Submitted by As many already said yesterday, the Kubuntu.de story seems to be a classic example of a storm in a teacup. “Their article makes everything sound much worse than it is. The problem was that when kubuntu.org moved to a new host the sysadmin request to recreate Amu’s account never got answered. Amu makes the cool Live CDs that get published along with KDE releases so it’s obviously very useful for him to have an account. I should have poked Canonical’s sysadmin to remind him but the account has now been added so problem solved. This doesn’t mean, as some people seem to have suggested, that Canonical is in any way dropping support for Kubuntu, they continue to be wonderfully supportive, both to the community of developers and commercially if you want to buy a support contract off them.”
I thought that story about Kubuntu’s being “in trouble” was a bit of an exaggeration. Mark Shuttleworth even publicly stated that he was using Kubuntu as his desktop:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12553
There is no trouble, stop trying to stoke a fire.
“As many already said yesterday [OSNews item “Kubuntu in Trouble?”], the Kubuntu.de story seems to be a classic example of a storm in a teacup.”
First, quote a stroppy “press release” from some disgruntled developers (two of whose names I recognised from before, one in a slightly more than vague fashion). Then, hype it up in the aforementioned article. 60-odd comments later, presumably mostly about KDE vs. GNOME, it’s suddenly no big deal.
The big question: why on Earth did you hype it up in the first place? For fun? Not enough news in the BeOS scene or something?
“The big question: why on Earth did you hype it up in the first place? For fun? Not enough news in the BeOS scene or something?”
More posts = more visits = more ad revenue.
I downloaded and tested the x86/PPC liveCDs for Flight 6 this weekend, both the Ubuntu and Kubuntu versions.
The default text smoothing for KF6 is terrible compared to Ubuntu’s. There’s no reason a KDE live distro should look that awful.
Espresso is fully functional under UF6 and nothing more than a stub on KF6. Leaving the same generic “developer WIP” warning on both versions is dumb.
KF6 cannot use the wifi in either the x86 (Intel Pro) or the PPC (Broadcom) flavor; it enables the wifi for half a second then disables it again. By comparison, UF6 can at least enable the wifi in the x86 version.
KF6’s trackpad tracking speed is substantially different between the x86 and PPC versions. Using the trackpad on PPC is painfully slow. If memory serves correctly, KF5/PPC didn’t do that.
Remember, there’s less than 60 days before this is supposed to be a frozen mainstream release.
Edited 2006-04-10 16:38
It’s well known that kubuntu devel lags behind ubuntu by at least a couple months. You can only fairly compare the released versions of each.
That being said, I tried the first big release of kubuntu and thought that KDE setup was the worst I’ve seen in the distros I’ve used (Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware)..
Not trying to cry foul OR start a flamewar but…
Why does it seem like the KDE developers are always crying foul and stirring up problems? Didn’t something not that long ago happen with a KDE developer completely lying about novell because they laid off 1 kde developer? Wasn’t there another incident where a KDE developer (Aaron Siego I think) also caused a big stir over Xgl? And now there is a Kubuntu developer threatening Canonical with, “Meet my demands or else…”.
I have never heard of gnome developers doing this EVER. Why do kde developers insist on causing such problems? Although not my personal choice, I like KDE with it’s integration and polish. Is this just another, “Hey look, me too!” kind of syndrome?
Please stop flaming, then. This, IMO, is not at KDE/GNOME thing, if it is indeed a thing at all. If it should, then it should be a paid/nonpaid developer thing.
I remember a lot of complaints when a certain high-ranking (former?) kernel developer said that he would recommend KDE and not GNOME.
To get back on topic, I am personally glad that Kubuntu is not in trouble. I use Ubuntu myself, since I am a GNOME kinda person, but I feel that making KDE available for users who like the rest of Ubuntu is the way to go.
Edited 2006-04-10 17:42
Maybe it has to do with the fact that all the big corporations are taking a shit on KDE and going exclusively with GNOME in spite of the technical superiority of KDE (and the fact that it’s GPL-only, unlike GNOME). The devs are complaining about conspiracies because there ARE conspiracies to basically kill off KDE. It’s really too bad because if the corporations had put as much effort into KDE as they are putting into GNOME, Linux would have already become a big contender on the desktop.
There are not such compirancies, the problem is that KDE has the Qt toolkit, is like they really want the toolkit but they hate the concecuenses of using it (not technical), in my opinion they are focusing their energy in the wrong direction, want to fix it? talk to TrollTech instead of whining to corporations, they do what they think is better to them and they own nothing to you.
Edited 2006-04-10 18:39
And what’s wrong with Qt? It’s superior design? The fact that it’s backed strongly by a company? The fact that it runs native on the three major platforms? The fact that it doesn’t look like crap? I’m sorry, I fail to see the problem.
I said not technical, read again.
