Qt, the GPL, Business and Freedom (OfB)

Posted Aug 9, 2005 2:06 UTC (Tue) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link]

> The problem (trying to state this very carefully so as not to be
> misinterpreted again) is that Red Hat and Novell aren't able to
> offer support for non-GPL'ed KDE application development in the
> same way that they are able to for Gnome applications.

Although very true, the point to this is that Trolltech *can*. Sure it's
a different entry that must be entered into Accounts Payable, but I think
we've already established that for most serious businesses, the license
cost is not a large factor. The question in this case then is... who do
you pay for support.

With LGPL'ed software like GTK+, you pay whoever can help you. With
GPL'ed software like Qt and MySQL, you *also* pay whoever can help you.
In these cases there happen to be companies behind the software
development, who have chosen the GPL so that if you use their library
commercially they at least get a piece of the action.

> But it is "complicated" for the customers insofar as it differs
> from the way it works with competing products (Gnome, OS/X,
> MSDN, Solaris, etc...)

But that's what I'm not seeing. How does this differ? With MSDN you pay
Microsoft their fee and do what you want. With Solaris you pay Sun their
fee and do what they want (for a long time you had to pay just for decent
dev tools, same with MS). Likewise with Apple and OS/X. When using Qt
(for *commercial* development!), you pay Trolltech. Simple. Just like
companies have done for years now.

In fact the odd one out in this case is GTK+ based software. There's
certainly corporate support behind it with the likes of Red Hat and
Novell, and all the other companies making good software with it. But
there's not really that *one* company you go to for GTK+ support. Not
that this is a problem per se for users of GTK+, but I don't see how this
complicates commercial development using Qt either.

> I'll stop now. But *please* re-read my earlier posts, with an eye
> to the facts that (1) I'm not arguing that developers should
> be choosing Gnome/Gtk over KDE/Qt and

Noted. Although I hope you understand why it is that a lot of KDE devs
have come to the defense of their chosen toolkit. ;)

> (2) I'm personally very much a fan of the GPL. But that doesn't mean
> that all things Troll are a good thing for KDE, either. You don't
> have to be pro-Gnome to think that, perhaps, a less "complicated"
> relationship with the underlying toolkit might be a good thing
> for KDE.

Well there are certainly things that have been in Qt that KDE has had to
ignore, or to do better. Sometimes it gets recycled back into Qt (I
believe Qt 4 has a lot of improvements inspired by KDE code). And it's
obvious as a general rule that a desktop environment should not live and
die by its toolkit.

Luckily that's not an issue for KDE. It's certainly true that KDE has
*had* a complicated relationship with Qt. That's not true anymore. Qt
is even more Free than Gtk+ is now. Of course, this will inconvenience
some people, just as there are devs out there anxiously awaiting the day
that Trolltech loses their minds and BSD's Qt. ;)

Trolltech can't make everyone happy, and nor should they try. KDE, on
the other hand, needs to look after their best interest. Right now, I
can tell you that there is no viable competition to Qt toolkit-wise for
use with KDE. Since KDE is in the business of making the best Free
Desktop Environment out there, this isn't a bad thing for KDE. The fact
that there is a vibrant commercial development environment around Qt/KDE
is icing on the cake. :)