Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows

Vmware 4.x uses Gtk 1.2

Vmware 5.x (the beta) uses Gtk 2.x

Miguel.

1) pretty much every enterprise desktop distro uses gnome.

2) those cross platform toolkits you mentioned for oo.o and moz use gtk bindings in linux. if they didnt, theming them wouldnt be such a pain for kde people.

3) evolution, the only outlook replacement in the world of linux, is a gtk app.

4) as was mentioned before, vmware is not only gtk, but higified for gnome.

5) i would call gaim, inkscape, and the gimp quite high profile for linux apps. konq is only high profile because of apples use of KHTML, which has nothing to do with widgets.

im not trying to trash qt or anything, i like it alot more then gtk for all kinds of reasons. but my like or dislike of something has nothing to do with how many people are using it (other then +/- 1 i guess). as it stands now, the world of commercial linux is in gnome. whether that is a good or bad thing is a completely different issue.

> are widely considered to be best-of-breed.

Considered by whom ? The GNOME Marketing gang ? If you repeat something thousand times then it still doesn’t make it true. It’s just what you make people believe by lying at them.

> It would be the same ridiculous hope to think that the

> Gimp-ers would ever port to Qt. Or the Gaim-ers.

I consider Kopete to be better than Gaim – but I say this because I used both and not just talk about one.

Sorry I meant to compare Kontact to Evo. Kontact is a nightmare to use.

Apples to Apples.

The last time I’ve looked at OpenOffice.org it was written by using SFC.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 is a work in progress. For the most part, it already looks/feels like a native GTK app. Future versions will be more GTK friendly. Don’t forget that StarOffice has been around longer than GTK itself. There’s just some catching up to do…

The last time I’ve looked at Mozilla it was written by using XUL.

Yes, it uses XUL to extend its own architecture, but its look/feel is native to the platform it runs on: Win32 on Windows, GTK+ on Linux. No QT here.

The last time I’ve looked at Konqueror it was written using QT.</i?

[i]So what apps are you speaking about?

See previous post!

– Evolution

There is kmail and kontact (at least will be in kde 3.4)

youve aparently never worked in an office that uses outlook. kmail and contact != evolution.

– Firefox

There is Opera, konqueror, and iirc there is project porting gecko to qt

firefox is the only browser with a measureable market share compared to internet explorer.

– Adobe Acrobat 7

AFAIR it’s terribly slow (like most gtk apps:), and it looks like new kpdf (from kde 3.4) is the best pdf reader for Linux (it supports continous scrolling)

kpdf being better or worse then adobe acrobat is a different discussion. we are talking about weather or not adocbe acrobat uses gtk.

– OpenOffice.org (not fully GTK)

I thought there was a patch for making it qt/kde

quite possible, i really dont know. what i do know is that sun is part of the gnome foundation, and uses gnome on their operating systems, so the linux oo.o will probably continue to officially use gtk.

– VMWare

VMware is still gtk1, and it’s commercial app

as miguel noted, vmware 5 uses gtk2

– Gaim

Psi is 1231231232x better than gaim

gaim happens to be the defacto standard on linux (just look at what the noob distros pick for their apps, i see gaim all the time, i have never seen psi) the gaim team also happens to be top knotch at reverse engineering the propriatary protocols whenever they try and bump out third parties.

In my mind up until now, QT may have been open-source but it certainly wasn’t free software as it still restricted you to other open-source platforms in order to develop free-software.

Now with this announcement, people can hopefully develop GPL’d applications that run on both Linux and Windows using QT.

Better late than never +++

Now the last, little reason they could have to troll on every QT/KDE related news is gone

Actually, we still have the bload factor. =).

I found it to be a good news, but I may say the Real, Adobe, etc, etc. choise GTk because the LGPL licence, big companies like that doesn’t want to share the code, yet.

So, the licences will benefit only OSS community.

Quote:

“I found it to be a good news, but I may say the Real, Adobe, etc, etc. choise GTk because the LGPL licence, big companies like that doesn’t want to share the code, yet. ”

I don’t think you understand it.

There are two licences. A commercial, and a gpl license.

This means that commercial companies don’t need to release the source code.

And… Adobe does use Qt, as well as GTK.

Why did they use GTK for Reader ?

Most likely because of practical reasons.

It would be more practical, I guess, to update an existing program than to start all over again.

>

The cross-posted accusation above that Trolltech is controlled by Canopy has already been adressed by Eirik Chambe Eng on slashdot:

<

I didn’t say trolltech was *controlled* by canopy, I said that I wish trolltech wasn’t *associated* with canopy.

