OSNews

I believe Free software is a great thing: one of the greatest feats of human engineering, with millions of hours of work that are being donated to humanity for free, forever. That can only be good.

However, I don't buy into Stallman's idea that software *has* to be free. It is nice to write a book and donate it to the world, but hardly anybody argues that all literature should be free and that authors should never receive any money in return. There has to be a way for those that want to monetize their work for whatever reason they find, and they should be reasonably free to decide how to do it.

With Trolltechs previous model, writing closed-source software was only possible by paying A LOT of money per programmer seat, which not only was only feasible for large companies, but also got into the hot waters of license management. Suits them right, many would say, for pushing the closed-software ecosystem.

Of course this was fully within Trolltech's rights. They have the same right as anyone else to cash on their work, and they even provided a faultless way for free software writers to use it. Those who defend that model say the price was worth it, because you got great tech support. Well, then I'm sure that tech support business is not going to be any worse now.


I'm sure, though, that this was a barrier for many software writers that Nokia has, extremely generously, removed. This puts Qt squarely against GTK+ in the eyes of any company that writes software, not pushing it anymore to decide in square one whether all or part or none of their software is going to be open or closed.

I think this is going to be very good for Qt/KDE, and the GTK+/Gnome camp will have to put a lot more wood in the furnace to keep the competition going, which should also be good. So let competition begin! Or rather, let the next round of competition begin!