Thinking on the issue of licensing and KDE, an old hymn came to the mind of OfB’s Tim Butler. “As it was in the beginning, is now, And ever shall be…” Yes, the issue of licensing has been a perennial problem for the Free/Open Source desktop and he suggests its biggest licensing issue remains: the GPL. Read more at OfB.biz
At about $2500 USD a pop, the Qt commercial development license is not really an issue. Where I live, a programmer will pull down $65,000 USD / year without a problem, and the overhead per employee is about 40% (taxes, benefits, etc.) — which comes to $91,000 / developer / year. The license is, therefore equivalent to 7 days of development per licensed developer (and that might be recouped by accelerated development time — the toolkit is well designed).
The cost is also tax-deductible (in this jurisdiction, atleast) . Moreover, if one needs only the GPL features, one can develop in house for no cost prior to non-GPL release using the GPL version (the license even says as much). Even when you do go commercial, for large projects it’s unlikely all developers will need a license.
Assuming you expect to make enough money to blow $91K per developer year, the cost is completely insignificant. Where it might hurt is a guy knocking off a $5/download closed source app in his basement during his spare time. This, of course, is a different beast entirely. TrollTech already makes special deals for this situation on a case-by-case basis, so no problem there.
It’s silly to think the cost or license have any practical bearing on Qt’s suitability for use as a general purpose toolkit or basis of a desktop implementation, and you know in advance that it will exist in perpetuity (unlike most commercial toolkits, like MFC).
Some people can not see others happy:
KDE development is booming. There are more and more commits every release cycle.
KOffice got a nice revival. There is a lot of action in the image apps now.
Qt is doing fine, thanks (I saw some numbers). And BTW, Qt 4 rocks.
Now KDE/Qt apps will be available Free in Win and Apple too.
Why on every KDE thread there are so many trolls whining? You can write GTK apps for KDE: they will work just fine, so the existence of KDE/Qt is not taking anything from anyone.
Don’t like the Qt price, write GTK or MSVS, or whatever apps. They can even be integrated with KDE, if you want. Hey pravda, you are putting a lot of effort on bashing KDE, please explain what is your agenda. What do you want to accomplish?
KDE development is booming. There are more and more commits every release cycle.
The most impressive things is that they seem to attract new contributors at an unbelievable pace. Reading the kde-commit mailing list, I see that *each week* they get at least 6-7 new contributors (new svn accounts created). I never saw the KDE community as thriving as it is now.
Hey pravda, you are putting a lot of effort on bashing KDE, please explain what is your agenda. What do you want to accomplish?
Pravda has no agenda, what a ridiculous implication.
> i use gnome everyday. all the tools work, and it doesn’t crash.
That doesn’t mean anything but all it does is calling me a liar then. I was refering to the utterly broken framework of GNOME. The architecture of GNOME has many issues starting from library a) towards library b). I leave it up to the users to decide on their own. I rarely get anything done seriously without hitting issues there and here. Applications not really working, applications crashing, applications not offering enough power to compete with commercial counterparts etc. I know enough about GNOME to demonstrate everyone live what’s up with it.
Do you ever getting anything productive done?
> The most impressive things is that they seem to
> attract new contributors at an unbelievable pace.
> Reading the kde-commit mailing list, I see that
> *each week* they get at least 6-7 new contributors
> (new svn accounts created). I never saw the KDE
> community as thriving as it is now.
I fully agree! Most of the KDE people are quite friendly, helpful and really funny at times. You can talk with them, have fun with them and they even guide you through KDE related problems, be it maintainance, installation, configuration, development and many more. The KDE community is really awesome compared to the ugly and evil GNOME community that I belonged before where slandering and public defamation is on their daily order and considered a normal behave. KDE is so much refreshing and they even motivated me enough to contribute to Open Source again. My contributions and all my work makes sense again. Thanks to the outstanding great community that KDE is. People really worth to share a beer with, people worth having fun with.
You know, that post would be funny except that you’re not trying to be funny. This is stereotypical fanboyism at its finest.
Remember this:
This is a real beauty. I like how you try to take subtle jabs at people in this one.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-August/msg00261.html
Not so subtle.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2002-May/msg00001.htm…..
I especially like your rebuttal to this comment.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-October/msg00055.html
It seems that you were quite a contributor to GNOME…contributor of unprovoked flames. And you get modded up for that tripe? What a laugh. This thread has degenerated rather badly, and it doesn’t seem the modding system is working all that well.