Problems like expensive licenses costs or inherited licenses issues to customers, with Qt you have freedom only if you can pay for it, with GTK not, everybody have the same righs with or w/o money to buy licenses.
Don’t try to confuse readers about it.
Edited 2006-04-10 18:44
Organizations go with gnome because of the toolkit… gtk. Because it is licensed in LGPL, they can use it for proprietary applications. VMWare didn’t want Trolltech to extorm money from them simply so they could make a pretty gui on Linux so they went with gtk.
Technical superiority of hal/dbus “just works” oh wait… Project Utopia was originally for gnome and now KDE is adopting some of the technology. Collaboration like this helps open source as a WHOLE, not just one or the other.
Don’t say, “Desktop foo is obviously better because of it’s technical superiority.” KDE is neither better or worse than gnome. It is simply different. Each is better than the other in it’s own way.
No, no, it’s technically better. Even Gnome devels say this. But they also say it’s what you do with the code, rather than QT being superior, technically. It’s not a penis-sizing thing, little boy.
Thats contradictory since the KDE developers are the ones who some GKT libraries for their use.
So, take your fake statements some place else, you are abviusly tryng to flame there.
Edited 2006-04-10 20:13
“Thats contradictory since the KDE developers are the ones who some GKT libraries for their use.”
Really? What GTK libraries would that be?
Well, little boy… Can you back this up with any proof? A mailinglist archive URL? A blog post? Something on the internet?
I didn’t think so. Go spread your fud somewhere else please.
ok, but i still don’t understand what’s wrong with Qt’s license. its GPL – now, that’s like the kernel and almost all other major linux applications. and in addition, it is available under commercial license – at a fee. GTK is not comerially available, and has no corporate support company behind it like Qt has with Trolltech (which is a healty, quickly growing business, committed to Free Software, and its majority owned by its employees).
Hopefully this clarifies just *why* businesses go with gtk and not qt. Proprietary software is a fact of life unless you are RMS and honestly believe all programmers should be poor and barely have money to feed their families. VMWare is a shining example of a closed source company that is a good open source citizen. They contributed a very nice widget toolkit (libview) and some of their code is making it back into the core of GTK. They didn’t pay anyone to write VMWare for Linux in gtk because it is GPL.
Also, if you’ve been with open source long enough, you might remember the reason gnome/gtk was created in the very first place. It was because the QT toolkit was NOT free and Trolltech charges a LOT of money for people to license it.
What, you don’t believe me:
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html?cid=18 doesn’t lie.
You obviously don’t have a job or work for a company that has any money. The QT licensing is 1500 bucks. That’s nothing to 99% of companies.
The cost its $2000 per platform pert developer and to the company where I work it is a lot of money.
Don’t talk for everyone.
I explicitly stated that I wasn’t. But MOST companies do well enough that that isn’t a big deal. See the fact that Trolltech is very successful…Proof is in the pudding, little man.
Well my company just spent 1.2 million on licenses to Bea Weblogic alone.
There is nothing wrong with Qt being GPL, but you must understand that GPL doesn’t feed for everyone and in this case maybe doesn’t feed for some corpotative goals, you must respect their decition because it is their choice to do it, and that’s about Free Software is about, Free choice, w/o questioning, is not right just because some people dislike that choice start flaming, those people are hypocrits because to them free choice in free software is fine only when is convenient to them.
Edited 2006-04-10 20:00
tempest in a teacup…
It just sounds better that way
I can’t find the edit button… The above should say that VMWare didn’t pay anything because gtk is LGPL. That allows proprietary products to link against it without becoming GPL themselves
The edit button is visible only in flat view (no threads). I know, it sucks, but if you really need to edit something it’s there.
KDE (and the fact that it’s GPL-only, unlike GNOME
Actually no. Unless you are referring to applications, which are mostly GPL licenced, the KDE libraries are either LGPL, BSD (and variants) or MIT/X11 licenced.
http://developer.kde.org/policies/licensepolicy.html
That’s nothing to 99% of companies
It really depends on the company’s products. If they want to maintain different codebases for different platforms, most likely because it is an old product that was created that way, they’ll loose Qt’s main advantage.
However, if the plan is to cut costs by maintaining only a single codebase for multiple platforms, usually implying that it is a new product that can be developed like that from the beginning, the cost for proprietary Qt licence is usually small compared to the gain of reduced development and maintenace costs
There are examples for both kind of companies, so I’d say any claim of preference is highly exaggerated
Problems like expensive licenses costs or inherited licenses issues to customers, with Qt you have freedom only if you can pay for it…
The freedom to distribute proprietary products that use the toolkit, yes.
Don’t try to confuse readers about it.
You’re the one who’s confusing readers by making the broad statement that the Trolltech dual licensing model makes Qt less free without specifying in which sense.
The freedom to distribute proprietary products that use the toolkit, yes.
