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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @01:52
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Actually, if you read the faq, trolltech specifically says that the NonCommercial license they are using is incompatible with the GPL, so anything in kde that has gpl code in it cannot use this... which is sad.
In the end, the only way to wrest control of the desktop from Microsoft is to produce GPL applications for their desktop. It's easy for Windows users to convert to GPL applications slowly over time. Once all of their critical applications have been replaced with GPL versions, swapping the operating system out from underneath them will be painless.
I love KDE, but if anyone is going to break Microsoft's monopoly, I think it's going to be Sun's OpenOffice. |
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Carbon on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @05:15
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>I think it's going to be Sun's OpenOffice.
I hope not, at least not going at it's current state and path. It's a powerful, very mature suite (iirc 6 years in the running), but its very, very bloated. On my machine, opening MS-Word takes about 5 seconds, where as starting the latest stable build (i.e. StarOffice 5.1a-something) takes about 45 seconds! Most of the bloat is due to the fact that StarOffice decided it would be fun to make their own widget set, printing libs, font loader, staticly built OpenGL port, etc.
Not to be negative, but I don't think it has much of a chance unless much the guys at Sun manage to wean OpenOffice off it's little statically built cornucopia and onto something more likely to already be loaded at login/boot-up time (even if that be GTK+/GNOME)
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @18:01
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> Not to be negative, but I don't think it has
> much of a chance unless much the guys at Sun
> manage to wean OpenOffice off it's little
> statically built cornucopia
I'm not suggesting that OpenOffice is the better
technical solution. Its their evolution strategy
that is superior, and actually stands a chance
in corporate America of taking desktop share
away from MS.
KDE's proposition: switch your OS and all of
your apps simultaneously, deal with all the
training and support issues for the whole thing
at the same time.
OpenOffice's proposition: slowly replace one
application at a time, until all of your
applications are non-MS, then painlessly swap
operating systems later.
The only way that KDE (or GNOME) is going to
take the desktop market in America is if:
- Europe and/or Asia standardize on it
- that forces Microsoft to develop compatible
file formats so that international firms
can communicate.
- once the office monopoly is broken, American
firms move to open-source to decrease costs
That might actually happen if European gov'ts
decide to standardize on open-source, which a
lot of them seem to be seriously considering.
But Sun's strategy is much more threatening to
Microsoft.
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by not me on Wednesday 27/Jun/2001, @22:34
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<"OpenOffice's proposition: slowly replace one application at a time, until all of your applications are non-MS, then painlessly swap operating systems later.">
This is exactly what this QT release might help KDE do. You could run Konqueror or KWord under Windows, then switch the OS and DE to Linux/KDE later. If only all of KDE was LGPL! For a project as large as KDE, re-licensing is really unfeasable.
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Re: Trolltech: No-Charge License for Qt/Windows
by Carbon on Saturday 30/Jun/2001, @23:57
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>The only way that KDE (or GNOME) is going to take the desktop market in America is...
I believe that you may be missing the point of Open Source. KDE is not a business or a corporation, and the whole concept of market share isn't applicable. Sure, KDE developers love it when KDE is used by users and by other developers, but unlike a business, KDE has a major advantage : it's progress does not depend that it be used by a certain amount of people.
KDE's continued existence depends totally on whether or not the developers continue to work on it, and this will continue even if the developers themselves are the majority of the people using it! The primary reason that open-source software will (IMHO) almost totally replace commercial software in non-specialized fields is because the developers of Open Source have as much time as they feel like to work on it, since marketing is (rightly so) almost non-existant.
This is the way capitalism is designed to work, that is, a product will make it or not depending almost entirely on it's quality. Microsoft and (to a lesser degree) Sun are more concerned over whether or not their customers _think_ the product is of high quality, then whether or not it actually is.
For instance, for all of M$'s raving over how Win2k no longer has DOS, this "feature" is in fact a detriment! With a minor amount of registry editing, you can discover that in fact the OS still depends on and can boot into a version of DOS, but now it is almost impossible for the average user to get at it, even if only to run some classic games or for emergency purposes.
This is why I don't think OpenOffice will last for the long haul. You said yourself that :
>I'm not suggesting that OpenOffice is the better
technical solution
In Open Source development, what else _is_ there but the quality of the software?
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