I’m not exactly sure how qt alone has killed UNIX on the desktop (when the installed base of Linux is slowly growing) and how KDE can’t possibly be useful/exist/thrive/fail to explode just because it uses a toolkit that’s not completely free if you’re making closed-source apps. Either I can and do use KDE or my brain is missing key lobes.
I use lots of gtk apps, such as firefox, gaim, beep-media-player and acrobat reader on KDE because I want to. But KDE itself has lots of nice little features that make running KDE itself worthwhile to me.
This entire discussion is insane. People are claiming that qt being under the GPL isn’t good enough, and that gtk is better because it’s under the GPL. Then they justify themselves by saying it’s not that qt IS under a restrictive license, it’s that it once was. I assume if KDE switched to gtk, people would still attack it.
Trolltech changed the licensing agreements, but some people don’t seem to have noticed.
Indeed, this discussion is rediculous and doomed from the start. I prefer GNOME, but I certainly don’t go around telling everybody how GNOME rules and KDE drools. I think that those who bash software projects that are competing with their favorite software project are immature and need to grow up. Why can’t you praise your project without also bashing the others? What ever happend to friendly competition?
> It seems that you were quite a contributor to
> GNOME…contributor of unprovoked flames.
I consider GNOME people quite immature, weird, slow in mind and simply retarded. You are proving what I always said, that the people behind GNOME are quite insulting, defamating and simply insane. Good that the world seems to realize this. Slowly but ongoing for sure.
> Do you ever getting anything productive done?
Do you ?
> I think that those who bash software projects that
> are competing with their favorite software project
> are immature and need to grow up. Why can’t you
> praise your project without also bashing the
> others? What ever happend to friendly competition?
You have nerves saying this while you (with the same IP) keep slandering and defamating other people as you did above. Friendly competition ? Obviously not if we read your other crap above.
This article has turned up exactly what it promised: A debate without end!
One thing that struck me for instance, who work on multimedia stuff, is that we might not be able to do opensource Qt based applications using GStreamer (or any other multimedia framework for that matter) that ships with non-free plugins.
I did try to get Markey to LGPL or GPL+exception Amarok some time ago, but maybe getting him to do so wouldn’t really help, as Qt licensing would kill the issue anyway.
Huh? Isn’t the GPL (Amarok’s license) opensource enough for the gstreamer crowd?
I really don’t see the problem (and the fact that gstreamer is one of the two top candidates for the KDE4 multimedia framework –nmm being the other one– shows that the KDE developers don’t seem to see it either)
The whole point of gstreamer is that you don’t have to put the plugins in your program you don’t even link to it. You seperate the different stages of multimedia processing and pipe the data between the different filters (sinks, whatever). If that’s “linking” in the way the GPL sees it you couldn’t even use shell pipes between GPLed and proprietary programs.
It seems to me they either didn’t think this through (most likely), or chose GTK for other reasons and now want to justify that (also likely) or they’re FUDing/trolling (there are surprisingly few trolls among the people who actually develop the applications others are trolling about =)
I think the problem is thus:
Gstreamer – LGPL
Amarok – GPL
XYZ plugin – non-Free
When Amarok links to Gstreamer, Gstreamer is converted to GPL, and then a non-Free plugin can’t be used for Gstreamer (since it is now GPL). It seems the plan would be to have a combo like this:
Gstreamer – LGPL
ABC media player – LGPL (or possibly non-Free, althought the text doesn’t suggest that)
XYZ plugin – non-Free
This combo would be perfectly acceptable to use.
Then again, I could have misunderstood.
Uhmmm… that’s not how the GPL works.
First off, recall that the GPL comes to bear only when something is distributed, not at run time. Thus a piece of code is not magically relicensed at run time by virtue of its being linked to by GPL code. In fact, even in cases of distribution, GPLed code can link to any code licensed under a compatible license (X11/MIT/BSD, LGPL, etc…) and that GPLed code can then be distributed along with its dependencies. In fact, I can even link GPLed code to proprietary binary only libraries so long as I only distribute the GPLed code it in source form.
So in the case of Amarok and GStreamer:
Amorak (GPL) links to GStreamer (LGPL) –> distibuting Amorak and GStreamer together is within the terms of both licenses.
Plugin (binary only, proprietary) links to GStreamer (LGPL) –> distributing both together is within the terms of the GPL and presumably the pugin as well.
Amarok (GPL) links to GStreamer (LGPL) & Plugin (bo, proprietary) links to GStreamer (LGPL) –> all three can be distributed together without violating the terms of any of the licenses.
For an almost exactly analogous scenario consider a Linux distribution which includes Apache + mod_php + php web app (GPL) + php web app (proprietary) –> all can be distributed together. Actually, the above scenario isn’t just possible, it’s common.
