Quit whining, diversity is good [LWN.net]

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 15:10 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533)
In reply to: Quit whining, diversity is good by hazelsct
Parent article: A toy and a promise from Nokia

After all, if only Qt/KDE lovers would get a clue and realize that no vendor wants to create ISV confusion by distributing GPL libraries

Neither Sharp nor the various add on software vendors seemed to have a problem with using Qtopia on the aforementioned Zauruses, and Opera (which ships on the Nokia) uses Qt.
Maybe GTK/Gnome lovers should get a clue and realise that commercial companies don't have a problem buying commercial licences when they want to produce closed source software :-)

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Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 16:57 UTC (Thu) by tao (guest, #17563) [Link]

Nokia doesn't use the Opera UI, only the rendering engine from Nokia. No QT involved.

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 19:04 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Neither Sharp nor the various add on software vendors seemed to have a problem with using Qtopia on the aforementioned Zauruses

Sharp ? No. Add on software vendors ? No. Users ? Yes. When I've checked and found that I can not use most of my C860-compatible software with new C3000... This not what I want - and it's really hard to keep binary compatiblity between different releases of QT-basec things. GNOME is not perfect either but at least they are trying - unlike QT/KDE. And changes in C++ ABI is biggest problem there...

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 19:11 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

Admittedly the Qt documentation etc. is excellent, but have you looked at
the Qt commercial version prices?
http://www.trolltech.com/products/embedded/pricing.html
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html

"All developers in your company using Qt will need individual licenses."

For a small company, especially the embedded version prices are pretty
steep. The developed software has to sell pretty well to get back both
the cost of development effort + development SW for the developers and how
many of the companies producing just PDA software are doing economically
that well?

Anyway, I don't think it will take that long from someone to port Qt to
the device. It seems pretty standard Linux with X11 and all...

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 28, 2005 5:50 UTC (Sat) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

The licensing prices aren't all that unreasonable for a business, relative to the probable salary of the developer. So I wouldn't expect the license cost to affect businesses much. Non-businesses that don't want to use the GPL may have troubles with the price. For instance research labs at some universities may want to distribute software, but not be allowed to use the GPL for one reason or another (perhaps the funding agencies require something else, like a BSD license).

I am personally happy that Trolltech has a GPL release for such a great software library. And I don't worry about the C++ API for two reasons. First, I've met a lot of GUI developers that like C++. Second, I use the python bindings.