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Interview With Trolltech's CEO and CTO Eirik Eng 266

Posted by timothy from the bringing-others-joy dept.
jlp2097 writes "There is a great and lengthy interview at the The Dot with Eirik Eng, CEO of Trolltech, and Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project and CTO of Trolltech. They talk about the recent X(Free86) trouble, accessibility in QT, Trolltech's finances, Qtopia, the OS X Port and a GPL'd Windows QT - it's probably not going to happen. And, did you know that Qt is pronounced 'Cute' by its creators?"
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Interview With Trolltech's CEO and CTO Eirik Eng More

Interview With Trolltech's CEO and CTO Eirik Eng

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  • Bad HTML (Score:4, Informative)

    by Andrewkov ( 140579 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:35PM (#8839862)
    The second link is bad ... Looks like the author forgot the http:// or something.

  • "Cute" (Score:4, Funny)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:38PM (#8839901) Homepage
    At work, we went through a phase once of calling people who were doing X "X-boy". E.g., I was doing some email stuff, so people called me "email-boy". Well, one programmer was learning Qt, and as he left one evening, someone called out "Goodnight, cutie-boy!". Man, was his face red when he realized what that sounded like. :-)

  • GTK+ (Score:5, Funny)

    by 3Suns ( 250606 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:39PM (#8839908) Homepage
    And, did you know that Qt is pronounced 'Cute' by its creators?


    I also heard that GTK is pronounced "Gittuk" by the gnome hackers...

  • cute? (Score:5, Funny)

    by taj ( 32429 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:39PM (#8839910) Homepage

    Another project where the creators don't event know how to pronounce the name of the project? I run into this all the time.

    • Re:cute? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by m0rphin3 ( 461197 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:47PM (#8839981)
      Another project where the creators don't event know how to pronounce the name of the project? I run into this all the time.


      Did you ever consider that the project creators are not from English-speaking countries? Hence, their pronounciation is correct as far as they are concerned.

      Qt in Norwegian would sound something like 'ku-teh', or 'cute' to untrained (e.g. non-Norwegian) ears.

  • This sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)

    by PetoskeyGuy ( 648788 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:45PM (#8839962)
    Hello this is TrollTech, and we pronounce QT as "Cute"

    a la Linux [sladen.org]

  • Canopy/SCO Connection (Score:2, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:45PM (#8839964)
    Someone's going to mention it, so ...

    PF: Somebody mentioned that the Canopy Group & SCO owns some parts of Trolltech.
    ME: Sorry, we don't have any influence on them.
    PF: Do they have any influence on you?
    ME: Not really. They have a 5.7% stake in Trolltech

    This is completely believable -- Trolltech doesn't really fit into Canopy's current legal strategy, and there's unlikely that there's any "influence" going on there.

    However, you can be sure that Canopy has access to Trolltech's customer lists -- If you have purchased Qt with the intent of doing (say) a large internal Linux deployment, don't be surprised when SCO comes knocking and asking for fees.

    • Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:52PM (#8840029)
      Nice try : a failed pre-emptive strike, though.

      More specific questions remain :

      The real questions are

      1) What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors? Sorry, sitting on the board means "influence".

      2) What is financial relationship between SCO/Canopy and Trolltech? Specificly: does Trolltech owe money to SCO/Canopy, does Canopy have contractual rights to seats on the board? Does SCO/Canopy have warrants or other agreements to take control of Trolltech later?

      Sadly, a QT standard on Linux DOES fit into Canopy's strategy for market share. Especially if they can invoke ownership or control of Trolltech on a later date.

      • Hello moderators? The parent has legitimate questions...

        Canopy's *Ralph Yarro* sitting on the Trolltech board of directors certainly DOES qualify as influence.
      • What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors?

        There's a perfectly reasonable explanation. I simply play my Lawful Good paladin when attending Trolltech board meetings, my Chaotic Evil mage when attending SCO board meetings and my True Neutral druid when attending Canopy board meetings. This is quite common practice and nothing to be worried about.

