Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sun 23rd Feb 2003 20:42 UTC
Red Hat is the undisputed commercial leader when it comes to Linux distros. A few years ago more distros were sharing the Linux market/userbase, but these days Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity. Popularity doesn't always mean quality though (look at Windows9x for example), so after our world's first review of Red Hat 8.0 a few months ago, I wanted to check out the new product, Red Hat 8.1, destined to be released sometime in the next one or two months. I downloaded and installed the third beta of 8.1, codenamed Phoebe, and gave it a whirl. We will be featuring a full review when the final version becomes available, but here is a preliminary report on the current status, accompanied by three screenshots. Update: Added one more screenshot.
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Firstly, $2000 isn't all that much for many companies making software. If you are making internal software (mostly for corporates, IMHO what most software are written for), you don't really have to pay a thing (GPL is fine if your distribution base is limited).
In addition to that, Qt allows you to target 3 platforms at the same time. If source compatibility doesn't make your day, using Qt would still mean easier porting from platform to platform. This is essential for now as Linux is still a very small market (more smaller if you count only people that actually want to pay for software).
Besides, since we are talking about Red Hat, personally I think Red Hat would have gone further if it had gone the KDE way. They decided to support GNOME at the time when KDE was until QPL. Instead they should have invested in Harmony (from the looks of then, there weren't in a hurry to load a desktop). Harmony would also mean that there would be a dominant toolkit on Linux that is actually made for Linux, and not for cross platform usage.
For most companies BTW, $2000 for propreitary software is a small sum. Unless they are planning to make a small tiny weeny profit or have a very small tiny weeny budget. And to add on, while this may seem very objective, Qt would also mean faster time to market (Wine would mean even more faster time to market). Many Win32 developers (well, all the developers I know personally are Win32 ones :-) said they prefer Qt or GTK+ mainly because Qt means faster development (the rest never tried them both :-).
With that said, I think it is stupid to say now that we should go for one toolkit. Many software is already written in that toolkit. What should be done is to change the look of each toolkit to be consistent. And for each app to follow a single HIG (KDE's seems far better to me... but copying the old Macintosh Human Interface Guide (not Aqua) would be better :-).