The GPL is viral, its just not anywhere near as virulent as you suppose.
Uhmmm… that’s not how the GPL works.
First off, recall that the GPL comes to bear only when something is distributed, not at run time. Thus a piece of code is not magically relicensed at run time by virtue of its being linked to by GPL code. In fact, even in cases of distribution, GPLed code can link to any code licensed under a compatible license (X11/MIT/BSD, LGPL, etc…) and that GPLed code can then be distributed along with its dependencies. In fact, I can even link GPLed code to proprietary binary only libraries so long as I only distribute the GPLed code it in source form.
No, you can’t do that. Section three says that a user can redistribute the program in source in binary form. The only exception for non-free libraries are those which are included with the OS. Or, as the GPL says it “However, as a
special exception, the source code distributed need not include
anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the
operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component
itself accompanies the executable.” Since users would be unable to redistribute the proprietary library then no one other then you could distribute your software. Thus, no GPL.
So, gstreamer claims they are unfit to be linked into GPLd media applications. I hope they really publicize that, and get marginalized in Linux in about 4.2 seconds.
While the Qt bashers have been busy trying to FUD Qt and Trolltech, in the real world everything is somewhat different. Take some people, perhaps the people actually buying and using the “toolkit to expensive to be used”, and hear what they have to say.
95% of development team managers would recommend Qt to others.
79% of Qt customers responded that Qt exceeded or far exceeded their expectations, while none claimed that Qt failed to meet expectations.
91% of managers say Qt offers fair, good or outstanding value for money
Way back, I guess that TrollTech needed not only to get their name out, but also to demonstrate the abilities and stability of their Qt. What better demonstration than a new DE like KDE? This is why I think KDE got special conditions that do not apply to other project/product using Qt.
Now the problem is not about what would happen if Trolltech closes. It’s IP would probably be acquired, though of course the product would probably not be developed further and just be considered as a cash cow. The problem is, as others pointed, the confusion imposed on developers by the licence. In front of uncertainty, people just walk away. And when they have to pay a meaningful amount for uncertainty, they even run away.
It’s why, despite KDE’s technical edge over GNOME, it is likely that more applications, especially commercial applications, will be developed for GNOME. Of course the KDE team can continue to add more applications of their own, but I doubt that team can compete against IBM’s Eclipse, Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Firefox, Sun’s OpenOffice, GIMP, etc. The KDE team can’t do everything and lacks the combined resources of several large businesses. The KDE team will not scale up more.
In that context, porting KDE to a different library makes sense in theory, as a way to remove the Qt shackles and allow KDE to be attractive to software developers, especially commercial developers. But I doubt this can technically be done. At least not quickly and not easily and not without breaking a lot of things in KDE.
I think GNOME is way behind KDE in term of technology and usability, but I do not use a DE. I spend 99.5% of my time using applications, and the DE just 0.05%, mostly to login/out, launch applications, and look at the clock. So because there are more mainstream applications developped for GTK/GNOME, I use GNOME, even if I don’t like it. Of course I could use GTK/GNOME applications under KDE, but then there is the GUI consistency issue which reduces productivity.
For the same reasons MS-DOS and Windows became dominant, GNOME will also become dominant. Becasue applications are created for that environment/platform/DE. Just like Windows, GNOME is not the best looking GUI or the most advanced environment. But it’s where I can find enough tools to allow me to work and be productive on it.
If Linux wants to become more successful on the desktop, there must be just one main Linux desktop. People must put a stop at the current wasted efforts of maintaining 2 main desktops. Why reinvent the wheel? It just keeps Linux’ desktop way behind Windows’ desktop.
Just my 2 eurocents.
IBM’s Eclipse, Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Firefox, Sun’s OpenOffice, GIMP, etc
I would be interested in that “etc” part.
You wrote this list in the context of commercial applications developed for know, yet none of them is a GNOME application and from the ones listed, GNOME is the only GTK+ application, the others are all using their own toolkits.
Whether these applications use their own toolkit or the GNOME toolkit does not matter. What matters is they all follow the same GUI rules and appear consistent together and with the GTK-based desktops. But when used with KDE, the clash is very visible. THis is why I say those applications and others are developed for GTK/GNOME/XFCE.
Firefox, Thunderbird, MySQL, OpenOffice, Eclipse, GIMP, VMware and others are all heavyweights. I prefer using KDE but there are no heavyweight applications developed to run on KDE, bar those bundlded with it.