      • Check your facts, please (Score:2)

        by falonaj ( 615782 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @06:08PM (#8842028) Homepage
        1) What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors? Sorry, sitting on the board means "influence".

        Please stop reporting wrong rumours as facts.

        Check Trolltech's site for their board of directors [trolltech.com], or search for "Yarro" [trolltech.com] on their site - and then apologies to them for spreading lies.

      • Re:Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:5, Informative)

        by haavard_nord ( 749222 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @12:45AM (#8844755) Homepage
        Good questions that deserve to be answered. I'm co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Trolltech and should be able to give fairly accurate answers. (To avoid confusion, Eirik's title is President, not CEO as Fremy writes).

        What is Ralph J. Yarro of Canopy infamy doing on the Trolltech board of directors?

        Early 1999 Trolltech had helped Utah-based Caldera to create their award-winning graphical Linux installer. Around the same time we also started developing Qt/Embedded for the embedded Linux market. Lineo, another Utah company, was the king of embedded Linux at the time, and they needed a product like Qt/Embedded for Linux-based consumer devices.

        Canopy was a major VC and stakeholder in both Caldera and Lineo. Ralph Yarro, President and CEO of Canopy, recognized that Trolltech could help two of their porfolio companies succeed and decided to make an investment in Trolltech.

        I met Ralph Yarro in Utah in August 1999 and we agreed on an investment term-sheet (with very reasonable terms for Trolltech, by the way).

        Did we do the right thing? Definitely. Canopy was the first investor in Trolltech and their investment made it possible for us to grow the company and build new products. Canopy was later followed by Borland and a syndicate of three Norwegian VCs.

        As part of the investment agreement, each investor got a seat on the board: Ralph Yarro from Canopy, Dale Fuller from Borland and Ingar Ostby from Northzone. Ralph Yarro has been on our board since late 1999.

        Sorry, sitting on the board means "influence".

        Ralph Yarro has about zero influence over how we run the company. When you have a person on your board that might have a conflict of interest in certain areas you will make sure that this person does not participate in all discussions or get access to all company information.

        What is financial relationship between SCO/Canopy and Trolltech?

        The deal in 1999 also involved a stock swap with Caldera. As all of you know, Caldera became SCO a couple of years ago and changed their Linux agenda. Trolltech owned stock in SCO but we decided to sell them last year after the interview took place. But SCO still owns a tiny portion of Trolltech shares.

        Does Trolltech owe money to SCO/Canopy?

        No.

        Does Canopy have contractual rights to seats on the board?

        Yes, this is part of the investment contract we have with all our investors.

        Does SCO/Canopy have warrants or other agreements to take control of Trolltech later?

        No, are you nuts? We would be pretty stupid to sign an investment contract that would give a minor (or even major) shareholder the ability to take control of our company.

        Do I support Canopy's or SCO's actions? No way.

        Haavard

  • Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows license (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BestNicksRTaken ( 582194 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:48PM (#8839987)
    wxWidgets has a huge following because it is truly cross-platform, with the same [free] licensing.

    I would be using Qt/PyQt if it had a non-commercial (or preferably GPL) Windows license, but for now I'm stuck with wxPython - which really isn't as nice as Qt, although sometimes looks better due to native LnF.

    I don't see the point of having GPL Linux *and Mac* versions without Windows, just because of the lame excuse "well Windows isn't GPL", it really bugs me, I don't want to write free software that won't work on Windows (and I'm far from a M$ advocate).

    MacOSX isn't OSS, it's proprietary Apple stuff that they hacked on top of an OSS OS, so come up with another excuse TT....

    And before anyone mentions the non-commercial Qt with the book - that is a very limited version (personal use, non-ditributable), doesn't work with PyQt, and is out-of-date already.

    Argh, rant over!

    • Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:3, Interesting)

      by XbainX ( 464073 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:10PM (#8840174)
      I hear that... I'm just now starting to work on a project I'm coding in Python. I'd love to use PyQT, but one of my reasons for using Python is the portability. Why the hell would I choose a a cross-platform windowing API that is free (for non-commercial) for all but the OS family with the largest market share?

