From the DOT: The KDE on Cygwin project, which produces ports of Qt and KDE to Windows using Cygwin and Cygwin/XFree86, announced that the native Win32 port of the Qt3 GPL library has been started, mainly driven by Richard Lärkäng at the moment. The plan is to provide a base for a future native KDE port. Several screenshots of the ongoing port are available. Richard is seeking developers, who don’t have access to the original Qt Windows sources, to help him.
Native Win32 Port of Qt3 GPL Started
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Most excellent news. I’m sure Trolltech can’t be terribly happy though
Trolltech puts in thousands of man-hours into the product, is good enough to release the source and then some jerky comes along and says, hey, I’ll make it free.
What a jackass.
What’s the Legality of this project?
My understanding of Trolltech’s license is that it is GPLed only for use on specific platforms. If Trolltech hasn’t released it for use on Windows…then is this legal…IANAL, but I’d stay away from this project at least until the Cease and Desist letters from the TrollTech lawyers clear.
From the moment they have a version of their software as GPL, then developers are free to port that specific version in any platfrom they wish to, as long it remains GPL. I don’t see any legal reasons, the GPL allows that. If Trolltech didn’t want that to happen, they should have release the X11 and Mac versions of their QT as a different license where explicity would say to not port it to other platforms.
Folks, this is really okay! The GPL’d unix/X11 source is being ported to Windows. This is:
A.) Entirely legal. The code is GPL’d. It can be modified, ported, etc. I repeat, this is completely legal.
B.) No biggie for Trolltech. Most Windows software isn’t GPL’d anyways. I don’t see many Windows developers using this instead of the non-GPL’d version. At least now Windows developers will at least have access to a free version to play around with. Who knows? This might encourage Trolltech to release their own GPL’d version (which would probably be better than this small effort).
PS- For those too lazy to read the website, this will be using native windows graphics calls.
First of all Trolltech has a free version of Qt for Windows alongside their “for pay version.” I know because I’m using it right now to learn Qt for personal use. The link is below:
http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/noncomm.html
Second of all, Trolltech gives away Qt for non-commercial use on all platforms. I know that if I ever decide to develop commercially with Qt I fully intend to buy their commercial package. It is very well put together and reasonably priced.
Its really not a big deal. Qt/Mac is already GPL’ed. Making a GPL’ed Qt available for Windows simply means that Open Source (and usually free) Windows apps can now use Qt. Trolltech shouldn’t be losing any revenue, because they make their money from closed source commercial developers, like Adobe, who wouldn’t GPL’ed their products even if a GPL’ed Qt was available on Windows.
PS> It would be unwise of Trolltech to sent cease and desist letters. First of all, they have no legal basis for it. The GPL explicitly allows for this sort of thing. Trolltech knew what they were getting themselves into when they GPL’ed Qt. Second, it wouldn’t be in their best interest. KDE and other OSS apps are a big advertisement for Qt. If these apps are available on Windows, Trolltech simply gets more exposure, at no real cost to themselves.
With this effort, I think that the Opensource community (whatever that is) should get together to develope a Windows XP theme slicer for all semi-native platforms. For instance, Java Swing, GTK+ and now Qt Native GPL for Windows all provide themes. One can create a theme for either of these toolkits and make it look like XP luna (the default Windows XP theme). What happens when I am running the Toothpaste theme from XP Style?
What we need is a simple program that will poll the Windows theme engine to see what theme is running. Then the program can extract the elements from the proprietary theme format and lay the elements out in a directory on the file system in PNG format with a naming scheme that tells toolkit developers what line and corner goes onto which widget.
I think this plan is so simple and long over-due and would really allow developers more freedom to use whatever toolkit they like. Comments?
“Trolltech shouldn’t be losing any revenue, because they make their money from closed source commercial developers, like Adobe, who wouldn’t GPL’ed their products even if a GPL’ed Qt was available on Windows.”
Well, AFAIK all those inhouse Win32 apps using Qt could use a GPL’ed Win32 version without paying a single cent to Trolltech.
I guess these companies still want and can afford technical support.
What we need is a simple program that will poll the Windows theme engine to see what theme is running. Then the program can extract the elements from the proprietary theme format and lay the elements out in a directory on the file system in PNG format with a naming scheme that tells toolkit developers what line and corner goes onto which widget.
This is only necessary with toolkits like Swing which emulate the native GUI rather than using native widgets. The problem is solved by simply using native widgets, which will be rendered using the current visual style. For Java, there’s SWT…
This is only Qt2, not Qt3.
My question is, will this allow compilation of QT under windows using cygwin/gcc?
Right now if you develop on windows using Qt you have to use MSVC, gcc just flat won’t work (very sad).