Exactly, and GTK gives you this freedom for nothing, maybe that’s the reason they use it.
> Support: One year of email-based support for the
> registered developer. Find out more about Trolltech
> support.
that’s no reason to pay something between EUR1420 to 5260 per developer per year? support and a more efficient toolkit to work with? peanuts. it’s a lot of money, but not compared to what a developer costs. and a dev costs more than his salary – administration, taxes et cetera. you can almost double it. so this is peanuts if he can work just a little bit more efficient. and you can also see you don’t have to add to the price of your product (other company’s often ask a fee per sold item).
> The complete source code of Qt for the
> platform(s) you have purchased, with the ability to
> modify it for your needs.
and GTK doesn’t even give you this. yes, you can access the source and change it, but you MUST give these changes back (LGPL). With Qt, you can keep em closed, too. you’re paying for it, after all.
the thing i have most against GTK is not just it is technically a worse toolkit compared to Qt, but more the fact it lets a company play NOT cool with Open Source software. with a GPL license, you have to contribute – money (closed license) or with code. GTK allows a free ride, i don’t like that.
but you MUST give these changes back (LGPL)
Totally wrong, you don’t have to get any change back, that’s the philosophy of LGPL.
Edited 2006-04-10 21:07
If you modify the toolkit code you do have to give the code back which is the scenario you were responding to.
but more the fact it lets a company play NOT cool with Open Source software
So?
I don’t care, I have not religious commitments with open source software, I don’t own them anything and they don’t own me anything .
Simple, the moment I hear someone with statements like these I know the kind of troll he is.
Edited 2006-04-10 20:59
so, if you don’t care about something, and someone else does, he/she is a troll? thank you sir.
NO, you are a troll because you don’t undertsand evryone else rights to pick the license they want w/o making a big deal of it.
if you change anything in a LGPL-licensed library, and you ship it to anyone, you have to make the source of these changes available. read the license on http://www.fsf.org
You are confused, you don’t have to retunr anything, that’s the GPL version not LGPL.
Edited 2006-04-10 21:29
Just to clarify (however, IANAL):
If you use a GPL library in your application, you MUST distribute your application under the GPL.
If you use a LGPL library in your application, you can distribute the application under a license of your choosing, be it proprietary or not
If you change the source of a GPL library, you MUST distribute it under the GPL
If you change the source of a LGPL library, you MUST distribute it under the LGPL.
The point is, that you can use a LGPL in a proprietary application, but if you make changes to the library itself, you have to publish those changes.
The point is, that you can use a LGPL in a proprietary application, but if you make changes to the library itself, you have to publish those changes.
Can you a put a link to this?
Of course:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html
For your reading pleasure 😉
I am quite positive that my previous post is correct (maybe not in a legal sense, but the spirit is there).
If I am wrong, I would like you to provide me with at link stating the opposite.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
“Most GNU software, including some libraries, is covered by the ordinary GNU General Public License. This license, the GNU Lesser General Public License, applies to certain designated libraries, and is quite different from the ordinary General Public License. We use this license for certain libraries in order to permit linking those libraries into non-free programs.
When a program is linked with a library, whether statically or using a shared library, the combination of the two is legally speaking a combined work, a derivative of the original library. The ordinary General Public License therefore permits such linking only if the entire combination fits its criteria of freedom. The Lesser General Public License permits more lax criteria for linking other code with the library.
We call this license the “Lesser” General Public License because it does Less to protect the user’s freedom than the ordinary General Public License. It also provides other free software developers Less of an advantage over competing non-free programs. These disadvantages are the reason we use the ordinary General Public License for many libraries. However, the Lesser license provides advantages in certain special circumstances.
For example, on rare occasions, there may be a special need to encourage the widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To achieve this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library. A more frequent case is that a free library does the same job as widely used non-free libraries. In this case, there is little to gain by limiting the free library to free software only, so we use the Lesser General Public License.
In other cases, permission to use a particular library in non-free programs enables a greater number of people to use a large body of free software. For example, permission to use the GNU C Library in non-free programs enables many more people to use the whole GNU operating system, as well as its variant, the GNU/Linux operating system.
Although the Lesser General Public License is Less protective of the users’ freedom, it does ensure that the user of a program that is linked with the Library has the freedom and the wherewithal to run that program using a modified version of the Library.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow. Pay close attention to the difference between a “work based on the library” and a “work that uses the library”. The former contains code derived from the library, whereas the latter must be combined with the library in order to run.”
Doesn’t everyone just love how a simple headline can create such heated arguments? The QT vs. GTK or KDE vs. Gnome war will continue on and on much like any other religious wars.