      Yes, yes, it's their code and they can choose to do whatever they want with it. Well, I'll choose to use wxWindows instead...

      It just kills me that they justify their GPL'd releases for Linux and MacOS X by helping the Free software community and yet it appears to be a completely alien idea to them (according to the interview) that just maybe there are some GPL developers out there that want to release software that runs on MS Windows.

    • Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:5, Informative)

      by Soul-Burn666 ( 574119 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:13PM (#8840193) Journal
      " just because of the lame excuse "well Windows isn't GPL""

      That's _NOT_ the reason they give. The reason they gave is that too many commercial companies used the GPL version of the library in their commercial software instead of using the pricy commercial version of the library, and they said it's impossible to go and sue all of them.
      • "The reason they gave is that too many commercial companies used the GPL version of the library in their commercial software instead of using the pricy commercial version of the library, and they said it's impossible to go and sue all of them."

        I could find no such reference in the section of the interview talking about a GPL'd version for Windows.

        The actual reason given was incoherent and completely meaningless. If they had just come right out and said, "we make the vast majority of our money by requiring Windows developers for pay for licenses, and we don't want to lose that revenue," then they would have put the question to rest. Instead, they sidestepped the question entirely.

        I work for county government, and I produce software for internal use only. Management was perfectly willing to license all internally developed software under the GPL. All our users are on Windows, so the Windows versions was the only Qt option that was viable.

        Since I am so proficient with Qt, the county bought a Windows license for me last year. I do all my development on Linux, then recompile on Windows using the Borland free command line compiler.

        I am the only developer in the county who is familiar with Qt, and the only developer who primarily uses Linux. I have been in love with the Qt API since day one. The others develop entirely on Windows.

        Qt got the official boot at work for a couple reasons:

        1) No Windows IDE. Having to pay for a full IDE (Visual Studio or C++ Builder), then having to pay for Qt licenses on top of that is a ridiculous proposition. And the poor integration with them both is a non-starter. This is by far the biggest reason Qt lost to C++ Builder.

        2) We don't make any money off of software development. It is necessary for us to create software to support our internal processes, but that software is useless to anyone but us. Given Qt's lack of an IDE (which we could work around), the fact that it was going to cost us at least as much as C++ Builder (which has a full IDE), and twice as much under some circumstances, there was absolutely no way the boss was going to standardize on Qt.

        Trolltech is badly fumbling the ball here. The only reason that Qt gained the following that it has on Linux is because it's Free/free for writing GPL'd applications. Being a great toolkit was not enough. Qt gained an Open Source following because of the license.

        I can't believe that Trolltech people actually said that the main reason they don't GPL Qt for Windows is because there is no Open Source community under Windows. That's backward logic.

        The real reason there is no Open Source Qt community under Windows is because there's no GPL'd Qt under Windows. Duh!

        The Windows Open Source community would materialize the moment Qt were GPL'd under Windows. A large part of that would be a melding of the Linux community with the Windows community.
        • I did not write the grandparent post but it is well known on the qt-interest mailing list (run by Trolltech) that the reason there's no GPL'ed version of Qt for Windows is exactly the reason given in the grandparent post.

          I find it strange that you wish Qt came with a Windows IDE. I see these as entirely separate products. I do not expect Qt to come with an IDE and indeed would probably not use one (I quite like KDevelop). Qt also does not come with a compiler, it does not come with source code control, it is not a web browser, and it cannot play DVDs. Obviously I am being facetious here.

          Qt is expensive. If C++ Builder allows you to develop a similar quality of product at about the same level of work, your boss is right that you should be using C++ Builder. At the company I work for, we examined the alternatives and decided that purchasing a license for Qt would be a cost-effective solution and indeed this seems to have been the case.
      • Go reread the article. The primary reason they gave was that in order to get the Windows development kit you have to sign a webform and that's how they get most of their contact information for when they spam people.
    • Or.......to paraphrase:

      < Ronald Regan Cold War Era Voice >
      Mr. Eng,....tear...down.. this... wall!
      < /Ronald Regan Cold War Era Voice >

    • Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:2, Informative)

      by OglinTatas ( 710589 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:16PM (#8840220)
      Qt has a non-commercial windows license. It is basically the GPL with the added restriction that you cannot use it at your place of employment. That sounds reasonable. Hack stuff together as a hobby if you want, but if you need Qt at work, your employer should buy a license for it.
      I got a copy of Qt with the book "C++ Programming with Qt3" [slashdot.org]
      It looks pretty slick. I won't use it at work but everything else is fair game.
      • The non-commercial version also puts a big "[Non-commercial]" in the title of every window. What's worse, you have to use Borland (on the book CD) or Microsoft's C compiler, either meaning I need to pay for VC.net or use a compiler which doesn't handle C++ templates correctly and breaks STL/Boost/Loki-type stuff. For just goofing around, it is ok, but it looks like I'll have to move to Linux to get anything decent written.

        The non-commercial license is very different from the GPL.

    • OS X/Darwin (Score:3, Insightful)

      by simpl3x ( 238301 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:17PM (#8840236)
      Isn't the idea of Qt to avaid the proprietary aspects of OS X, which would be the interface. If it runs similarly on the "free" version, isn't it free from the proprietary aspects? Similar to the comments on Java earlier today, if the code is tied to non-free parts of the OS, then the tools cannot be free, and the potential forr costs being incured by TrollTech are a possibility.
    • Where are all these wxWidgets freaks coming from. Did the name change suddenly confer mass popularity on the project or something?

      To date, I have yet to see any X11 software that used wxWidgets besides one dialog editor for wxWidgets. Maybe its doing gangbusters in Windows land, but it's an unknown in my world.
    • The fact remains that there is a version of Qt available under the GPL -- and, therefore, in source code form. Anybody could quite legitimately port that to Windows, as long as it was released under the GPL {or not released at all, just used within an organisation}. Sure, it would take a bit of effort, but that's the only obstacle. Trolltech cannot do anything legally to prevent you from doing it.

      I think it's absolutely pathetic the way all these Windows fanboys bitch about the way Trolltech hasn't released a GPL version of Qt for windows. Nothing is stopping them doing what we in the GNU/Linux community have already done for ourselves, and writing their own. But the truth is the only kind of software the Windows users really know or care about writing is worms and viruses -- and even then they only manage that with a lot of help from Microsoft. They're quite content to eat the shit they get fed, because they know it would be too much like hard graft to try changing it.

      • Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:3, Informative)

        by Trestran ( 715384 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:50PM (#8841250)
        Anybody could quite legitimately port that to Windows, (...)
        Sort of what the people at kde on cygwin [sourceforge.net] are trying to do with their qt 3 win32 port [sourceforge.net]:

        • The native win32 port of the qt library is going to have the following features:
        • Complete gpl licensed replacement for win32 environments
        • based on the gpled qt/X11 sources means there is no licensing problems with any commercial trolltech license
        • supports mingw and cygwin host environment
        • supports cygwin mount table even under mingw environment - improves cygwin and mingw interoperability
        • base of a future native KDE port
      • But the truth is the only kind of software the Windows users really know or care about writing is worms and viruses -- and even then they only manage that with a lot of help from Microsoft. They're quite content to eat the shit they get fed, because they know it would be too much like hard graft to try changing it.

        This gets a +1: Interesting?! Calling anyone who writes software for 90% of the computer-using public criminals? This may be the most personally insulting thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Nice keyboard courage, there, buddy.

      • {or not released at all, just used within an organisation}

        That's a myth; but one that even the FSF has helped spread [gnu.org] (although not in the exact same form).

        However, actually reading the text of the GPL [gnu.org] will reveal that there is no special exception for organizations (or corporations). According to the license, you must apply the GPL whenever you "distribute" the modified software.

        Some [walmart.com] organizations [pentagon.gov] have thousands of locations and a million members. To give a modified program to all those people would undeniably qualify as "distribution"; the fact that they're all "internal users" is irrelevant.