If this does work reliably I wonder how that would effect the licensing considering that commercial users could need only purchase only an X11 license and build/distribute applications on Windows.
I think it depends on licenses on the patches.
Microsoft puts in thousands of man-hours into Windows, is good enough to release free SDKs and compilers, then some jerkies come along and say, hey, we’ll make free OSs and Desktop environments…
What bunch of jackasses.
Hmmm… or, maybe your comment was rather inane…
Microsoft puts in thousands of man-hours into Windows, is good enough to release free SDKs and compilers, then some jerkies come along and say, hey, we’ll make free OSs and Desktop environments…
What bunch of jackasses.
Hmmm… or, maybe your comment was rather inane…
Those people who developed the free desktops (KDE, Gnome) have done so entirely without Microsoft’s help. They didn’t use Microsofts compilers, SDKs etc.
These people who are now developing qt for Windows DO use Trolltech’s code.
So your comment is the one that doesn’t make sense.
And while it’s absolutely legal to port GPLed software to any platform, Trolltech will indeed lose money when this port is ready. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have stopped to release free versions of qt/Win after version 2.x after all. There is no technical problem preventing them from releasing qt/Win 3 under GPL.
It’s sad to see more free software on non-free platforms.
inane – Without contents; empty; void of sense or intelligence; purposeless; pointless; characterless; useless.
MakeSomeSense (IP: —.gen.twtelecom.net) i’m thinking was sarcastic, so hes on your side
I am not a fan of QT or KDE … but it’s always good to see another library ported over to windows. Another choice for developers … especially those who cannot afford VC, they can code GUI applications using GCC or some other compiler.
Also with QT ported, it could mean another step of porting KDE over to windows. There are many replacement shells for windows, there are many users who wouldn’t mind having KDE as their shell … I just am not one of them
Why oh why on gods green earth would you want to use GCC for windows development? You do *know* that MSVC blows GCC out of the water when it comes to Windows development? Not to mention that GCC is slower then a turd roling up hill for…well… for everything…
Trolltech is a great company that creates a great toolkit. Most of the software in the world is bespoke, either for clients or in-house. Almost all Qt’s licensee’s use it for this purpose. It makes no difference to people creating bespoke software whether it’s proprietary or GPL. A GPL port would cost Qt a lot of money, endanger the company, endanger the communities that rely on it’s EXCELLENT products and frankly show a total lack of respect or consideration for a decent hard-working company that has actively worked WITH open-source efforts in the past.
Remember kiddies, the GPL was NEVER about free beer. Qt’s licenses have stayed very faithful to the spirit of GPL – on Unix & Mac. If you write GPL software, Qt is free, if you write proprietary software you pay. The problem is there is no clause in the GPL to get around the bespoke issue. Qt addressed this with their pay or non-commercial use licenses, what’s happening now is people are trying to weasel out of paying, which goes against the spirit of the GPL, and is frankly dishonourable.
Actually, recent benchmarks show that gcc generates *faster* code than MSVC in certain instances. So be careful about what you consider “blasting” out of the water.
> It’s sad to see more free software on non-free platforms.
I really dislike this attitude. Where is it written that application developers are bound by the licensing choices of OS developers? I think it’s perfectly legitimate to write and use free software on Windows and commercial software on Linux.
There is no moral dilemma in releasing commercial software – it is your time, effort, and money that made it, and just like any creative person, you have the right to sell it or give it away. Conversely, there is no reason you shouldn’t be generous and release free software on a commercial platform – it still benefits the community at large, and allows other people to learn from and expand upon your work.
Children think everything is black and white. Grownups can see shades of grey. It’s time for the open source fanatics to grow up.
Well, as the saying goes, “Don’t jump into the fire, you might get burned.” As much as I dislike Microsoft, they were right when they said the GPL was viral. I personally try to stay far away from it. But if one wishes to release something under the GPL, they have to expect this or something like it to happen. If they don’t like the thought of someone porting their work and losing money by it, then they shouldn’t have released their work under the GPL to begin with. Now, they have no recourse to prevent it or stop it.
Why? Every app that links to these libs needs to be GPL or compatible. It’s not allowed to link to these libs and keep the application closed source. Do you really think that anybody paid Qt license fees in the past, just to release a closed source freeware app for Windows? I doubt anybody did.
Everybody who wants to make money with his Qt Windows app does certainly want to keep the source closed. Those people are still required to pay the fees to TrollTech.
I think running KDE on Windows would be very cool but it would hurt KDE and Linux. The heart of desktop Linux is KDE itself. If this is done professionaly, porting it to Windows may drive away users wanting to switch from Windows to Linux as the free Windows alternative programs written for KDE will run on Windows natively. My opinion only.
http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/kde3/
It doesn’t work too well, but it does work.
