There's a thought I've always had about Qt, and I think this thread is a good
place to tell about it.
I know that Trolltech and KDE e.V. have an agreement that assures the
availabilty and continued development of the free version of Qt for KDE to
use it. I know it's good to have a company making money out of the product
they also give us in a free form to develop with. But, through time, I've
seen comments in this list that have made me think that a completely free
"community developed" version of Qt would be better to KDE.
Please, calm down.
I don't want to hurt any feelings. I'm not saying we should immediately drop
the Trolltech Qt, fork it and start developing our own version of Qt. I'm not
even saying that it must ever be done. But there are a couple of thing I
don't like about the way we have Qt nowadays, and I just want to present
them:
- Qt is developed by a company: I remember a question I read once in this list
about when was KDE going to allow the K Menu to be customized by dragging
items to it. I also remember another about the use of the composite
extensions in X.org for alpha blending. My point is not on those two specific
issues of Qt, but in the answers given to those questions: "we must wait for
the Trolltech people to do something about that in Qt". That's my point. Why
should we wait for Trolltech to add a feature we already want in Qt? Don't
you think that, even though it's GPL licensed, Qt is out of our hands? Don't
you feel that Qt could better response to the community desires if it were
developed the very same way that KDE or other free software is?
- There's no free Qt in Windows: I've seen a lot of free software from Linux
ported to Windows. I feel glad every time I find a new free software sample
that is ported to Windows. How many of those free applications use Qt? I
don't remember a single one. I think I read once about an idea of some day
porting KDE to Windows. I haven't been able to find the place where I read
it, and perhaps I didn't, or the idea has been dropped. But anyway, let's
imagine we would like to port KDE, or at least, some KDE application. How
would that be accomplished? I know about KDE-Cygwin, and that's ok, but
that's not the way to use Qt in Windows that I would like to see. Haven't you
thought of making a cross-platform application with Qt? How would you do
that, if you won't sell your application? How do I make a free-as-in-freedom
cross-platform application? Qt isn't the way to go now.
Don't blame on me, please. These are just thoughts I've had and I want you to
know. Qt is anyway an excellent toolkit and Trolltech has been very nice with
KDE so far. I wouldn't like to hurt anybody's feeling with this.
Thanks and sorry If I'm wrong in any concept,
Andy
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