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GNU is Not Unix GUI Software

Trolltech Discontinue Non-Commercial Qt 101

Posted by timothy from the tradeoffs-and-obligations dept.
An anonymous reader submits "Trolltech has quietly discontinued their non-commercial version of Qt for Windows. This eliminates Qt as a choice for those wanting to develop free multi-platform software." Actually, according to the linked page, "if you write Free software (Open Source software covered by the GPL) you are welcome to download and use the Free Edition of Qt," and Trolltech points out that one can buy the current edition of Qt -- seems fair enough.
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Trolltech Discontinue Non-Commercial Qt More

Trolltech Discontinue Non-Commercial Qt

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  • No big deal (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 )
    In the free software world, QT is just a dependency for KDE (hence, only the free *nix version is important). Other libraries such as WxWindows are already more widely accepted by free software developers.
    • Care to back that up with some real evidence?
      • Ok, why would anyone be using QT when you could use wxWindows [wxwindows.org]? The license [wxwindows.org] is true LGPL.

        Its been months, and people have been bitching about QT's license, just use something else. Everyone I know seems to love wxWindows.

        • Re:No big deal (Score:5, Informative)

          by BrianHV ( 63256 ) on Sunday November 30, 2003 @11:46PM (#7596048)
          <pedantic>The wxWindows license is LGPL with an exception to allow static linking and binary-only distribution without extra source distribution burdens. This is nice when you want to tweak a platform's behavior at the toolkit layer.</pedantic>

        • Re:No big deal (Score:3, Informative)

          by grotgrot ( 451123 )
          Technically the wxWindows license is LGPL with exceptions. The exceptions make people like me happy (*), while still keeping the source under strict GPL.

          There is one significant problem that still affects wxWindows and that is that many Linux based PDAs use Qtopia which is based on QT and the QT license. This makes it difficult to do wxWindows for the Zaurus etc.

          (*) My code is under an open source license, just not the GPL. Consequently I wouldn't be able to use GPL stuff although I would be able to us
          • you hinted at one fault in wxWindows. There is no binding yet for KDE and gnome. I hope there will be some day. It would make wxWindows even better.
            • The binding on Linux is to GTK which is close enough to Gnome. They are currently working on the GTK2 binding which is mostly complete. I suspect that a runtime switch to GTK or KDE as appropriate would be WAY too hard to implement. Hopefully the freedesktop.org people together with the combined talents of the best GNOME and KDE hackers now at Novell will help make toolkits like wxWindows even easier, and always look normal to a user.
              • I was talking about more of a seperate target like windows is a sperate target from Linux and Mac. I still need to download GTK version since I just nuked WinXp becuase it refused to work with my external touchpad (my cursor went haywire across the screen), and I replaced it Mandrake 9.1.
        • The lack of a Free Software Qt for Windows is a problem. But under X11, the dual QPL/GPL license grants *ALL* of the benefits of the LGPL.

          But that's for Free Software developers. For commercial proprietary developers, if they're going to bitch at paying for commercial Qt, then I'm going doubly bitch at paying for their stuff. Fair is fair.

      • Re:No big deal (Score:3, Insightful)

        by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 )
        No.

        Look around at crossplatform OSS projects. WxWindows is much more widely used. Hell, even the Win32 GTK port is more widely used.

        Also, can someone enlighten me as to why my post was flamebait?

        • Because you said:

          "Other libraries such as WxWindows are already more widely accepted by free software developers."

          That's just not true. There are *way* more Qt/KDE apps than WxWindows apps. You didn't mention the "crossplatform OSS projects" thing until now.
          • You didn't mention the "crossplatform OSS projects" thing until now.
            The story says "develop free multi-platform software". As this entire discussion is about using Qt for cross-platform applications, there was no need for him to say "cross-platform" any more than he needed to specify "Qt." It was assumed.

            So you didn't read the article then modded him down because you missed something fundimental to the discussion. Typical ./ moderation!

        • Hell, even the Win32 GTK port is more widely used.

          Which is a shame, since the Win32 GTK port has some serious issues.

          • Re:No big deal (Score:3, Informative)

            by jensend ( 71114 )
            The Win32 GTK 1.x port had lots of serious issues. However, I haven't noticed any serious issues with the GTK 2 port (which is used by just about all the win32 gtk apps except the stable version of the gimp). Care to elaborate?
  • Does Trolltech have any plans for a GPL version of Qt for Windows? By the way, has anyone heard any thing about a native non-X11 version of KDE and/or KOffice for the Mac.

