Qt, the GPL, Business and Freedom (OfB)

Qt, the GPL, Business and Freedom (OfB)

Posted Aug 9, 2005 21:22 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Qt, the GPL, Business and Freedom (OfB) by ajross
Parent article: Qt, the GPL, Business and Freedom (OfB)

And this is where we disagree; I don't see Cairo as the eventual standard for X Window System GUI toolkits, not least because they've not managed to get TrollTech onboard. Indeed, Cairo isn't even mentioned on the X.org pages, while RENDER is, implying that RENDER is "more" of an official X.org standard. Further, both Cairo and Arthur can render using RENDER, just as both GTK+ and Qt can render via other X11 operations. If we'd been having this debate ten years ago, there's a good chance that we'd have been arguing about the future of the standard toolkit for X applications.

My feeling is that if it were worth KDE's while using Cairo, someone would have gone and done it; as it is, TrollTech have done their own thing, which KDE might adopt from a simplicity perspective (although the devs are more than competent to decide that they prefer Cairo and thus go and use it separately, just as the KDE devs don't rely on plain Qt themes, but have gone and created KDE themes, or indeed the way some applications now use GStreamer for multimedia).

On the API issue, please go and look at the kdelibs module; there's stuff in there that duplicates Qt stuff, but done differently (and probably better from a KDE perspective); Arthur does not imply that KDE will not use Cairo, it just means that Cairo's C++ API has to be enough better than Arthur to be worth the hassle.

To take the flame issue: firstly, there have been some major flamewars on both sides of the fence relating to interoperability; the recent ones that I've seen have all been started by someone claiming that one desktop is worse because it's not adopted a technology the other has (Cairo in this case, but I've seen KIOSlaves, DCOP, DBUS, ATK, Pango, KCacheGrind and others used), then trolling whenever people dare to argue. Secondly, precisely because Qt is not controlled by KDE, the KDE team do look at what happens elsewhere; if Cairo is worth adopting over Arthur (if the API is nicer, for example), it'll be implemented in kdelibs. If it's not, that work won't be done. Thirdly, there is a degree of unification between Qt and GTK themes, although all the work on that has been done from the perspective of allowing GNOME apps to look like KDE side (I'm referring to the GTK-Qt theme engine). OK, so it's by no means perfect, and it does mean that only Qt themes can be used (whereas I'd assume you're after a unified theming system such that a theme is desktop-independent), but there is no equivalent going the other way (allowing Qt to use GTK themes).

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