>

Fact: Canopy and SCO own 4.1 and 1.6 per cent of the Trolltech shares, respectively. This is not exactly a controlling interest. The current ownership structure has

Employees owning 64.7%.

<

Again, you have changed my arguement. You are addressing your own “strawman” arguement. I don’t understand why trolltech has *any* financial involvement with canopy. Why doesn’t trolltech publicly ask canopy/scox to divest? If trolltech really honestly opposing what scox and canopy are doing, then that would be the honorable thing to do.

commercial, or high profile linux apps are not the same as the linuxquestions users choice awards. what you have tells us that people new to linux are pretty much split, or it doesnt really matter to them. regardless, not really relevent.

firefox and oo.o are most definately not gtk. but this conversation is about what kind of support the two toolkits are getting, and both moz and oo.o integrate into gnome, not kde (without modification).

and who said that gtk apps were better? it looks like you didnt read the comments, and instead just decided to flame.

there was only one fellow who made the claim that firefox was a gtk app.

Why did they use GTK for Reader ?

Most likely because of practical reasons.

Qt makes most sense when you develop a new application because you get the benefit of a shared code base between platforms, thus reducing the need for two different development teams.

Acrobat Reader for Unix/Linux is very likely a fully separate application, so they most likely went with the cheapest option.

It actually doesn’t make sense to compare GTK+ and Qt with closed source applications on Linux as Trolltech says most of the clients buy their Windows licences.

The reason that many popular GPL apps are GTK+ apps is because QT was not available on windows under GPL, which immediately means that it can’t be used.

Not quite…the isn’t the first Qt has been dual-licenced on Windows. It was only a little over a year ago that Trolltech removed non-commercial useage on Windows.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/01/0236207

Just to clear something up, I am talking about popularity in my example. DW’s HPD vs LQ poll.

It dosent mean anything.

Well, wadda ya know. This article about trolltech was also on slashdot. I posted my usual gripe about trolltech being associated with canopy. I got a reply from trolltech’s president, claiming that trolltech *has* asked canopy to divest, so now the request is public.

I feel much better about trolltech now. Here is the reply:

>>

We have asked Canopy to divest since SCO turned against Linux. Unfortunately under US and Norwegian law you cannot force someone to sell something. We have sold all our investments in Canopy companies a long time ago. We do not like the fact that Canopy and SCO owns shares in Trolltech. The irony is that they became shareholders because the old Canopy/Caldera wanted us to continue to create good Linux software. Canopy/SCO owns a very small share of Trolltech and has no control or influence whatsoever on the strategy and operations of Trolltech. Trolltech is controlled by it’s employees. Eirik Chambe-Eng (President, Trolltech) —–

<<

Quote:

“Actually, the main reason remains: the future of QT is controlled by a single, commercial entity. What if they decide to stop development on QT?”

I can’t find the article on dot.kde.org at the moment, but I read that if Qt was stopped, it would be released as lgpl. Not sure though, as I can’t find that article.

Only KDE is stupid enough to make their libs GPL

Last time I checked any code in kdelibs has to be licenced LGPL or GPL compatible BSD style.

But maybe you are talking about some other project named KDE, not the one on kde.org

<<I agree it’s not the be all end all of results, but this is a fairly extensive survey of Linux users>>

Er, not really. Do you know the demographic of LQ users? I don’t thats my problem.

<<All this talk about “high profile” applications. Well what is high profile? The apps that people use are high profile, just because something is put out by Adobe does not make it high profile. >>

Read my post a few pages back.

<QUOTE>

I think the point hes making is that the :

-most popular

-most user visble

-most commerical

apps are done in GTK+.

</QUOTE>

<<how many commercial desktop applications for Linux are there that are worth money?>>

You mean like every Linux game installer (UT series, Quake series Doom3, etc)

Adobe Reader 7 and Real 10 are a pretty big deal too, buddy.

To sum it up, commerical support in Linux is pretty limited, but what is avaliable is primiarly done in GTK.

I was curious about Acrobat Reader 7 that people were saying uses GTK. I remember the ugly, unusable version 5, so having a modern one would be nice.

You can’t even download it yet! Apparently there was a prerelease program, so some people got an early beta. But as far as the general public is concerned, there is now no way to download Acrobat Reader 7 for Linux.

Software that isn’t available doesn’t count, people.

So now because I’m not a large organization, I don’t matter? Why should I be forced into the GPL?

You are not forced into anything. Just continue to use whatever toolkit you’re using if you don’t want to apps to be GPL (for whatever reasons).

You want to use Qt code? You play by their rules. As other have said, enough people don’t have problem with this. As a user, I certainly don’t!

Read my post a few pages back.