        (Note that copyright law also has no exception for members of an organization)

    • Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tyrione ( 134248 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @05:33PM (#8841714) Homepage
      MacOSX isn't OSS, it's proprietary Apple stuff that they hacked on top of an OSS OS, so come up with another excuse TT....

      Hacked? Are you an ass? Yes. Yes I believe you are truly an ass!

      Hate to pea in your wheaties but Quartz, Cocoa, Java, QuickTime and more are not "hacks." I'd love to see what you consider non-hacks. Let's not even get into the contributions NeXT and now Apple is making with BSD, Mach and GCC. Shit if it wasn't for those contributions GCC would be far behind the curve. It's amazing to me how one shoots off commentary without ever being on the inside to know what the hell goes on.

      What I learned working at NeXT and Apple is we seemed to have this reputation of being untouchable and overly arrogant with our developed products. Not surprising considering seeing both sides of the screen I've yet to find any other company who has even close the caliber of talent writing software that NeXT did and did infuse into Apple.

      Any one who would turn down a job to learn under that Engineering team is either a complete schizophrenic or never was considered for any of those positions, in the first place.

      It is clear to me how come Trolltech isn't offering a free Windows port. They want to stay in business and the Windows world has a crapload of money to purchase licenses from them. If Bill Gates suddenly went Open Source I'm sure Trolltech would follow.

  • Linux (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:48PM (#8839992)
    As one of the primary graphic toolsets for Linux, and the choice of many distributions, QT being commercial/GPL is a hinderance to commercial software for Linux. It provides a "toll booth" by forcing all non-free applications to pay a fee to distribute these applications. This forces non-free developers to charge more to pay for these fees, as well as stopping closed-source "freeware." Since KDE is used so widely and known to many as the linux desktop, it makes sense to have a LGPL QT implementation. The GPL should keep applications free, but drastically hinders adoptation as a standard for use in all applications.

    • You misunderstand the goal of the GPL (Score:2)

      by yokem_55 ( 575428 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:48PM (#8840573)
      Well, the goal of the GPL is to expand the availability of Free (as in freedom) software, not to be "a standard for use in all applications."

    • Re:Linux (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:10PM (#8840767)
      Feel Free to write your own Toolkit and license it any way you want. Trolltech is a business and if companies want to develop commercial or closed source apps they can pay.

      "QT being commercial/GPL is a hinderance to commercial software for Linux."

      No it isn't, companies who want to take advantage of Trolltech's work without paying like they normally do on the Win32 platform are the problem. Sorry but your arguement has been debunked about a billion times over. If you can quote one big commercial company who said "The license fee for QT is too expensive so we won't be developing any commercial apps for the Linux" I'll eat my hat.

      And Lastly as another wise person once said here, very sorry I don't have your name I just have a bunch of quotse from the last gtk vs qt debate.

      " The cost of a license for commercial development is not a valid argument. If a company develops an application for sale, the cost of a license is a fraction of the overall cost to develop, market, and maintain a product. As far as development kits go, the decision on which dev kit that gets chosen is based on quality, which will drive the cost of development in the long run, and company politics."

    • Re:Linux (Score:2)

      by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2@earthsh ... .co.uk minus bsd> on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:21PM (#8840903)
      QT is available under the freaking GPL. That means anyone can use it, as long as they release their software under the GPL. I'm fine with that. IMHO, closed source software is just plain wrong -- there is simply no justification for it. Just because you wrote something, doesn't give you the right to stop me from seeing it. Them's the breaks. If you want to write closed source software, don't expect to get a free ride on the back of the Free Software community. We might sell you a limited right to use our work -- if and only if you're prepared to pay for it, and we reserve the right to invest that money in a GPL replacement for whatever you're writing.

  • Chicken and egg . . . (Score:4, Informative)

    by AshtangiMan ( 684031 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:49PM (#8839999)
    As some people mentioned on the dot, it has partly to do with finances, sales and Trolltech's business model. Another point is the fact that Windows is a closed source Operating System. There is no community for Free Software development under Windows. The situation is very different from Linux, as you know. On Windows development usually happens as shareware or commercial software and we don't see that community evolving into producing Free Software.
    This is a bit backwards. Right now if you use Visual Studio (and any windows library) you are suposudly prevented by the EULA from creating GPL'd code. So, in the windows world, if there were a good alternative that allowed for GPL code creation/distribution I think it would be used.

    • Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:5, Informative)

      by negacao ( 522115 ) * <dfgdsfg@asdasdasd.net> on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:57PM (#8840074)
      Perhaps we should correct this blatant, failed attempt at trolling.

      The code you write is YOURS. The EULA of the compiler and provided libraries doesn't even TRY to control your licensing scheme.

      In fact, the GPL isn't even mentioned in the EULA for MS Visual Studio 6.

      The only thing you're prevented from doing is giving away the provided libraries, header files, or source code that come with the compiler and tools.

      Don't get me wrong, MSFT sucks big floppy donkey dick, but FUD in either direction helps none of us.

      • Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:2)

        by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:12PM (#8840187) Journal
        Here's what I think he's talking about (from the VisualStudio.NET EULA [clendons.co.nz]):


        (b) If you use the Redistributables, or the "Sample Code" or "Redistributable Code" portions of the SDK Software (as described in Section 4.2(b) (all of the foregoing referred to in this paragraph as the "Licensed Software"), then in addition to your compliance with the applicable distribution requirements described for the Licensed Software, the following also applies. Your license rights to the Licensed Software are conditioned upon your (i) not incorporating Identified Software into or combining Identified Software with the Licensed Software or a derivative work thereof; (ii) not distributing Identified Software in conjunction with the Licensed Software or a derivative work thereof; and (iii) not using Identified Software in the development of a derivative work of the Licensed Software. "Identified Software" means software which is licensed pursuant to terms that directly or indirectly (A) create, or purport to create, obligations for Microsoft with respect to the Licensed Software or derivative work thereof or (B) grant, or purport to grant, to any third party any rights or immunities under Microsoft's intellectual property or proprietary rights in the Licensed Software or derivative work thereof.

        Identified Software includes, without limitation, any software that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of such software that other software incorporated into, derived from or distributed with such software be (1) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (2) be licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (3) be redistributable at no charge.


        This seems to be a pre-emptive strike against Stallman's unconventional view of "derived works" -- that GPL obligations can extend across library boundries.

        I don't think this is a real problem for GPL developers however -- either the GPL does not impose these requirements on Microsoft libraries (due to "fair use" and the right to run software under copyright law), or it's also illegal to distribute these programs under the GPL.

        • Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:2)

          by Keith Russell ( 4440 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:48PM (#8840576) Journal

          I think this is the relative paragraph of the GPL that covers this:

          However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

          In other words, the GPL does not need to apply to the target OS' runtime libraries or developer tools. If it did, then GPL applications could only be built with GPL compilers on GPL operating systems.

          • Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:2)

            by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:12PM (#8840786) Journal
            Problem is that VisualStudio libraries are not normally distributed with Windows, so at least it violates the letter, if not the spirit of that clause.

            > If it did, then GPL applications could only be built with GPL compilers on GPL operating systems.

            Either that or a more conventional view of "derived works" would rule the day. The issue is that Stallman seems to be saying "We can use YOUR libraries, but you can't use OURS", and MS is saying "Um Like Whatever, just don't create any obligations for Microsoft in the process."

    • Re:Chicken and egg . . . (Score:3, Informative)

      by cjellibebi ( 645568 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:03PM (#8840119)
      >Right now if you use Visual Studio (and any windows library) you are suposudly prevented by the EULA from creating GPL'd code. So, in the windows world, if there were a good alternative that allowed for GPL code creation/distribution I think it would be used.

      GCC has been ported to Windows. If you just want a minimalistic setup, try MinGW (Minimalist GNU For Windows) [mingw.org]. This just installs things like GCC and 'make' and a few GCC-related tools. If you want GCC with an entire unix-like environment running under Windows where you can do builds that rely a lot on unix-tools, and build programs that assume a unix-environment, I suggest you install Cygwin [cygwin.com].

