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Re: Native Win32 would be rather easy...
by Justin on Friday 18/May/2001, @20:30
Like I said in a post earlier, my guess is that a lot of the Qt/Windows license sales are for in-house development. Trolltech would probably lose a LOT by releasing it as GPL.

Honestly, I can't name any Qt/Windows applications. This may be because it isn't so obvious what toolkit is used in the Windows environment as it is in X. Still, this leads me to theorize that:

1) In-house Unix developers use free Qt/X11
2) In-house Windows developers use nonfree Qt/Windows
3) Commercial Unix developers use nonfree Qt/X11
4) Commercial Windows developers use nonfree Qt/Windows

Since the majority of software in this world is in-house, Trolltech's biggest customer base is probably #2.

Let's say 80% of their sales are for in-house work. Would the benefits of a free Qt on all platforms outweigh the obvious drop in license sales? GPL is really not a problem for in-house developers.

-Justin
  Related Links
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Re: Native Win32 would be rather easy...
by Mosfet on Friday 18/May/2001, @21:16
I'm not talking about TrollTech doing it. I don't work for them, I don't care about their license sales ;-) What I'm talking about is if someone else wanted to take the GPL QT/X11 and port it to Windows, it wouldn't be that hard to do since it's already designed to be run on multiple platforms. Looking at the code it's fairly straightforward.
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  • Re: Native Win32 would be rather easy...
    by not me on Saturday 19/May/2001, @14:13
    He was replying to the comment above his more than your comment, Mosfet.

    "I don't work for them, I don't care about their license sales ;-)"

    I care about TrollTech's license sales! TrollTech is a good company, they produce a good product which we all benefit from, and if they went out of business it would be a big loss. TrollTech obviously doesn't want a GPL QT on Windows, or else they would have done it already. I agree with Justin, a GPL QT/Win would be disasterous for TrollTech. Do you want Open Source to be seen as poison to companies that might be considering open-sourcing their products? We don't want to kill off companies that open-source their products, we want to encourage them!

    Besides, a GPL QT/Win would have questionable benefits. KDE on Windows? Great, all the stability of Windows with the broad application base of KDE! There are really no GPL apps that Windows needs and QT/X has. The only thing I can think of would be increased interest in QT development by open-source types, but I don't think it would be increased very much since most open-source developers use Linux or BSD anyway.
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    • Re: Native Win32 would be rather easy...
      by Mosfet on Saturday 19/May/2001, @19:37
      I would like apps I write for KDE to be able to run on Windows (and Mac, and Beos, and everything else ;-). Windows is irrelevant to me because I can't hack it, but that's just me. All I know is I want as many people to be able to use cool KDE software as possible.

      I don't feel any need to discourage porting in order to protect TrollTech, either. If someone wants to port, it's totally within their rights. TrollTech would have to live with commercial application licensing, like everyone else that does GPL libraries. Saying "Okay, we'll use the GPL but please don't use all the rights given in the license!" is crap (which BTW they never said).
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      • Re: Native Win32 would be rather easy...
        by Timothy R. Butler on Tuesday 22/May/2001, @10:07
        I agree with your statemens Mosfet. It seems like porting QT-Free to Windows could also benefit KDE, since any QT-Free apps created in Windows could easily be ported back to KDE/Linux.
        Another major benefit of Qt and KDE on Windows would be the porting of Konqueror to Windows. If Konqi was available on Linux and Windows, Konqi could potentially become a major competitor in the browser wars.

        -Tim
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      • Re: Native Win32 would be rather easy...
        by Andrew Ymirth on Wednesday 24/Apr/2002, @04:36
        It's a good thing you can't, or we'd have to worry about trash like Liquid coming to Windows.
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