</QUOTE>

Sheesh. I addressed this. Most popular seems to be even or slight favour to QT. Most user visible is the same thing. Whether you like the LQ numbers or not, they’re better than anything you’ve come up with (which is nothing).

Most commercial, I already agreed GTK is used more here. Why are you even arguing? I’m just saying there’s not many commercial apps worth using on linux yet.

You mean like every Linux game installer (UT series, Quake series Doom3, etc)

Adobe Reader 7 and Real 10 are a pretty big deal too, buddy.

Installers? Please, an app that’s used for a whole 2 minutes hardly counts. Even so, lets count “every Linux game installer”, oh, we’re at about 3 from that category.

Adobe Reader 7 is not released, Real 10’s marketshare among Linux users is miniscule compared to the more established players like Mplayer and xine.

So now because I’m not a large organization, I don’t matter? Why should I be forced into the GPL?

No, I said, if you don’t like it. MOVE ON. Noone is forcing you to use QT. Use GTK if you can’t afford/dont want QT!

Proper licences for kdelibs according to this

http://developer.kde.org/policies/licensepolicy.html

>Sheesh. I addressed this. Most popular seems to be even or slight favour to QT. Most user visible is the same thing. Whether you like the LQ numbers or not, they’re better than anything you’ve come up with (which is nothing).

most popular and most visible are not the same thing. i would venture to say muine is more popular then rhythmbox, but rhythmbox is far more user visible. no matter how much you may not like it, gaim is far more user visible then psi, or even kopete.

and the lq numbers mean nothing, thats like taking a /. poll on operating systems, then using those numbers to extrapolate popularity. any site that caters to a specific demographic cant be used to even vaguely justify something general.

>Most commercial, I already agreed GTK is used more here. Why are you even arguing? I’m just saying there’s not many commercial apps worth using on linux yet.

that is where this whole discussion started. we are talking about how maybe now qt will get more use by the big visible, popular, and commercial projects.

>Installers? Please, an app that’s used for a whole 2 minutes hardly counts. Even so, lets count “every Linux game installer”, oh, we’re at about 3 from that category.

so what you are saying is that gtk is not used by more commercial projects in linux because even though they pretty much all use it, there arnt that many of them yet? sorry, a bit confused…

>Adobe Reader 7 is not released, Real 10’s marketshare among Linux users is miniscule compared to the more established players like Mplayer and xine.

you are totally right, see my comments near the top about how visibility and popularity are not the same thing.

Applications like the Gimp, Evolution, Firefox, etc. are widely considered to be best-of-breed.

—-

I dont dispute Firefox as being “widely considered best”. (I leave aside my personal consideration about the best browser).

But I dispute Gimp: Photoshop for sure is more widely considered best of breed, no? Ah, so you want to limit the contest to Linux platform only? Fair enough: Gimp is the King. But Krita is the one that will overthrow the King sooner or later. It is coming closer by the week…..

Re. Evolution: it is more buggy and unstable than ever. And why is it that Evolution got beaten by KMail/Kontact in the recent poll conducted by Linuxquestions.org ? Mind you, this is not a KDE-dominated website — last year Evolution clearly won over KMail/Kontact, but this year they lost. So much for “widely considered best of breed” in that category.

While Karbon and KMail may be capable applications, they do not come to mind as defacto replacements for Photoshop or Outlook.

—-

Are you saying that Gimp is coming to mind as a *replacement* for Photoshop?? Get serious.

Are you saying that Evolution may replace Outlook? OK, maybe. But so does Kontact, and even quicker — now that Qt4 will be GPL’d on Windows.

Oh, and what about Evolution’s connectivity?? Kontact 3.4 can be used with a whole slew of different groupware servers:

* [ http://www.kolab.org/ ] Kolab

* [ http://www.suse.com/en/business/products/openexchange/ ] SUSE Linux Openexchange Server (SLOX)

* [ http://www.egroupware.org/ ] eGroupWare/phpGroupWare

* [ http://www.opengroupware.org/ ] OpenGroupware.org

* [ http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/ ] Novell Groupwise

* [ http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/ ] Microsoft Exchange 2000/Microsofte SharePoint Server

I don’t know about Evolution — maybe they are even on par on that count. But Kontact is better in that it is modular: Evolution is a bloated hog of various code fragments, glued together to a now monolithic block that cannot be separated and is difficult to maintain.

In Kontact, I can run each of its components as standalone app, if I dont like the integration, and I can draw in any number of the many components into its integrative shell: KMail for mail, KNode for newsgroups, aKregator for RSS feeds, KAddressbook for Contacts, KNotes for reminder scribbles, KWeather for weather reports,… a calendar, a todo-list, a journal, a PDA synchronization tool.

