“Solaris 9 for Intel could be poised to ship after all, Register spies at Sun suggest. The official line is currently that Sun is shipping Solaris 9 for Sparc, but that “Sun is deferring the productization and release of the Solaris 9 OE for Intel IA-32.” In English this means that Sun has (probably) more or less finished it but is hesitating as to whether or not to ship it, while in ITspeak this sort of phrasing generally means that the product is headed for a lingering death in the netherworld.” The story is at TheRegister.
Sun to Reprieve Solaris 9 for Intel?
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That the “Cli” in “CliMonkey” stands for clitoris? You heard it here first, folks!
You don’t want to rub CliMonkey the wrong way…
BWAHAHAHAHA
will we build it or will we not? will we ship it or will we not?
id like to try solaris… but if they keep playing all these games by the time it does come out i probably wont be interested any more.
Oh for solaris 9 to have KDE….but alas we’re going to be gnomed.
“Oh for solaris 9 to have KDE….but alas we’re going to be gnomed.”
There are binary packages of KDE for Solaris scattered around the Internet. Not easy to find, but they do exist.
Also, I have heard of reasonably good success with building KDE on Solaris if you use GCC for Solaris.
Yeah, I can’t believe they’d do that either. GNOME is teh suck. It’s still unstable, after how many promises that “this time” they fixed it.
See Trolltech created Qt, KDE developers used Qt to create KDE, Qt is free for non-commercial use otherwise you pay.
Solaris is a commercial OS, thus Sun would have to pay to use Qt so they could ship KDE. Thus they went with Gnome for free, as in beer and speech.
I think Sun also did not want to be dependent on Trolltech for having a working desktop.
I don’t see your point, Anonymous. KDE is free software. Sun wouldn’t have to use Qt everywhere, just to use KDE! As for dependency, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. The difference is that if they did license enterprise Qt, there would be some protection in the contract. That way, Trolltech couldn’t do something nutty like remaking everything to Microsoft standards.
Whats not to get?
KDE is free software……. well duh?
Qt is not, The Qt tool kit is a commercial c++ tool kit created by Trolltech.
There is a GPL version and a commercial version.
If you write free software you can use Qt for free if you write commercial software you have to buy a license.
http://www.trolltech.com/purchase/desktop.html
Now if Sun used Qt and KDE then other developers would have to pay for a license to create commercial software for Solaris, they can use GTK for free.
Thus using KDE/Qt would make everybody dependent on Qt and Trolltech.
Anonymous, I think you’re using faulty logic about that. Your if…then really doesn’t follow. The only time a developer would have to pay is if they were creating commercial software using Qt. Qt != Solaris!
I don’t see what the big deal is. They’re paying for Motif now…what’s the diff? I don’t have much sympathy for UNIX software vendors anyway. I’m sure they can afford the developer kits with the prices they charge!
Anonymous is right – licensing would have a huge impact on Sun. They’d have to pay a license fee based on every version of solaris with KDE – hence Anonymous’ if…then statement, which is realistic.
“Qt is not, The Qt tool kit is a commercial c++ tool kit created by Trolltech. There is a GPL version and a commercial version. If you write free software you can use Qt for free if you write commercial software you have to buy a license.”
It would be a violation of the GPL for Trolltech to forbid selling software created with the GPLed version of QT. The GPL has no such provision for allowing them to do this. The best they can do is license QT under the GPL instead of the LGPL. What that would mean is that if I were to create a product linked against the QT libraries, that I would have to provide the source code for my entire product. But it would not forbid me from selling that product. It would however, forbid me from preventing other users from in turn, reselling my product, or modifying my product.
The only reason I would want to purchase a commercial license would be if I wanted to create closed source apps, or I wanted to forbid my users from redistributing my apps. In that case, I would need the commercially licensed QT because I would be in violation of the GPL if I used the GPLed version for that. But at the same time, Trolltech would also be in violation of the GPL if they told me I can’t use their product that is licensed under the GPL to create commercial software.
“Anonymous is right – licensing would have a huge impact on Sun. They’d have to pay a license fee based on every version of solaris with KDE – hence Anonymous’ if…then statement, which is realistic.”
They wouldn’t have to pay a license fee anymore than any commercial Linux vendor has to pay a license fee. My understanding is that they would only have to pay a license fee if they wanted to keep the software closed source.
The main difference is that GTK is licensed under the LGPL whereas QT is licensed under the GPL. So I can legally use GTK to produce commercial closed source products that others can’t redistribute. I can’t do that with QT.
What QT has done is similar to what MySQL has done. If you want to create closed source commercial applications, you have to license a commercial copy of MySQL because the GPL doesn’t allow you to do that.
Sun could have used KDE in Solaris without paying a license fee. But GNOME allows them more flexibility in the long run because GTK allows them to create closed source system utilities and such that work with Solaris on GNOME.
Thanks Simba, nice to see that someone bothered to read the license before posting.