arstechnica.com— Trolltech, the company behind the cross-platform open source widget toolkit used by the KDE desktop environment, has announced that it will be adopting GPL 3.
Jan 19, 2008View in Crawl 4
This could be good. QT is a pretty good library - and its not just a widget library. Its a generic container, database, networking, and UI library, with graphical UI design program and a clever messaging system. The licensing stuff is the only reason I've been using GTK...
You can make money from GPL'd products. If someone produced a specialised interface for an SQL server using GPL'd Qt they could charge people for their work. It's a misconception that you must have the Trolltech license to make a profit, that's to allow you to keep your source closed which is entirely different.//edit - another example, used by OpenBSD is to distribute pure source code for free but distribute binary packages on CD and charge.//
vektuzJan 19, 2008
This could be good. QT is a pretty good library - and its not just a widget library. Its a generic container, database, networking, and UI library, with graphical UI design program and a clever messaging system. The licensing stuff is the only reason I've been using GTK...
gmorganJan 19, 2008
You can make money from GPL'd products. If someone produced a specialised interface for an SQL server using GPL'd Qt they could charge people for their work. It's a misconception that you must have the Trolltech license to make a profit, that's to allow you to keep your source closed which is entirely different.//edit - another example, used by OpenBSD is to distribute pure source code for free but distribute binary packages on CD and charge.//
phinnfortJan 19, 2008
This account has been closed by the user
technoredneckJan 20, 2008
From what I gather, Qt is still going to be also licensed under the second version of the GPL (kind of like how Firefox is GPL/LGPL/MPL tri-licensed).
Closed AccountJan 21, 2008
What you meant to say was, "This is really good news for KDE developers and users. Congratulations, Trolltech!"