> My question is, will this allow compilation of QT under
> windows using cygwin/gcc?
You have been able to compile QT/*nix under cygwin with gcc for ages. Probably since cygwin was first POSIX compliant. If you want to run KDE applications under win32, cygwin is a far better option. However, I haven’t used win32 at all for nearly half a decade so some of this could be out of date. aka “forgive me if I’m wrong”.
> Remember kiddies, the GPL was NEVER about free
> beer. Qt’s licenses have stayed very faithful to the
> spirit of GPL – on Unix & Mac. If you write GPL
> software, Qt is free, if you write proprietary software
> you pay. The problem is there is no clause in the GPL
> to get around the bespoke issue. Qt addressed this
> with their pay or non-commercial use licenses, what’s
> happening now is people are trying to weasel out of
> paying, which goes against the spirit of the GPL, and
> is frankly dishonourable.
Before I begin, could I just say that you either work for Trolltech, have a friend who works for Trolltech or have invested in Trolltech (have they floated?).
What Trolltech have done for the free software community is somewhat honorable. Taking the successful commercial product that they had and releasing it under the GPL takes a lot of guts. Guts that other companies have shown ALSO. Companies like Apple (Darwin), IBM (JFS, *cough*SCO Code*cough*), Sun (OpenOffice, NetBeans, Jave to some extent), SGI (XFS). Admittedly these were not all released under the GPL but similar licences such as the BSD licence were used.
Forking was a risk that these companies were willing to take when they released the code of their software. But surprisingly, no-one has forked OpenOffice, NetBeans or JFS. Do you know why that is? It’s because the companies who released them did so without any other implicit restrictions. Trolltech were foolish not to realise that it would only be a matter of time before someone picked up the QT source and DID WHAT THE LICENCE PERMITS THEM TO DO with it.
On WindowsXP, Qt already uses Visual Styles for Luna.
The GPL isn’t viral. Trolltech put their code under the GPL. Their option was to either GPL Trolltech, or have KDE lose support in the OSS community. They chose the one that would maintain their highest profile user.
Also, I think some people are confused about the GPL. The GPL does allow you to use GPL’ed code in internal projects, without releasing the source. It does *not* however, allow you to distribute to clients without GPL’ing the code. This last bit is important. Only the largest shops can afford to develop all of their code in-house. Most people pay consultants or programming shops to write their internal programs for them. Because of the GPL, a consultant handing code over to the buyer constitutes distribution, and the software must then be GPL’ed. And the large companies that do their programming in-house wouldn’t give a blink about paying Trolltech license fees, if only for the developer support program. I wouldn’t worry about Trolltech either way. Most of their money comes from large commercial developers (like Adobe) and embedded developers that use Qt in consumer devices.
> surprisingly, no-one has forked OpenOffice,
Ximian forked it. It’s not a “hostile” fork, but it’s a fork.
> Do you know why that is?
> It’s because the companies who
> released them did so without
> any other implicit restrictions.
IIRC in the past it was required to assign the copyright to Sun, if you want to work on OpenOffice.
But I hope this port progresses and matures.
While it is true that this is dangerous for TrollTech,
one has also need to admit that Qt greatly benefited
from KDE and the opensource community, by boosting its popularity amongst developers, and getting so much feedback. Also that way they made sure that no opensource
Qt-clones would be made.
But I’d like to be able to port my Qt-Based apps to windows without having to use Cygwin. And in either way, either the Qt win32 port happens, or a native win32 xlib implementation will make this port also an easy thing to do. It’s just a matter of time.
I always thought it was a mistake on the part of Troll Tech to let themselves be intimidated into GPLing Qt. They had the best product going, and releasing it sure hasn’t earned them any gratitude from the people who were whining in the first place. They would have been just as successful, if not more so, if they had continued marketing their product just as it was. And KDE would still be great desktop. They should have just gone about their business, and told the whiners where to put their hat. Troll Tech certainly wouldn’t be out anything for their lack of patronage. They’d be better off with a few users that are actually willing to pay for what they use, than they are accomodating every freeloader on earth. That crowd is never satisfied, anyway. Why even bother to try?
Why oh why on gods green earth would you want to use GCC for windows development?
Because when you’re programming with Qt, you’re not doing “windows development”. You’re doing cross-platform development. You typically want all your code to run on Windows, MacOS, and X11, so all those Windows-specific features don’t get used anyway. It’s a completely different environment.