Can Evolutions do that?

It’s no surprise that Adobe picked GTK for Acrobat 7, or that Real chose GTK for Realplayer.

—-

Adobe also picked Qt for their “Photoshop Elements” application. It will be no surprise if Adobe and Real will change their past toolkit decisions in the future. And it will be no surprise if more commercial companies started to migrate away from MFC and adopt Qt.

Scribus and K3b are the only best-of-breed applications that come to mind that run on KDE.

—-

The only ones? What about these:

* Printing: KDEPrint and kprinter (my own estimation)

* Desktop Environment: KDE (as backed up by number of distros defaulting to it and by numerous user polls)

* GUI Editor: Kate (in recent polls only beaten by Vim)

* Web Development: Quanta (in recent polls better than Bluefish)

* Rapid Application Development: Kommander (no comparable tool at all on no platform)

* Development IDE: KDevelop (lets you even develop Gnome applications), and Umbrello (UML modelling)

* Scientific Application: KStars (lets you control professional radio telescopes)

* Professional Data Processing: Kst (data plotting and viewing program)

* Central Administration of Large Desktop Installations: Kiosk and Kiosktool (no other desktop environment has anything that comes even close to KDE Kiosk)

* Audioplay: amaroK (need I say more?)

KDE is translated into more languages than Gnome. This is not said as an argument in a “pissing contest” about “Whose ‘***’ is larger?” — but it says something about what is “widely considered worth of a translation”.

#######

In conclusion, let me say: it is completely irrelevant, in the long run, wether KDE/KDEapps are better than GNOME/GNOMEapps or vice versa. What matters for world domination is if one of them (or even both) succeeds in becoming better than Windows/Windows-apps.

Do we agree on that last point?

so what you are saying is that gtk is not used by more commercial projects in linux because even though they pretty much all use it, there arnt that many of them yet? sorry, a bit confused…

Confused is right. Where did I say any of this? I didn’t.

*sigh* Well, one more time:

GTK is used for more commercial apps, but commercial desktop apps are not significant on Linux yet.

You spend so much time talking about the demographic of LQ. So what is it? As I understand, the demographic is linux users, so asking Linux users about their choice in Linux applications seems perfectly reasonable. You cannot compare this with a slashdot poll on operating systems, since slashdot has an obvious bias towards one operating system. Please, show me how LQ has a bias towards QT applications.

that is where this whole discussion started. we are talking about how maybe now qt will get more use by the big visible, popular, and commercial projects.

visible, popular != commercial

Your arguments on how visible is not the same as popular are not convincing. Sure they’re not the same thing, but there is a very strong correlation between the two.

Guys, please pay attention to the article. Yes, really.

There are people who prefer Qt and there are those who prefer GTK. Those who prefer Qt now get to run it on Windows as well.

End of story.

On the other hand, Qt rocks and I am happy to see it on Windows. It would be great to see more FLOSS taking over the mindshare of Windows users.

im a linux user for years. i like both kde and gnome.

skype is a Qt app yeah!!

amarok yeah!

but i like gnome more. gaim, xchat, evolution…

ive experienced with various toolkit.

for me QT is the best followed by WX then gtk.

and im using kdevelop in gnome wat a blasphemy!

i hate outlook, and i hate evolution. i do like kontact.

however, thats completely irrelivent, because as much as i hate outlook, my boss loves it more, which is the reason it will alwas be installed and running. outlook has gotta be the most loved application in existance by middle management, evo looks and acts in the same way, kontact doesnt. as for support for multiple groupware servers, you know as well as i do that means nothing. outlook (the biggest by FAR) connects to exchange, so thats the only one that really matters. again, not the way i like it, not the way it should be, but the way it is.

i hate photoshop, and i loath the gimp.

im not a graphics artist, so all the power and flexibilty it offers to someone trained in the fine art of computer graphics translates into nothing but interface bloat for me. i dont need a hundreth of the features available, and all they do is slow me down or confuse me when i am attempting to do what (limited) image editing i do. paintshop pro is more my style. but once again, we arnt talking about the product that is the most useful, or even best, but the one that is the most widly used, and considered to be the best.

once again, lq polls can tell us what linux newbies like the most, and thats about it. also, noone has said qt apps are worse then gtk apps. all we are talking about is what is used by the visible, popular, and commercial projects.

One thing I never understood:

* KDE is using Qt

* Qt is available under the GPL, the QPL or a commercial license. To my knowledge, KDE is using it under the GPL.

* using GPL licensed libraries in your product requires that your product is also licensed unter the GPL

How can the KDE libs be licensed under the LGPL if Qt is under the GPL then? Am I missing something? Is KDE using Qt under the QPL license?