  • No great loss (Score:5, Informative)

    by lpontiac ( 173839 ) on Sunday November 30, 2003 @11:40PM (#7596027)

    Qt/Free on Windows was decreasingly useful .. it was a crufty old binary-only Qt 2.3, which is quite aged when you consider that Qt is up to 3.2.x. Being pre-3.0 there were notable differences between it and more 'modern' Qt versions.

    By the way, you can still do Free (as in GPL) software development cross-platform on Qt, between X11 and Mac OS X.

    • Re:No great loss (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @05:25AM (#7597072) Journal
      Well, you can do free cross-platform QT development on any platform you want, as long as that platform runs X11 and has a POSIX-like interface (and what platform doesn't, nowadays?). Now that XFree86 is available for Windows (which is awesome, BTW) it should hardly be any trouble at all to develop QT/X11 applications for Windows as well. But if you want native QT/Mac or native QT/Windows, you still have to pay.

  • Alternative Toolkits (Score:5, Informative)

    by oz_ko ( 571352 ) on Sunday November 30, 2003 @11:45PM (#7596044)
    I think one of the best free toolkits is the eclispse swt which can build binaries for almost any platform.

    There is also now a visual editor which should make development much easier.

    Check it out at http://www.eclipse.org [eclipse.org]

    Oz

  • Maybe you should make it not sound like the end of the world.

  • I must be missing something here... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shadow255 ( 710534 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:04AM (#7596345)
    From the QT website:
    If you write Free software (Open Source software covered by the GPL) you are welcome to download and use the Free Edition of Qt
    Since there is no Free Edition of Qt for the Windows platform, is Trolltech making some kind of statement that Free software does not exist for Windows? I can think of an example off the top of my head of a GPL program which is available only on Win32: FileZilla [sourceforge.net].

    I'm not saying Trolltech is obligated to make a Qt Free edition for Windows, but perhaps they should word things a bit differently on their website, along the lines of "If you write Free software for X11/Mac..." It's just plain misleading, to my thinking, to state it the way they are.

    • I'm not saying Trolltech is obligated to make a Qt Free edition for Windows

      I'm not saying they're obligated to do anything, but I think it's time for them to rethink their business model.
      The per developer license is confusing, and IMHO, self-defeating.

      They should consider a royalties-based pricing scheme.

      Cheers,
      • The per developer license is confusing, and IMHO, self-defeating.

        What's confusing about it? I buy it once, and I can install it on any workstation I use. No need for me to hire an accountant to keep track of required royalty payments.
        • What's confusing about it? I buy it once, and I can install it on any workstation I use.

          It's confusing in an economic sense: you're going to buy QT licenses if

          1) You are using a very small team of developers, or

          2) You're pretty sure your product will be a smash hit.

          The per-developer license, having no relationship with the value of the final product, introduces a lot of uncertainity in the economic calulation.

          I think that's why there are so few takers despite the quality of the QT toolset.

          A royalti
          • The per-developer license, having no relationship with the value of the final product, introduces a lot of uncertainity in the economic calulation.

            Virtually every commercial UNIX development tool I've ever used in the has been a per-user license. This is similar in some ways to a per-developer license, but more flexible. It's main drawback is that you need a license server. It still has the "uncertainty" factor you're talking about. Do we need licenses for 25 developers should we go with 50? On the other
            • Virtually every commercial UNIX development tool I've ever used in the has been a per-user license

              That was precisely the point. In order to get traction, TT should try something different.
              Doing more of the same is not a good strategy in a saturated market.

              Carpenters buy hammers at a fixed price. They don't send monthly royalty payments to the hammer manufacturers.

              Hammers don't cost $2000. If they did, you'd be seeing a lot less carpenters.

              Royalties based licensing is eminently rational for TT: encour
    • Actually it's a lot worse than that. Trolltech holds the position that Free Software and Commercial Software are two seperate things. Even though there is plenty of Commercial Free Software.

  • Before the trolls start (Score:4, Informative)

    by daaku ( 199603 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:26AM (#7596405)
    It needs to be mentioned that this doesnt not affect the GPL version of Qt, as used for KDE and never can. Its been said, and said over again. Go here to find out why:

    http://kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
    • "... this doesnt not affect the GPL version of Qt ..."
      There is no GPL version of QT. Read the license (http://kde.org/whatiskde/images/kdefreeqt3.png & http://kde.org/whatiskde/images/kdefreeqt4.png) and you'll see that the Qt Free libraries can only be used in GPL'd or LGPL'd Programs. The Qt libraries themselves don't become GPL'd and have a number of restrictions/clauses on their use (including that the libraries cannot be modified).

