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Programming IT Technology

Trolltech Makes Qt/Windows Free As In Beer 10

Posted by timothy from the slightly-freer dept.
drachen writes: "Trolltech has announced that Qt/Windows will now be available under a non-commercial license. To sum it up: 'Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt for evaluation purposes; and Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt on a personal basis to create free programs, and the source code must be made available.'" There's also talk of this at dot.kde.org.
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Trolltech Makes Qt/Windows Free As In Beer More

Trolltech Makes Qt/Windows Free As In Beer

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  • The support for mingw/32 seems worse, since it doesn't have the Unix emulation layer provided by Cygwin

    Cygwin is licensed under GNU GPL 2 or later with exception "You may link this code to any code under an OSI approved license." No binary only code is under an OSI approved license. Qt for Windows is binary only. Therefore, Qt for Windows is not compatible with Cygwin or any other GPL program.

    However, Qt for *n?x can probably be made to work on Cygwin XFree86 [redhat.com] with minimal porting.

  • People usually use Microsoft Visual Studio in connection with the MFC windows library. Now they have a chance to use it with a better windows library, QT.
  • You should be able to get the VC compiler as part of the Windows SDK. It may not come with the fancy IDE and wizards, but that's what God made makefiles for.

    Dancin Santa
  • When Qt was charging

    Of course, I meant TrollTech... doh!

    Ryan T. Sammartino

  • Well, that only applies to the Non-Commercial license, but if you purchase a Professional or Enterprise license, you do get the Qt source code with it.
    It doesn't matter if the OS is Free or not. 3rd-party non-Free libraries can not be used to build GPL apps. This is why they QPL'd Qt/X11 in the first place; to rescue KDE from license hell. Trolltech suggested using Qt/Pro/Win for GPL'd apps when Qt/Free/X11 came out. They now stand corrected.

    Note that you have to get an exception to the GPL to use Qt/NonCom/Win with a GPL'd app. Nice cop out. They throw potential Windows developers a bone with this non-commercial license, then shift responsibility (and/or blame) onto the stewards of GPL'd Qt apps to grant an indulgence to Windows folk.

    It's pointless. Trolltech is still acting out of spite. With a QPL'd Qt/Win, commercial developers will still have to pay Trolltech, as they rightfully should. Without a QPL'd Qt/Win, Trolltech is still sowing seeds of ill will, deterring potential users, and shooting themselves in the foot by denying themselves the benefits of an Open Source library.

    I can't wait to see how Qt/MacOS X will be licensed. Then we'll see if they truly support Open Source software, or if they're just shallow anti-Microsoft zealots.

    We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead

  • I definitly agree that Qt is an awesome product which the Windows opensource programming community definitly could use. Personally I think it's great that Trolltech has committed themselves to help keep software Free by releasing such a great tool to the community and helping gurantee that programs made with it go back to the community.

    Of course, for companies to live, they have to make money, and this product is definitly worth more than the cost of a commercial development license. So if you're gonna make commercial software, it's only reasonable that you pay the company who gave you such a great start. As for Qt/Windows not being OpenSource:

    "The GNU GPL and the Trolltech QPL are open-source, respectively Free Software licenses. Note the capital "F". We are not talking "free" as in "free beer", but "Free" as in "Free Speech". We released Qt/X11 under those licenses, because it runs as major component on totally Free operating systems, such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. Once Microsoft Windows is completely open source, we will reconsider." - FAQ [trolltech.com]

    Well, that only applies to the Non-Commercial license, but if you purchase a Professional or Enterprise license, you do get the Qt source code with it.

  • Since works created using the free edition of Qt themselves have to be free, this makes sense: no one will be making money off of their works. I just hope this is not a sign of trouble at trolltech. They put out a great product that gets a lot less respect than it deserves; I hope they make some money off of it.


    ---
  • When Qt was charging Windows users for something they can get both Free and "for free" on other platforms it reminded me of this from Larry Wall:
    In particular, we really needed to have a commercially packaged version of Perl for the Windows folks, because many of them were (and still are) clueless about open source. It's almost like we're doing Windows users a favour by charging them money for something they could get for free, because they get confused otherwise.

    Ryan T. Sammartino

  • The VC and OpenSource relationship has always seemed terribly weird to me. Almost all win32 ports of GNU or other OpenSource tools I have used require VC to compile. I have tried to get some of them to compile under gcc/Cygwin with luck only with a few of those supporting automake, and then only with modifications (though I haven't tried must in the last year).

    The support for mingw/32 seems worse, since it doesn't have the Unix emulation layer provided by Cygwin ... but at least you don't need the Cygwin DLL!

    It strikes me that there are a number of free compilers / environments out there for win32, not the least of which being gcc or Borland's C++.

    Given this support, and Borland's apparent intent to support the OpenSource community with community licensing for Kylix, why are ported STILL supporting VC (especially knowing that few people have legal access to it?).

  • Nice, but... (Score:3)

    by Rick the Red ( 307103 ) <Rick,The,Red&gmail,com> on Wednesday June 27, 2001 @02:45PM (#124022) Journal
    why do they only support Microsoft Visual Studio version 6? Why not support gcc?

    QT requires Microsoft Visual Studio, Apache requires Microsoft Visual Studio -- Oh, yeah, Mr. Gates must really hate these "Open Source" folks muscling in on his territory using his tools. I'll bet he cringes every time some open source developer plunks down $1079 [microsoft.com] for a copy.

    So what happens to QT and Apache and the others when Bill decides to cut them off [slashdot.org]?

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