Re: [TCLUG:2858] Qt license debate: OVER

[John R Sheets <dusk@smsi-roman.com>]

Neal Tovsen wrote:
> 
> I seem to remember that there was some debate about Troll Tech's licensing
> schema for the Qt libraries (used in KDE, and other stuff). Some people
> didn't like the fact that though KDE was OpenSource, Qt wasn't. I seem to
> remember that some said they were going Gnome primarily for this reason.

I wouldn't say primarily, although it was a strong factor.  They
were also concerned that KDE was written entirely in C++ (my
language of choice, incidentally), which makes it a lot harder to
create bindings to other programming languages (name mangling,
etc.).  This promise has paid off, with existing bindings to
guile, perl, python, TOM, and yes, C++.  I'm probably missing a
few.  Oh, Objective-C, too.

Add to that the WM agnosticism, a more flexible widget toolkit
(GTK+ is now themable, down to the widget level), and a leaner
implementation (sorry, C++ tends to bloat, and KDE doesn't seem
to have bucked that trend).  Plus more.

All that said, I think KDE is a good thing.  I'll probably never
use it, but I'm glad it's out there.

FYI, if anyone's interested, there's a pretty good technical
article on GNOME, by one of the core developers, Miguel, at
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue35/icaza.html.

John