Thinking on the issue of licensing and KDE, an old hymn came to the mind of OfB's Tim Butler. "As it was in the beginning, is now, And ever shall beÂ…" Yes, the issue of licensing has been a perennial problem for the Free/Open Source desktop and he suggests its biggest licensing issue remains: the GPL. Read more at OfB.biz
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Member since:Actually there is a lot non-GPL GTK-software and have been for a long time, examples are the Yahoo and AOL official Linux/Unix chat clients, the Netscape browser, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Applixware Office used GTK, the Opera browser shipping with the Nokia 770 is using GTK, Wing IDE, Real Player and more.
Member since:2005-07-06
Actually there is a lot non-GPL GTK-software and have been for a long time, examples are the Yahoo and AOL official Linux/Unix chat clients, the Netscape browser, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Applixware Office used GTK, the Opera browser shipping with the Nokia 770 is using GTK, Wing IDE, Real Player and more.
Fair enough. But there's nothing like the shareware scene you have for Mac OS X. I was pretty surprised when I started getting the Mac magazines (Mac Format, MacWorld) here in the UK and discovered that most of the software on the cover disks is either shareware, demo or by-agreement free beer. The vast majority of GTK software is open-source, and even Netscape is just a closed variant of a free package (Firefox).
Member since:2005-07-05
Yes, there is NEROLinux, using GTK as toolkit. And I would say that NERO is a commercial product...
http://www.nero.com/eng/NeroLINUX.html
AndyZ
Member since:
2005-07-06
I agree about the price of commercial licences for Qt - they are staggeringly high. But I suppose a big software house like Adobe has more than enough money, and they rely on those that don't being able to persuade a venture capital company to lend them a relatively small sum of money. Let's face it, ordinary people find loans for houses in London, and they cost upwards of UKP 200,000 - Qt only costs €2,630 for one platform, and twice that for all three.
Anyway what happened to all the benefits of open source? The wider range of eyes leading to bugs getting fixed quicker and more security? Anyway, where are all the little software houses developing low-cost closed software for the GTK toolkit? I've never seen closed commercial software for GTK, nor any shareware scene for Gnome. I don't think the community would accept it.