[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde
Subject:    Re: QT license
From:       Sirtaj Singh Kang <ssk () physics ! unimelb ! edu ! au>
Date:       1997-05-26 21:51:10
[Download RAW message or body]


This belongs in kde-licensing, but since I dont read it, and well, this
letter is here, I might as well reply. :)

On Mon, 26 May 1997, Aaron Granick wrote:

> I was just visiting the TrollTech web page, and decided to glance at the
> commercial license section, and noticed that commercial use of QT costs
> almost $1500!  This could be a serious hinderance to commercial KDE
> development ( which I believe is vital to make KDE universally
> popular...one of the main reasons windows has succeeded so well is
> simply the number and quality of apps available, not the OS itself).  To

There is no shortage of both numbers and quality of free applications
avaliable to UNIX/linux. The problems so far, as i see them have been:

1. No single standard GUI. We've got athena, but I don't like to call it a
GUI. More like a gui mess (a pun i could not resist).

2. No RAD GUI system. Athena is not easy to write with, neither does it
turn out applications that are polished enough to justify the work you
would put into them (people who disagree with me: go spend a day playing
with Delphi).

We are working on the principle that there is no shortage of people
willing to write free programs for unix/X. It has just been damn
difficult, so far, to write GOOD programs with minimum of effort.

Most of the good free programs out there have been written for Motif. But
that certainly aint free for _anything_. 

Certainly Qt isn't RAD in the way Delphi is, but programs like DlgEdit
prove that it is certainly possible to write a RAD system based on Qt. 

I do agree that $1500 is out of the budget of the hobbyist programmer
looking to put out low-overhead commercial software, but perhaps this
hobbyist programmer is not who Qt is targetted at.

This hobbyist programmer is just going to have to write his software using
the free Qt license, or go out and buy VC++ and MFC for a 10th of the
price of Qt and write his program for Windows, just like almost everyone
else.  The unfortunate, unwritten "UNIX tax" applies to Qt as well. 

-Taj.

Sirtaj S. Kang       taj@kde.org         ssk@physics.unimelb.edu.au
School of Physics    Univ of Melbourne   http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~ssk/

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]