  • Corrections to Timothy's $0.02 (Score:4, Troll)

    by Keith Russell ( 4440 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:31AM (#7596428) Journal
    Actually, according to the linked page, "if you write Free software (Open Source software covered by the GPL) you are welcome to download and use the Free Edition of Qt,"...

    Actually, if you read what the submitter wrote, he said "free multi-platform" software. OK, I'll grant that X/11 and Mac are "multi-platform", but when those platforms make up ~7% of the market, it's nothing to brag about. Trolltech continues to aggresively deny Qt developers the ability to distribute their works to the vast majority of the computing product. After all, cross-platform Open Source software can't [mozilla.org] possibly [openoffice.org] succeed [apache.org], can it?

    ...and Trolltech points out that one can buy the current edition of Qt -- seems fair enough.

    MSRP of Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition: US$109 [microsoft.com]. MSRP of Qt/Windows Professional Edition: US$1550 [trolltech.com]. <sarcasm>Oh, yeah. That's fair.</sarcasm> It's really discriminatory and punitive. And it's still not Open Source. What makes them think that taking the low road like that will convince Windows devlopers to consider Qt?

    • Re:Corrections to Timothy's $0.02 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @02:15AM (#7596559) Homepage Journal
      After all, cross-platform Open Source software can't possibly succeed, can it?

      How much money has GTK+ made for GNU? How much money has LGPL wxWindows made? How about plain XFree86? I'm not talking about donations from Redhat or SuSE, I'm talking about actual revenue from actual customers. Now ask yourself if that's enough to support even one full time developer?

      I do wish that Trolltech would release a QPL/GPL version of Qt for Windows. But they'll still have to charge proprietary prices for proprietary development if they want to stay in business.

      MSRP of Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition: US$109. MSRP of Qt/Windows Professional Edition: US$1550.

      Rather than repeat the tired cliche about apples and oranges, let me merely remind you that filet mignon costs a lot more than canned tuna, yet no one complains about the discriminatory and punitive pricing of fine steaks.

      • Re:Corrections to Timothy's $0.02 (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Rather than repeat the tired cliche about apples and oranges, let me merely remind you that filet mignon costs a lot more than canned tuna, yet no one complains about the discriminatory and punitive pricing of fine steaks.

        Lay off the crack pipe. Even though the $109 will only give you the IDE for c++, or c#, or VB.NET(you don't get all of the languages/tools) with the standard edition, to say that the qt toolkit is so much better than a world class IDE such as VS.NET is almost comical.

        In any case, this
        • The operative word being "still".

          Cheers,
        • Qt is not an IDE. You cannot compare the Visual Studio apple with the Qt orange.

          If you want to make some relevant comparisons, then compare the VS dialog editor with Qt Designer, or the .NET framework with the Qt framework. In terms of the dialog editing, Qt Designer kicks butt. I haven't used the .NET framework, but having perused its documentation, it seems to me that the Qt framework is still superior, and is crossplatform to boot.
      • How much money has GTK+ made for GNU? How much money has LGPL wxWindows made? How about plain XFree86? I'm not talking about donations from Redhat or SuSE, I'm talking about actual revenue from actual customers. Now ask yourself if that's enough to support even one full time developer?

        Yes, but instead of looking at it from a TrollTech point of view, look at it from a user point of view. Regardless of *why*, there are a number of developers supporting GTK+. It might be very difficult for TrollTech to mak
        • Yes, but instead of looking at it from a TrollTech point of view, look at it from a user point of view. Regardless of *why*, there are a number of developers supporting GTK+. It might be very difficult for TrollTech to make a profit doing th same thing (hell, it's hard for a company to compete with lots of free software), but that doesn't mean that users should then use TrollTech software.

          I'm alway wondering why so many people cannot see this.
          TT, good guys as they seem to be, cannot escape from OSS rules:

      • Rather than repeat the tired cliche about apples and oranges, let me merely remind you that filet mignon costs a lot more than canned tuna, yet no one complains about the discriminatory and punitive pricing of fine steaks.

        I was trying to head off one of the usual shallow counter-arguments: "If you can afford $1000 for Visual Studio .NET..." Or was your statement a dig at the (mercifully) deprecated MFC? Now that's cross-platform apples and Win32 oranges

        I do wish that Trolltech would release a QPL/GPL


    • What makes them think that taking the low road like that will convince Windows devlopers to consider Qt?

      I stopped developing for windows about 5 or 6 years ago. That was when the cross platform GUI library zApp got discontinued.

      If the prices you point out are correct, I would definitly consider using Qt if I was "forced" to code for windows and was forced to use C++.

