source projects.
3) The commercial license is very affordable.
4) QT is very cross-platform.
5) QT is very full featured, but still fast and light.
6) QT includes a very nice GUI designer.
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:2)
(Okay, so it does a lot more than draw pretty pictures, but I would make the argument that if you were doing x-platform development Qt could be a lot more beneficial to you than Rose.)
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2)
If you think $6600 to allow for the productive development of software on all three major platforms, simultaneously, is EXPENSIVE, you are lacking in experience.
$6600 is a midline wage for a single coder for one month. Any decent sized project goes on for YEARS, and usually involves at least 2-3 coders.
$6600 is a drop in the bucket if it saves even 5% of developer costs over the long haul! A single sal
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2, Insightful)
wxWidgets: Qt: 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.
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2)
Qt is ok (not exactly light), it's KDE that sucks for being bloated as hell.
Same goes for GTK and Gnome.
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2)
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2)
Maybe you should apply for job there? (Score:2)
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2)
THey just finished saying that their code is running on several platforms (for non comercial use) for free.
Re:How does QT survive. (Score:2)
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:5, Informative)
There are also Qtopia Pda and Phone Editions.
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:2)
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:2)
Think anyone who could afford to buy a licence was writing programs they don't mind being GPL'd?
I think probably the only way that they will lose income (and I think this is a very real possibility btw) is people who cheat (violate the license for the commercial version probably) and get a couple licensed copies to do production builds on, but develop mostly on GPL'd versions.
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:2)
It is a very VERY VERY risky business to be in if you plan on this scam. Because there are no copyright violations to pay if you get caught. You simply must open your code. Period. And a court order could potentially be issued to require that. If you were caught you would have 2 options: Open your code, or stop distributing your code. Both the nail in the coffin fo
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:2)
As long as you don't distribute it you're okay, because I believe the GPL allows you to create derivative works without requiring your code to be GPLd. And I'm even more sure that this is the position the FSF takes even if it's not in the license explicitly.
I agree that this is a very risky strategy, but it's something that is probably being done by some companie
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:2)
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How is this going to work for trolltech? (Score:2)
Not many business accept releasing their apps under GPL.
And therefore don't use free Qt.
And buy commercial version.
Generating income for Trolltech.
Case closed, they win, you lose.
Re:KDE4 ? (Score:2)
Re:KDE4 ? (Score:2)
You're not a very good liar... Please get a life.
Re:KDE4 ? (Score:4, Informative)
What makes you think they won't? Migrating to a new version of the Qt framework doesn't require rewriting all of the underlying logic, therefore allowing for bug fixes in a major portion of application code. Not to mention, there are plans for another release [kde.org] in the 3.x series (development can happen in parallel). Also, you should be happy to know that the things you complain about, kicker and kdesktop, are slated to undergo a major overhaul [plasma.bddf.ca] for the KDE4 release.
Re:mingw vs. cygwin on win32? (Score:4, Informative)
MingW is a native windows app that doesn't require the cygwin dll and creates exes that are standalone in windows.
Both the founders are married and have great wives (Score:5, Interesting)
Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO, and Eirik Eng, Trolltech's President, had been working together with various cross-platform GUI tools back in 1991. We were both very disappointed in their quality and were sure we could do it much better. Haavard went on to write his Masters thesis on GUI design, while I wrote a C++ GUI toolkit for a Norwegian company. In 1993 he called me up and suggested that we should join forces and use our experience in GUI design to write the toolkit that would be the king of toolkits. We had no customers, no funding and a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily we were both married to wives who had full-time jobs. We used some savings to rent a small office and hacked away for a year while our wives fed and cared for us.
Personally, I find the entire thing rather neat and almost romantic. If you told your spouse/sig. other "I'm gonna go work on something and make absolutely no money for a year and you're going to support me...do you mind?" (s)he'd probably say something along the lines of "hell no" or go packing. The company name comes from a dream one of the cofounders had about their wife as well.
I dunno. I don't see that many couples that're close or stable enough to do that.
There's more important things "chicks" can have than a "hot" body. Like...helping you realize your dreams?
Re:international input (Score:2)
I might be just an ignorant troll, but if it wasn't qt-3, I don't know why else i can't write accented words on anything using qt.
I have never had this problem in Slackware or old versions of SuSE. You probably use one of those crappy distributions that bundle misconfigured software. I have a friend who had your problem with LyX in Ubuntu. It was the first time I saw i
Re:The problem with Qt (Score:2)
You will soon start seeing Qtopia Phones on the market.
Re:How to install this thing? (Score:3, Informative)
First, get and install mingw from http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml [mingw.org]
Second, from Trolltech, get and install "qt-win-opensource-desktop-4.0.0-mingw.exe", NOT "qt-win-opensource-desktop-4.0.0.zip".
Then, from the Start menu, run "Qt 4.0.0 Command Prompt" to get a DOS box with everything set up properly. Then play with the examples and demos, using qmake to create the makefiles.
Hope that helps!!
Re:some things to add in the TODO (Score:2)
sounds like a fancy term for having a dance partner and copying what they do.
Re:Licensing question (Score:2)
Just to clarify - technically, it's the licence under which it was released, and it is the only thing that allows you to distribute it. The GPL says nothing about use, only distribution.
Re:Forced to GPL your code??? (Score:3, Informative)
No can do. GPL and BSD are incompatible according to our friendly psychos at FSF.
Only that archaic, ancient, malicious BSD with advertising clause.
The more modern variant is not, and it's 100% OK to use it in Qt programs, it's just that the recipient has to be able to distribute it under the GPL if he so wishes.