I always thought it was a mistake on the part of Troll Tech to let themselves be intimidated into GPLing Qt. They had the best product going…
In the world of APIs, having the “best product” means very little. APIs, like human languages, are valued primarily in proportion to the number of people that use them — not according to any intrinsic quality of the API. (See the Windows API for a good example of this). Qt is not the first cross platform GUI toolkit. There have been literally dozens of them introduced over the years, and sold to commercial developers at fairly high prices. Why is Qt now one of the most popular toolkits used, while these other packages waste away in obscurity? Not because Qt is a better product (although it is quite good), but because it was made available to the open source community. By GPL’ing their product, Qt allowed the open source hordes to actually use it. Every programmer that becomes familiar with using Qt for his open-source projects is someone who is likely to recommend it to his boss at work. Said boss will then buy a commercial Qt license (since the company doesn’t want to GPL their own software). That is why Qt has strong sales, while many other GUI toolkit companies are out of business.
Therefore, GPL’ing Qt was an extremely smart decision on TrollTech’s part. It’s not without its risks, to be sure, but it differentiated Qt from the pack and got TrollTech where it is today.
==The GPL does allow you to use GPL’ed code in internal projects, without releasing the source. It does *not* however, allow you to distribute to clients without GPL’ing the code.==
Nitpick. You can restribute your application as long as it doesn’t include any GPL code. For instance, you could make your users download the GPL libraries themselves after selling them the application. It is a cheap way to do business, but the GPL leaves that open.
Because MSVC is a non c++ standards compliant piece of garbage that chokes on template code at the drop of a hat?
They still haven’t fixed the idiotic for loop scoping issue.
Why oh why on gods green earth would you want to use GCC for windows development? You do *know* that MSVC blows GCC out of the water when it comes to Windows development? Not to mention that GCC is slower then a turd roling up hill for…well… for everything…
>The heart of desktop Linux is KDE itself.
I prefer Gnome myself…
And I don’t think it’ll hurt Linux at all. Does KDE running on MacOS X hurt Linux?
I doubt many people will use it anyways. Just us geeks who try everything at least once.
> It’s sad to see more free software on non-free platforms.
I really dislike this attitude. Where is it written that application developers are bound by the licensing choices of OS developers? I think it’s perfectly legitimate to write and use free software on Windows and commercial software on Linux.
There is no moral dilemma in releasing commercial software – it is your time, effort, and money that made it, and just like any creative person, you have the right to sell it or give it away. Conversely, there is no reason you shouldn’t be generous and release free software on a commercial platform – it still benefits the community at large, and allows other people to learn from and expand upon your work.
Actually there are very good reasons to not release OSS software for Windows. Americans are so hypocritical they can recognize the harm a monopoly can cause and label a company a monopoly then do nothing to dismantle it or prevent its harmful actions. Can you imagine the harm that would be caused to Microsoft if it didn’t have Mozilla, Apache, Open Office, the GIMP, XFree86/Cygwin and all the other free software? If that software was only available on OSS platforms like OSX, BSDs and Linux it might tip the scales on some purchasing decisions. It should be obvious by now capitalists lie to you.
Q. Is Microsoft and commercial software now more stable, secure and faster than OSS like they promised? And is there as much commercial software available for OSS as there is OSS available for proprietary systems?
A. No. Adobe and the other commercial corps have drawn a very clear line. And they intend to spread FUD while promoting their products on only their proprietary platforms as usual. They have entire departments of their business organized to do just that.
Don’t kid yourself. Seeing shades of grey might mean you’re color blind.
That crowd is never satisfied, anyway. Why even bother to try?
Because that crowd will happily code their way around you and forget you ever existed. You are either with us or against us.
For instance, you could make your users download the GPL libraries themselves after selling them the application. It is a cheap way to do business, but the GPL leaves that open.
No, actually, you can not link to GPL libraries if you intend to release a non-GPL binary. You can only do that if the libraries are licensed with the LGPL. The Lesser or Library GNU Public License. The GPL requires all software that makes use of its code to be distributed with the GPL, no exceptions. The LGPL does not. Its more BSD-like.
this is to say that you can not link to a GPL library, but you can still make use of a GPL binary, passing it data, etc. You can use GPL software like you can use commercial software for any purpose. But when you distribute the software you must make sure that any software using GPL code, functions, etc. is also licensed with the GPL. Your commercial licensed software can run a GPL binary and pass it data, for example, but it could not link to it and make use of its functions/methods. And even in that case you would be required to redistribute the GPL software, binary in this case, within the guidelines of the GPL, giving source code of any modifications you have made to the GPL software to any customers upon request.
Its so frustrating when you almost have to be a lawyer just to understand what you can and cannot do with software, when all you wanted to do was write code and have fun. Whoever was the moron that invented capitalism and copyright, may him and all his believers live a long and boring life spent reading legal documents.