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Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows (KDE.News)

Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows (KDE.News)

Posted Feb 10, 2005 9:53 UTC (Thu) by mmutz (guest, #5642)
Parent article: Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows (KDE.News)

I'm not sure why this news bit doesn't feature on the front page. It's
certainly as big a break-through as the GPL'ing of Qt2 back then.


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Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows (KDE.News)

Posted Feb 10, 2005 13:19 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

Why is this big news for "Linux Weekly News"? Now if this was "Windows Weekly News" then maybe.

Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows (KDE.News)

Posted Feb 13, 2005 2:44 UTC (Sun) by ddaa (guest, #5338) [Link]

That's big news because the licensing issues on Windows used to be a major reason not to use Qt for some people. At least for me.

I do not know Qt well, but from what I have heard and the little I have seen (when I last considered it, a couple of years ago), it competes very well with GTK on Linux, and has clearly superior Windows support. That would make it a toolkit of choice for software which does not care about integration with a specific linux-based desktop environment, but which care about good Windows support.

However, to reap the benefits of the good Windows support of Qt, you needed to introduce an exception to the GPL. That is often not feasible (when the project has been around for a long time and includes many contributions) and sometimes not desirable, at least because of simple free software bigotry.

Dual licensing for Qt on Windows is a dramatic change in the free-software GUI toolkit landscape. Up to now it was "GTK wins", now is Qt is suddenly much more relevent.

In my opinion, that at least deserves a headline in the Development section.

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