> What matters is they all follow the same GUI rules
> and appear consistent together and with the
> GTK-based desktops. But when used with KDE, the
> clash is very visible. THis is why I say those
> applications and others are developed for
> GTK/GNOME/XFCE.
Using the gtk-qt theme engine GTK apps can be made to conform to the configured KDE theme. The button order can be reversed, too, in recent GTK apps. I don’t see what inconsistency with KDE you mean. I have this configured mainly for Firefox (the few times I start it).
For OpenOffice there’s a KDEified version: http://kde.openoffice.org/
What would be more interesting than looks and HIGs is integration of advanced desktop features like IOSlaves or gnomevfs. But neither KDE nor GNOME have that, yet.
> What would be more interesting than looks and HIGs
> is integration of advanced desktop features like
> IOSlaves or gnomevfs. But neither KDE nor GNOME
> have that, yet.
Replying to self: I forgot, there’s the KIO Fuse Gateway http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+Gateway that allows mounting of IOSlaves as file systems. That way non-KDE apps can access files there, too.
Using the gtk-qt theme engine GTK apps can be made to conform to the configured KDE theme. The button order can be reversed, too, in recent GTK apps. I don’t see what inconsistency with KDE you mean. I have this configured mainly for Firefox (the few times I start it).
For OpenOffice there’s a KDEified version: http://kde.openoffice.org/
—–
I think you just proved my point, twice:
1) Those applications are designed for GTK/GNOME/XFCE. But there are some “underground” ways to tweak some of them to make them blend a bit better on KDE.
2) The “official” web page of the KDE version of OpenOffice is abandonned. Even 6 months ago the guy in charge had no time for 1.1.3 (which is not the latest version anymore)… http://kde.openoffice.org/
As I said those heavyweight applications are designed for the GTK/GNOME/XFCE environment. KDE is always a second choice (if there is a second choice) for software developers.
Because heavyweights applications (such as MySQL, OpenOffice, VMware, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP) are developed for GTK/GNOME/XFCE, KDE can only die (despite its superiority as a desktop).
I think you are missing the point:
> 1) Those applications are designed for GTK/GNOME/XFCE.
OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird are designed for their own little Toolkit. But instead of porting this toolkit to the abhorrence that is the X protocol – they used a little higher library, GTK.
Thus they were not designed _for_ GTK/GNOME/XFCE…
(By the way, do you consider every Application build with GTK an application designed for GNOME? With that logic, every Qt application is designed for KDE…even if that application doesn’t even run on linux?)
The GIMP obviously was not designed for GTK, as GTK was designed for the GIMP, but that is nitpicking 😉
I have no clue where you get the idea that a Database (MySQL) could be designed for a desktop environment, but you might talk about some administration application. This, I am sure, you can easily find for KDE too…
So what is left of your impressive list is VMware, where I just cannot comment since I have no information about that.
>The “official” web page of the KDE version of OpenOffice is abandonned
I think the author of the integration is mostly working on the 2.0 version of OO. On the features page you will find:
Native system theme integration will be available for Gnome (version 2.4 or higher), Microsoft (R) Windows (including XP and future versions), and KDE (version 3.2 and higher) desktop environments.
That doesn’t look abandoned to me…
So please stop with that “everything is made for GNOME” nonsense. Yes there are good applications for it. But so there are for KDE.
This is what I based my example on.
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/faq/html/c…
Perhaps I misunderstood it.
That looks like a misunderstanding on part of the person who wrote that FAQ entry.
The gstreamer library does not know which licence the code is under to which it is linked at application build time.
It also doesn’t know which licence the sorenson codec plugin is under.
If the application request a file being decoded and gstreamer looking for a codec, no one can tell how the codec which is found is licenced.
Thus gstreamer could not load any plugin at all or load all plugins.
Actually as a shareware developer I don’t think I would use QT even if it were LGPL or BSD. For Linux I would prefer a library that could be statically linked so that it could work with all Linux distros rehardless of the shared libs they contain as this is basically is what is required for proprietary software in the fast moving Linux world where the shared libraries are constantly changing.
Therefore I would much more recomend something that can be legally statically linked like FLTK or the wxWidgets wrapper for GTK than QT for shareware proprietary development for linux. (BlitzBASIC the first spacific proprietary game authoring/development system to be made in a Linux version uses FLTK for the exact reason that it is designed for static linking and its version of the LGPL spacifically allows it and therefore BlitzBASIC will not have the “dependency hell” problems that QT, GTK and other shared libary based proprietary software has due to the speed of Linux development.)
>For Linux I would prefer a library that could be statically linked
You can very easily link Qt Applications statically (i.e. no dependency to a library…). No Problem there.
