Qt's success

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Qt's success
by jaykayess on Wednesday 01/Sep/2004, @07:23

I was under the impression that *Windows* development was Trolltech's bread-and-butter-- most of their paid, commercial licenses come from Windows developers: http://www.trolltech.com/success/index.html

To be honest, I think that Trolltech has been exceeding generous to open their toolkit up for free development on Linux and OS/X, and I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize. Trolltech actually pays some of its employees to work on KDE, so that commerical profit is literally feeding back into OSS.

Perhaps the issue simply is that some people dislike all commercial software?

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Re: Qt's success
by Ingo Klöcker on Wednesday 01/Sep/2004, @08:55

What do you expect to happen if Trolltech releases Qt for Windows under the GPL? Will suddenly all licensees start using the GPL version? Do you really expect them all to make their software free in order to be able to use the GPL version? Or do you think they will secretly use the GPL version for their commercial products?
Only for inhouse products a GPL'd Qt would be a possible alternative to the commercial version, but for commercial products it's not.

Where would Trolltech be today if KDE wouldn't exist?
Or the other way around: Where would KDE be today if it would run on Windows since several years? Where would people want to go today if KDE was available for Windows?

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Re: Qt's success
by teatime on Wednesday 01/Sep/2004, @11:11

>Only for inhouse products a GPL'd Qt would be a possible alternative to the commercial version, but for commercial products it's not.

That's still quite a risk given that something like 90% of all commercial development is said to be for inhouse use.

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Re: Qt's success
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 01/Sep/2004, @16:28

I don't know the exact statistics of Qt in house development, but I know they have had a great deal of success on Windows and that roughly 80% of software development is said to be in house. So this is a huge number no matter how you look at it. Personally I trust that the people at Trolltech are making decisions that are good for free software as well as their business, and I can see how both benefit from our relationship. If I thought it was advantageous to argue for free software on Windows I would, but I don't.

The FSFE statement seems ludicrous to me, because it could just as easily have been "we have a problem with supporting free software on Windows because it props up an operating system that is hostile to free software in general and since we believe that free software is the future we want to encourage people to move to free platforms instead of supporting companies that would like to find a way to destroy freedoms." That would be a much better statement.

In my experience the Windows world is much more concerned with free as in beer than free as in freedom, and this argument really comes down to that. Who is going to tell me that having access to source code is of any importance to Windows users? I don't see where free Qt on Windows doesn't do more harm than good in a number of ways.

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Re: Qt's success
by Ingo Klöcker on Thursday 02/Sep/2004, @01:41

> Who is going to tell me that having access to source code is of any importance to Windows users?

So you are trying to tell us that we shouldn't even try to change the attitude of the Windows users?

I find your generalization very inappropriate. Get real. The more users Linux gains the less important will the availibility of the source code be to the majority of Linux users. Why? Simply because the majority of computer users doesn't care for having access to the source code regardless of the operation system they are using.

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Re: Qt's success
by Don on Wednesday 01/Sep/2004, @22:54

As I've stated on the kdepim list I would like to see KDE running on Windows. Given that Qt is a cross platform toolkit it does make a lot of sense from a technical standpoint.

Unfortunately GPLing Qt on Windows would have a significant unfavourable financial repercussion on TT. This is not mere speculation but based on the post GPLing X11/OSX sales data.

But I'm not too worried. Given the progress of the cygwin and related projects I think it's only a matter of time before a native MSVC/MinGW KDE port is available on Windows.

Just speaking for myself based on knowledge I believe to be non-confidential.

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