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List:       kde-freeqt
Subject:    Re: [freeqt] Greetings!
From:       Matt Heck <mheck () www ! surveyorcorp ! com>
Date:       1999-02-17 12:51:45
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On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Steve Hutton wrote:

> Are you aware that Harmony was _not_ a cross-platform project?

Perhaps this particular aspect of Qt gets missed by the Linux-and-
only-Linux developers (and kudos to you), but Qt is a cross-platform
solution, and it seems appropriate (and useful) for Harmony to have
eventually reached that capability.  Qt's license for Windows, incidently,
was not quite as usable as its license for Linux.  Considering I will
DEFINITELY have to extend whatever toolkit we wind up using for a
high-performance video framebuffer, we're still leery of Qt's "mostly
kinda open if you ain't sellin' anything" license.  Frankly, as odd as it
seems, a completely commercial license for Qt would've almost been as
acceptable as an L/GPL license for my immediate needs-- it's the
confusion and half-assedness of the current license that makes us leery of
it.  It's one of those things where we'd never be quite sure what we
could do with it.

That said, their pricing structure was pretty much on par for a commercial
cross-platform GUI development toolkit, and the quantity breaks start low
enough where they take some of the sting out.  But I think we're still
going to decline using it here.

As far as Harmony not being multi-platform, I am aware that at least one
person was considering a Mac port, after the initial effort was stable
under Linux.  I expected to find that there was no significant progress
for a Win32 version, and intended to start that effort if it had not
already been done.

Unfortunately, I've been rather quickly left with the sense that the
programming team atrophied, and that usually means there is similar
atrophy in the source-- at present, though, I'm not even planning to look
at Harmony's source.

One concern that would come up for me is knowing the particulars of the
legal issues that scared off the developers.  APIs can't be copyrighted,
much less patented, and with the source code (for Harmony) freely
available for inspection, it should be obvious that the code is not based
off of Qt.  Was there a more coherent threat?

____________________
Matt Heck
Surveyor Corporation

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