Two recent articles cover the success of Trolltech and their product Qt 4, on which KDE 4 will be based. 'Trolltech: A case study in open source business' looks at the continued growth of the company based on dual licenced Free Software. The article describes what KDE and Trolltech gain from each other, including user feedback to Trolltech and sponsored developers for KDE. The Australian Computerworld declares that Qt 4 raises the bar for cross-platform app dev tools. They cover the separate modules of Qt 4 and the cross-platform quality, giving it a 9.2 out of 10 approval rating.
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Member since:2005-09-27
You can be sure TrollTech is having a hard time and its only hope now is Qtopia, Qt is simple to overpriced and to over hyped, no one would buy a $3,300 dls toolkit to program for Windows that's why they had to gpl, because no one sane woul buy it with better and cheaper options out there.
Qt is technical good, but not an option to Windows only programers, they have a chance in the multiplatform area but there's also GTK and wxWidgets, that are cheaper and can do the jood well done too.
Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:You can be sure TrollTech is having a hard time
Yeah, they are having such a hard time that they have 4000 paying customers, they are opening new offices in California, China, and Australia - apart from their home in Norway, and in the last year they made a 13.4 million dollars profit in sales.
I wish I had a hard time like this too!
Member since:
2005-09-21
but hey, i'm no programmer and i can't see for myself.
Luckily, I AM a programmer, and I have experience with a lot of toolkits*, and I can reasure you that Qt is undeniably one of the best toolkits out there.
People complain about price, people complain about licensing, and people just outright lie about what Qt is to make it look bad. But in the end, you have to look at the price for Qt (currently $3300 US for one platform) and ask yourself the question:
"How does a company not only survive, but thrive, on the sale of a relatively expensive toolkit when there are lots of free alternatives out there?"
The answer is that the quality of Qt is such that even that high price is worth it. This is not bias on my part, this is simple economics and can't be argued against.
* AWT/Swing, Gtk#, MFC, WinAPI, wxWidgets, Windows.Forms, SWT