      Of course I would prefere Java and SWING :-) And also: I cant be forced, LOL. Anyway my point is: Qt costs currently $1550 as you say. I

      • If you're in a professional environment, that $1550 may justify itself. If you're successful, it's a drop in the bucket. But for the hobbyist, it's a brutal kick in the teeth. Never mind the money, though. It still doesn't solve the problem that buying Qt for Windows to develop Free/Open Source software is antithetical to both the spirit of the movement, and the letter of the law.

        Say, for example, me and my buddy Kyle use Qt to write the Greatest Program In The World, and we suck it up and pay the $1550 e

    • Note that the Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition does not include an optimising C++ compiler.
    • Come on, TrollTech have to pay their developers somehow. Qt is a great widget set - simple to learn and use, the documentation is among the best I've seen. They help out the KDE people, they provide the Free software community with Qt for free on loads of platforms - most of the *nixs and Mac.

      Widget sets are often expensive. ILOG Views, for example, costs a lot more than $1550, and back when I used it was buggy as hell.

  • Let them do what they want (Score:5, Insightful)

    by endrek ( 547737 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:46AM (#7596477) Homepage
    I've seen lots of grumblings about this, but lets think for a moment. Why should they be obliged to supply a windows version. Its software developed for unix. Windows is a big difference and porting to it is no fun (I know). If its not fun, why give it away for free. So they're currently only selling it. Looks like a proccess. If they don't make enough money to makeit a viable option they'll probably just dump windows support entirly. From the unix front they get lots of useage and thus advertising of a sorts, what with kde and all the related apps. But free stuff for windows using qt hasnt really caught on, so why bother supporting such a hassle. Its their work to do with as they will they were supllying a free service and it didn't work out for them don't harp on them Don't like it? the current code is gpl fork it yourself and continue developing it if you all really care the point is that probably no one cares enough and it won't happen, which is why I think they've largly abandoned it. The difference again being popularity of platform. If they stopped new release of the gpl unix versions, someone, most likely the kde group, would pick it up and keep it going.
    • 've seen lots of grumblings about this, but lets think for a moment. Why should they be obliged to supply a windows version.

      We (the grumblers) aren't saying that they are obliged to do anything.
      What we are saying is that is is in their own self-interest to do so.

      I, for one, am an KDE user and TT admirer, but still I think they're in the road to irrelevancy owing to their license policy.

      Cheers,

  • Change of policy or the plan all along? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Andy Smith ( 55346 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @02:07AM (#7596544)
    Methinks we'll be seeing a lot more of this in future, ie: release software for free, let it become established for a few years, then discontinue the "free version" so people are, to some extent, forced to buy the commercial version.

    Companies should either do free or commercial software, or both. They shouldn't establish their product as free and then start charging for it once people rely on it.

    This strikes me as more of a long-term market-share strategy rather than a recent change of policy.
    • You're probably right, but in this case at least, the move comes as no surprise. TrollTech has caught flak for years for their licensing policies, and this change should not come as a terrible surprise.
    • Actually, the whole Non-Commercial version was an experiment in making Qt/Windows more accessable to free software developers. It was not intended as a bait-and-switch. Trolltech was very hesitant about releasing their flagship product for free on Windows (probably their biggest source of income), so in mid-2001, around the time Qt 3.0 was in the beta phase, they released a non-commercial version of Qt 2.x for Windows. The plan was that if their sales started to drop (implying that companies were freeloa

  • That's okay: Use ParaGUI instead... (Score:3, Informative)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum.gmail@com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @04:39AM (#7596943) Homepage Journal
    www.paragui.org [paragui.org] (follow the link to savannah)

    The market for cross-platform toolkits is wiiiiide open, and there's a lot of ground to be covered. ParaGUI (on top of SDL) is not such a bad choice ....
    • I have said it before and I will continue to say it until people realise it is true. Anything visual (including GUIs) should have screenshots available on the website in add to demos. This is especially true for cross platform libraries. Screenshots are important so that people can see who they look visually--especially with cross-platform libraries which may draw various parts when the intended part is not available on the system.
      • In the case of ParaGUI just forget about it and download it, build the demo's and see for yourself how cool it is.

        Totally themable, good-quality open code for widgets you'd expect to work well ... I think ParaGUI has some future.

  • Somebody port it, then (Score:3, Interesting)

    by __past__ ( 542467 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:19AM (#7597162)
    Didn't somebody recently announce a new effort to port the Free version of Gt/X11 to Windows?

    That might help even if the project won't get finished itself. Remember the Big Qt/KDE Licensing Flamewar? Seeing both Gnome and Project Harmony, a free Qt clone, being developed because many people considered the old QPL to be not acceptable for the base of a free desktop, Trolltech gave in and adopted the current dual licence scheme. With a free port to Windows, and other cross-platform toolkits being available (and getting more support, like Borland now using wxWindows after having used Qt for Kylix), they might reconsider not offering a free version for Windows themselves.