> It’s why, despite KDE’s technical edge over GNOME,
> it is likely that more applications, especially
> commercial applications, will be developed for
> GNOME. Of course the KDE team can continue to add
> more applications of their own, but I doubt that
> team can compete against IBM’s Eclipse, Mozilla’s
> Thunderbird and Firefox, Sun’s OpenOffice, GIMP,
> etc. The KDE team can’t do everything and lacks the
> combined resources of several large businesses. The
> KDE team will not scale up more.
I don’t think you are right here and your assumption is quite missleading too. FireFox as well as OpenOffice have two different Widgetsets, the one uses XUL and the other uses SFC. There are attempts from one side to use GTK+ backend for XUL on the Linux side for FireFox (but the main technology still stays XUL, something that totally doesn’t fit in the GNOME framework) and the other is SFC (Staroffice Foundation Class) that is being worked on to get GTK’ified and then otoh also KDE’ified. As well as FireFox is being ported to QT. So basicly both FireFox as well as OpenOffice are status quo with this.
I doubt that many companies simply switched on GTK+ or GNOME, sure there is AdobeAcrobatReader and of course VMWare and even Nokia. But then looking closer at these applications make us understand that neither of them really fit in the GNOME world. VMWare probably depends on an older GTK+ version, has custom functions to save settings on the Disk, same applies for AdobeAcrobatReader which is rarely used either due to Evince as alternative and even Nokia only depends on some small components of GTK+ and GNOME and then it’s old libraries such as GTK+ 2.0.0 (maybe 2.0.x) and we are at 2.8.x now. Working all their own patches up to fit 2.8.x would take ages I assume, then they still have all the deprecated stuff and and and. So at the end, they might have been using GTK+ but what benefits does it have if the apps feel bad in the environment of GNOME ?
For KDE we have plenty of QT commercial applications as well such as Eagle or some other Science or Industry applications, stuff probably most of us won’t be using due of them being industry leading applications and only interesting for industry rather than little boys and girls like we are. TrollTechs support and partners site seem to be quite big and they have hired a lot of KDE’s key developers and KDE for them is the best marketing they would be getting. So bascily QT without KDE is the same like KDE without QT, they depend on each other the one or other way and KDE speaks for itself and is the best marketing for TrollTech. Ever looked what kind of partners QT have ? Their list is quite long and this probably also explains the healthy situation that TrollTech is in, good building, hiring new good developers, being in perfect condition to even pay people to make a nice QT4 video and and and.
I cannot see how anyone in their right mind would develop on Linux. The OS is the dark ages for software development. Lots of clutzy tools, clutzy make systems, clutzy install scripts, etc. It is a giant waste of time.
I take it that’s why we’ve got all the posts, and why Microsoft payed you to be here ;-). Goldstein was the same.
If anything, Windows is cheaper (compare Windows XP vs. Redhat Enterprise Linux Workstation).
There’s much more out there than just Red Hat Workstation, including Suse, NLD, Mandrake and what Vienna have gone out and done.
And what do you get in those two comparing them? I assume you get database servers, office suites and other software all bundled into Windows XP. Again, you have still no comprehension of how much Microsoft actually costs.
The OS is the dark ages for software development. Lots of clutzy tools, clutzy make systems, clutzy install scripts, etc. It is a giant waste of time.
You should try getting something to actually work on Windows 2003 some time. There’s lots of little things that Microsoft has done for security which are essentially pointless wastes of time (trying to work out what the hell stopped something from working), and only go to show that they don’t understand security at all.
someone on this topic has said something interesting:
The QT license cost is ONLY a problem for smal developers, like the shareware world. BUT linux is NOT the place for shareware. linux is THE sharware killer. only big, commercial applications like photoshop might survive on Linux. and they don’t care about the QT costs.
So the QT license is only good.
if you wanna write free software, its free. if you are a big company, and want to write proprietary software, but a license. So no free riding on the work of others (exactly what the GPL is designed for). if you are a small shareware developer, don’t even think about writing software for linux, it’ll be written by someone else in GPL in a matter of weeks.
I think the GPL/commercial license system by QT has made Gnome obsolete. they can stop now… Gnome was written because QT wasn’t free. now it is even more free than GTK (as gtk is under the Lesser GPL).
so, gnome dev’s, get working on KDE
Let’s see how fast GNOME dies once MONO hits the floor. It’s full of propritary Microsoft licensed and patented technology.
The thing that is going to break the neck of GNOME and what makes it to die even faster than anything else is and will be the overall bad attitude from their developers towards other users and developers.