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On Monday 17 February 2003 11:25, Johnny Stork wrote:
> Hmm, is this true? 

not in my experience. most software houses writing closed source software can 
afford the licensing costs and those costs are more than made up for by the 
quality of the Qt library (which translates directly to lower development 
costs), the absolute ease and guarantee of natively-targetted cross platform 
development and the tech support provided by TT.

to go about another way, name the proprietary apps that use Gtk+.
the number that use Qt are quite large.

the Linux PDA market is largely a Qt one right now with both Zaurus and IBM 
using it as their reference and production platforms in that space.

i've also worked with a few people here in Calgary that do closed development 
with Qt and am writing an article on an industrial manufacturing company in 
the states who writes all their internal software using KDE (which means 
using Qt as well). so, no, i don't think Qt's dual licensing is a set back. 
if nothing else, it ensures that Qt will still be around and has a lot of 
very qualified full time developers working on it.

if Qt was hampering close source devel, Trolltech would be in dire straits 
financially instead of doubling their income every year for the last four 
years and we wouldn't see the immense amount of closed devel around it. 


i really, really take exception to the author's claim that GNOME is cleaner, 
newer and less bloated. apparently he has never coded with either 
environment, and i really don't know what he means by "newer".

his next statement that the most important OSS projects are released for or 
will be ported to GNOME is also bullshit. if he's referring to Open Office, 
he ought to talk to the Open Office and the GNOME developers who have 
publicly given up on that task a long time ago. otherwise, if he believes 
that Evolution, Galeon or Nautilus are the most important apps, he's less 
clueful than a rock; they aren't even best of breed. or maybe he doesn't 
understand the distinction between a GNOME app and a Gtk+ app. GIMP is not a 
GNOME app, it's a Gtk app. Pan isn't a GNOME app any longer, it's a Gtk+ app.

this author oversells GNOME (but that's nothing new) and completely FUDs KDE 
(but that's nothing new either). this is just echoes of a very old and stupid 
flame war that was started by trolls (hello Miguel) and continued by 
ignorants. this author and those like him are doing more to disrupt and 
destroy the future of desktop Linux with his writing than any licensing issue 
ever could.

> Do people consider this to be an important, and
> potentially "commercial-distro-choice-impacting" issue?

look at which distros commercial entities are picking. what do you think?

btw, i recently heard of a multi-1000s desktop license purchase by the Hilton 
hotel chain from Xandros. exciting times!

> And please be open minded and as objective as possible. 

like the author?

here's an irony: GNOME starts up because KDE wasn't Free enough for them. now 
certain GNOME supporters state that GNOME is better because it supports 
free-as-in-beer closed development while KDE encourages Free development over 
closed. not only is this ironic, but it demonstrates a lack of understanding 
regarding commercial software development, namely: people pay for their 
tools.

> In order for Linux and Open Source to
> succeed as a true paradigm-shift in the software/computer industry or a
> legitimate disruptive-technology, commercial acceptance and some sort of
> working relationship with closed-source, propietary systems is critical
> (IMHO).

i agree. and i don't think such a schism exists.

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE: The 'K' is for 'kick ass'
http://www.kde.org       http://promo.kde.org/3.1/feature_guide.php
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