Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th Jan 2009 09:54 UTC, submitted by Almar
After Nokia purchsed Trolltech last year, doubts arose about how Nokia would handle the dual licensing model of Qt, the advanced cross-platform toolkit which lies at the base of the KDE Free software desktop. As it turns out, these doubts were unfounded, as Nokia today announced it's going to add the LGPL to Qt's licensing model, starting with Qt 4.5.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Finally; I feel vindicated.
You haven't been vindicated at all. People have consistently missed the point that you don't get 'owt for nowt'. The license fees that have gone into Qt have made it into the development toolkit that it is by paying for people to work on it full-time and invest their hard effort. It remains to be seen whether Nokia's other activities are enough to sustain Qt at the same level.
I've been pointing out for a long time now that many small, indpendent commercial developers would ignore KDE as long as they were required to license Qt from Trolltech.
I doubt whether it will make too much difference for quite some time. Most small ISVs pay some sizeable sums of money for Visual Studio, MSDN and lots of third-party components and it's a large market. It does remove the rants from the bedroom programmer I suppose, but while they tend to look like a vocal majority around here, they're not. This does also increase license compatibility, which is probably the most positive thing.
Additionally, very, very, very few if any ISVs are writing for KDE or even for Gnome and GTK regardless of the license, so it's all a mute point right now.
Thank you Nokia for fulfilling a dream of mine; KDE is now finally a viable commercial option for many developers.
Not yet. There's an awful lot of other things that have to be in place to really achieve that, and the license is a small part of it.
KDE will have reached parity with Windows
You do realise of course that everyone is paying for development on Windows through Windows license fees, as well as through software that hangs off it regardless of whether they make money from development or not? KDE is already freely available. ;-)
Edited 2009-01-15 15:54 UTC
Member since:2006-10-02
Member since:2005-07-06
You haven't been vindicated at all.
Yes, I have. The Qt people themselves are saying exactly what I am here; that they believe doing this will significantly increase adoption (both commercial and non-commercial).
I doubt whether it will make too much difference for quite some time. Most small ISVs pay some sizeable sums of money for Visual Studio, MSDN and lots of third-party components and it's a large market.
I'm not sure where you get your data from, but the small ISVs I know do not.
It does remove the rants from the bedroom programmer I suppose, but while they tend to look like a vocal majority around here, they're not.
Insulting other people (based on false assumptions) is an emotional, not logical argument.
"KDE will have reached parity with Windows
You do realise of course that everyone is paying for development on Windows through Windows license fees, as well as through software that hangs off it regardless of whether they make money from development or not? KDE is already freely available. ;-) "
No, because chances are people developing for Windows already paid that license *whether they wanted to or not* when they bought their computer or to be a user of Windows applications. The argument that Windows developers pay Windows licensing fees is poppycock; developers pay Windows license fees to be a *user*. Whereas with Qt, you had to pay to be a developer. There is a stark difference.
Edited 2009-01-19 00:08 UTC
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Finally; I feel vindicated.
I've been pointing out for a long time now that many small, indpendent commercial developers would ignore KDE as long as they were required to license Qt from Trolltech.
Thank you Nokia for fulfilling a dream of mine; KDE is now finally a viable commercial option for many developers.
No longer will commercial KDE developers have to pay another company for the right to build applications; finally KDE will have reached parity with Windows, Mac OS X, GNOME and other desktop platforms.