KBasic Brings BASIC to Qt World

KBasic is a new programming language similar to Visual Basic. It combines the best features of those tools and comes with built-in backward support for those tools as it is 100% syntax compatible to VB and QBasic. It is written with Qt making it entirely cross platform. The Full Version Professional Edition is available to download for KDE now. It follows the old Qt licencing of being GPL licenced for Free Software and commercially sold for proprietary software.

KBasic is an open source project backed by years of continual development. Versions are available for KDE, Windows and Mac. It allows developers with an installed base of VB applications to start developing for a mixed Windows, Mac OS X and Linux environment. It is made up of a compiler, an interpreter and an integrated development environment. It is about 15 MB source codes in C++ and about 1000 source code files.

People around the world join KBasic - inspired by the idea to make software available for everybody: a programming language that is easy to use, and a development platform that is stable, reliable and available at a low price.

We communicate by different means, most of them on the Internet. The KBasic community rests on dedicated volunteers to further improve our programming language and development platform in a number of different ways. Whatever your skills, there are lots of places to start contributing.

The project is under active development and has a vibrant community. Take a look at ways to contribute.

KBasic supports calling functions of C/C++ library files, enabling you to mix C/C++ and BASIC code. KBasic uses SQLite as an embedded database engine, which creates database files locally on your machine without the need of a database server. Libraries are availalble for data/time, i18n, RTF, web browser.

KBasic Software is a small software company with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. KBasic Professional is its flagship product, the multi-platform BASIC programming language and environment.

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Comments

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

> It follows the old Qt licencing of being GPL licenced for Free Software and
> commercially sold for proprietary software.

Then where's the source code?

All I see on their download page is a .bin installer and a statement that it is "The Linux® version is free of charge for open source (GPL 3) Software." That's only free as in beer. It's the Kylix licensing model (yuck!), not the Trolltech one.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Actually, I have to correct myself, the source code is there:
http://www.kbasic.com/doku.php?id=source_codes

But why is this not linked from the download page? Why does the download page only talk about free as in beer?

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

PS: It's extremely hard to find the source code from the kbasic.com front page, it's not linked from Download, Community, About nor Description (that's the order in which I checked them). You have to actually go to Manual, then scroll down to "Open Source" (which comes below a long list of links and there's no in-page link) and there you find the link. Please make the source code more visible if you want to be recognized as a Free Software project! I'd suggest mentioning the GPL license where it talks about "free of charge" in the Download page and adding a link to the source code right there.

by whatever noticed (not verified)

The GPL doesn't require the source code to be available for everyone, but only for those who purchased the software.

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

No, only if you include the source when shipping the binary.

Otherwise you have to "include a written offer to make it available to any third party"

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

Since when is the GPL "Free as in beer"? The FSF are the ones that made up that whole "free as in speech not free as in beer" schtick.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

The thing is, nowhere on the download page does it actually say that it's GPL. It only offers a binary and tells you in the description it's free as in beer ("free of charge") if you develop GPL software. It is actually GPLed (see my correction), so it is actually Free as in speech, but unfortunately the download page doesn't make that obvious at all, you have to know where it's buried.

by Ken Jennings (not verified)

The source appears to be here:

http://www.kbasic.com/doku.php?id=source_codes

There are directions, and a link to http://www.kbasic.com/kbasic_linux_sourcecode.tar.gz (V1.87)

Linux

The following package contains three projects for KDevelop with complete source codes:

*kbc - the compiler (only C++ program without Qt usage)
*kbide - the IDE (with Qt usage)
*kbrun - the runtime and intepreter (with Qt usage)

Available under the terms of the GNU Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation (Version 3):

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

I know, I noticed after writing my comment. :-( See my correction.

Still, it should be written on the download page.