My thoughts on the differences between QT and GTK are pretty simple. Commercial entities generally chose GTK over QT for the fact that it’s free. Yes, the QT license isn’t too expensive, but think about it this way. Let’s say you have 20 programmers working on an application. This application when done will cost $99. Now, do you go with QT, which is $2000 per developer (at least someone else stated as such, I don’t know for sure) which would be $40,000. Now that alone means that you’d have to sell 400 copies of that software to be able to make up JUST THE LICENSING COSTS. That’s not counting developer costs, hardware costs, etc.
Granted, 400 copies is not that much, if it’s a popular program like Office. That’s still 40,000 that would not go into that companies revenue, that otherwise could have if they used GTK. Some companies (Adobe for example) could easily afford that much, especially since they charge 400-600 for photoshop. But think of it this way, if a company isn’t paying for a toolkit, then quite possibly (depending on how honest or nice that compay is) pass the savings of theirs down onto the end users.
My thoughts on the differences between QT and GTK are pretty simple. Commercial entities generally chose GTK over QT for the fact that it’s free. Yes, the QT license isn’t too expensive, but think about it this way. Let’s say you have 20 programmers working on an application. This application when done will cost $99. Now, do you go with QT, which is $2000 per developer (at least someone else stated as such, I don’t know for sure) which would be $40,000. Now that alone means that you’d have to sell 400 copies of that software to be able to make up JUST THE LICENSING COSTS. That’s not counting developer costs, hardware costs, etc.
Yes, the usual argument.
But if each developer is being paid $50K per year and it takes a year to design, produce and test the application, the company has spent $1M in development costs for those developers alone.
If Qt’s development framework can shave development by a single month, then the company has saved over $80K in salaries alone.
If it shaves development by 2, then the savings are $160K.
Suddenly that $2K per developer charge becomes pretty inconsequential, particularly considering they can now target Win, OS X and Linux with that app. Put another way, Qt’s annual license fee is equivalent to 2 weeks salary for that developer. Given Qt’s reputation as a development framework, even from within the Gtk community, it’s not unreasonable to assume an effectively run development house would see a very quick return on that investment.
And their legal department can happily include a clause prohibiting reverse engineering in the EULA, something that gives commercial software companies the warm and fuzzies despite what people may feel about the validity of EULA’s. LGPL doesn’t give them that option.
The annoying thing about the “But GTK is free argument!” is that it assumes price is a static thing and the single biggest driver for organizations whether developing or deploying, in fact that’s an attitude that is permeating the whole desktop linux approach as it tries to simply become a cheaper replacement for windows.
Companies measure cost in terms of value and return on investment. Spending money in order to reduce costs and increase profitability is not a paradoxical concept, it’s something smart companies practise everyday.
Assuming that things need to be free in order to be accepted simply devalues the product.
Qt’s not going anywhere, they’ve got a thriving paid developer base. If GTK needs to be free to be able to compete for developer mindshare, there’s nothing wrong with that and it’s actually the type of situation where the FSF grudgingly endorses LGPL, but at least realize that being free doesn’t necessarily mean being better or than ISV’s will fall over themselves to embrace it.
And to your last point about companies passing the savings down to their customers, you’re not only kidding yourself but you’re hitting on one serious flaw with the GTK/LGPL strategy: commercial third-party developers have no incentive to invest back, it’s left to Novell, Red Hat and the community to keep carrying that development load for Gnome and GTK, and then it becomes a question of whether or not that will translate into enough commercial desktop license sales to justify continued investment. Windows doesn’t have to charge an extra fee for development framework because the development cost can be spread across the license fee the millions of users around the world pay for using Windows. Linux does not have and will not likely achieve that type of market saturation or paying install base. So where do the development funds come from? Free isn’t free, it’s just redirected costs.
If Adobe and the other big vendors start releasing Gnome/GTK apps and half the market decides to run them on Debian or Ubuntu, how long will RH and Novell’s shareholders allow them to keep investing millions into the framework?
At the very least, as offensive as the commercial license fee for Qt is to some in the community, it does provide stability and development with those fees being re-invested back into improving Qt, without relying on the big distros to foot the bill. Stability and continuity are another thing the commercial companies look for in choosing their tools…
Sorry for the rant, but this argument really gets thrown around far too often.
EDIT: Typos
Edited 2006-04-11 01:55
Sorry for the rant, but this argument really gets thrown around far too often.
No problem, it was a good and well argumented answer to the nonsens.
Exept for one small bit, “Qt’s annual license fee” wich is wrong. Qt does not have a annual license fee, it’s a one time deal(You can in addition get annual support deals, but that’s just an option).
Excellent post. This is what I was trying to say.
I’d have to agree. I just tried the Kubuntu last night, and I was less than impressed.
It looked horrid to say the least.
If there arent any problems I guess you can just artificially create some? Why are some people making up this KDE vs GNOME animosity? As for the projects themselves, there is no such thing. The only ones whining and bitching like 5year-olds are users who probably dont have enough hobbies or dont get laid enough.
Edited 2006-04-11 04:00