    Or we can all just get along and use one of the other fine cross-platform toolkits.

  • So this is a non-issue. There are already running programs, so ...

  • Port of Qt/X11-GPL to Qt/Windows almost done (Score:4, Informative)

    by fault0 ( 514452 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:46AM (#7598071) Homepage Journal
    Yup folks, I've been trying it out the last few days, and the port of Qt/X11 to Qt/Windows (and is thus GPL'd) is almost done, and has progressed a lot over the past few months. Most of the graphical parts are done (replacing the x11 dependant parts of Qt with win32/GDI equivalents.)

    What's not done yet is replacing the non-GUI parts- e.g, moving from the "_unix" files and writing win32 equivalents. Thus it currently requires cygwin (but no X11).

    There are some screenshots here [sourceforge.net]. Source is available there too.
  • Even though they've officially discontinued it on the website, you can still download it from their FTP server, as of this writing:

    ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/non-commercial/QtWin230 -NonCommercial.exe [trolltech.com]
    ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/non-commercial/QtWin230 -NonCommercial.bz2 [trolltech.com]

  • Trolltech: "No Free Lunch" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jgardn ( 539054 ) <jgardn@alumni.washington.edu> on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:34PM (#7600182) Homepage Journal
    Trolltech is saying that there is no free lunch. It gives the source out freely to Free Software users because they receive so much from Free Software and the Open Source model. They could build a viable business model with their free software alone.

    The reason why they refuse to give away their source code and add value to the Windows codebase is because they get nothing in return from them. In fact, they have to pay Microsoft for the "privilege".

    It's also much more difficult to code for the Windows platform than for the standard free software *NIX platforms.

    One of the reasons is the lack of reliable documentation. Sure, there are tons of documents out there on Windows, but there are too many contradictions in them. Which one is correct? Which calls may cause seg faults? Which ones will cause the entire system to fail? No one seems to know. Microsoft has a mysterious habit of presenting second-rank "experts" to the community, while hiding the first-rank and true experts from public view. This means when you go read an article written by an "expert" in the field, it is really a nice PR ploy with little or no true substance. I guess you have to pay a lot more or live on the Microsoft campus if you want access to the actual experts.

    The other is the short, abrupt upgrades that totally invalidate their previous work. Imagine rewriting the entire KDE codebase every year or so because Linux and XFree86 decide to move around all their APIs and invalidate previous ones. That is what Microsoft is forcing people to do. I've experienced it first-hand from about 1997-2000, as I was writing a game based on Direct3D. How many times did the API to Direct3D experience a complete rewrite? I don't recall, but I think it was something like 4. I also had to code up from '95, to '98, and then to 2000 and NT. That was a very painful experience for me. I feel the pain of the people who are chained to their desks and forced to code for windows. You really are slaves to the whims of Redmond.

    The other reason is that when they have a problem, they cannot "dig down" into the source code or the community to discover if the problem is on their end or the OS's end. When developing for Linux or *BSD, when you run into some serious problems, you can either look into the source code itself or even ask the kernel community if there is a bug there or what you are doing wrong. Such is not possible with Microsoft unless you shell out some cash and spend a lot of time speaking with phone monkeys.

    If you really, really need a Windows version of Qt, and if it really is going to save you a lot of time in your project, then you should gratefully shell out the money to get a developer's version of Qt for Windows. And you can't complain that it is not open source -- neither is Windows, and yet you use that. Your money is going to hire people who really don't want to code for Windows. You will be paying to have them trained on the latest versions of windows. Not just the APIs, but the new applications as well. Your money is going to be used to purchase the latest and "greatest" windows platform for them to code, test, and build on. Your money is going to go to the phone monkey department as they call in to see if there is a bug in the Windows OS or if they are just reading the wrong version of an "expert's" analysis. Your money is going to be spent lining Bill Gate's pockets, and hire a few people who would rather be coding for Linux, in other words.
    • They could build a viable business model with their free software alone.

      Well, you must know about building a business model more than people who already run a company. I guess that makes you an expert.

      The reason why they refuse to give away their source code and add value to the Windows codebase is because they get nothing in return from them. In fact, they have to pay Microsoft for the "privilege".

      That's the way it works in the real world my man. You write software for a commercial OS, and then you s

  • Maybe now some people might want to take a look at GNUstep [gnustep.org] which is a Free cross-platform API and library set. Besides Unix systems, it does run on Windows, but not completely and with some errors.

    Every helping developer is welcome!

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