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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Does KDE want to limit or destroy its commercial acceptance?
From:       Guillaume Laurent <glaurent () telegraph-road ! org>
Date:       2003-12-29 23:38:45
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On Monday 29 December 2003 22:49, Paul Hampson wrote:
>
> however i am sure
> if we did a survey of several companies and told them that if they had the
> choice between free, powerful development software that would allow them to
> port to many types of systems with little engineering and gave them the
> ability to choose their liscense (as GTK+ is LGPL'd) over one that is very
> similar yet they have to pay for they would choose the free one.

On what are you basing this intuition ? Working in the software 
industry, I find that :

- Qt's price is irrelevant. This argument is often being brought up, but has 
really no ground. Qt is cheap compared to most development products 
available.

- the LGPL is *NOT* considered to be without issues, be they real or not. Most 
companies will very much prefer purchasing licenses rather than running any 
legal risk. 

- what matters in development is time. This is by far the most costly 
resource. Any comparison of Qt and GTK+, as is routinely the case prior to a 
purchase, will be in favor of Qt.

As has been recently discussed on dot.kde.org, the only serious advantage 
Gnome has to offer to a proprietary company compared to KDE is Ximian, that 
is, an entity they can talk to. That KDE lacks such a corporate entity is the 
only real problem we have, not Qt's License.

-- 
						Guillaume.
						http://www.telegraph-road.org

 
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