      As for the Windows libraries, I'm not sure if the EULA that applies to Visual studio that prevents you from writing GPL'd code also applies to using the Windows librasries with GCC-based compilers as well.

  • All of my questions have been answer and my (Score:5, Informative)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:50PM (#8840006)
    worries lain to rest.


    PF: Somebody mentioned that the Canopy Group & SCO owns some parts of Trolltech.

    ME: Sorry, we don't have any influence on them.

    PF: Do they have any influence on you?

    ME: Not really. They have a 5.7% stake in Trolltech. Historically Canopy became an investor because we cooperated with Caldera. As you might know we made and delivered the graphic install, which was the first graphical install for Linux, for Caldera Linux. The Canopy Group as the main investor in Caldera was so impressed by the work we had done that they wanted to invest in Trolltech, to make sure that Trolltech could become a solid company that could continue to deliver software to the Linux community. It's pretty ironic to see what has happened historically after that of course. But they don't have any influence on Trolltech. Trolltech is employee-owned, 65% of the shares are owned by the employees and we control the business so they have a small stake in us and that is it.

    PF: You haven't talk about this complicated with SCO on Linux

    EE: The patent issue or the corporate issue?

    PF: The thing that SCO is asking and preparing to sue everybody about some code they pretend they own in Linux.

    EE: I can tell you that we do not support these actions from SCO. Trolltech in many ways is dependent on the success of Linux. We think Linux is a Good Thing. We support Linux in many ways. On the other hand everybody has the right to bring his case to court. In this case it is very strange that they have not pinpointed exactly where in the code there is a problem and we feel that if they really had a problem with this, they could have acted very differently in presenting this to the community. So again we do not support these actions.

    PF: You have any position on software patents? Especially since in the EU there is going to be a law to be passed soon.

    EE: Trolltech is against software patenting. We think it is a bad thing and we see with horror what is happening to the US software market because of the patent policy over there. From my limited understanding of the subject, US patent law isn't that bad, it's the actual application of that law by the US patent office which is the problem. We sincerely hope that we will not get a parallel situation in Europe and we think that would be a catastrophe to the software industry in Europe. We think that we are well protected by copyright laws and other laws. we think that software is a very different product from other types of commercial production products. And we think that it is very important for innovation that people can continue to share ideas and that companies are not allowed to patent things which are very obvious.


    I feel much relieved now...

  • Accessibility in KDE (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:56PM (#8840064) Homepage
    I find the accessibility features of KDE far more superior and useful. e.g. the KmouseTool which enables auto clicking.

    If I am not wrong you need to buy seperate s/w for that kind of thing in windows . ( windows users correct me if I am wrong).

    Besides adding accessibility features makes KDE very much a candidate for use in Govt. work and any other place where accessibility features are a must.

  • GNOME: Views and thoughts from an apps developer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @02:59PM (#8840093)
    That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.

    Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.

    If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.

    I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).

    Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.

    Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.

    Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.

    Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.

    Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.

    We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.

    - GTK-Application-Window,
    - BonoboUI Window,
    - GnomeUI Window,

    Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil

  • Windows Developers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brolewis ( 712511 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:07PM (#8840148)
    I am a developer who believes in cross-platform development. However, I do most of my development in a Windows environment. I write code in Windows, test in Windows, and release it from Windows, and everything I've worked on is OSS. However, according to Trolltech, I don't exist. Why do they assume that because the OS I happen to develop on isn't open source there isn't an open source community in that niche? They comment that most Windows users perfer shareware, however, that is not the case. I find that there are a number of Windows users who are wanting to use open source programs for their own work and yet here Qt is preventing us from using their tools because they feel the users aren't there. I find this an unfortunate development.

  • Qt on Windows (Score:4, Informative)

    by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the@rhorn.gmail@com> on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:09PM (#8840167) Homepage Journal
    > a GPL'd Windows QT - it's probably not going to happen.

    Well, sort of. At the very least, it won't be done with Trolltech's support [iidea.pl].

  • Scandinavian deathmatch! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:13PM (#8840195)
    Let the world vote - which scandiavian country is best on open source? Norway (Qt), Sweden (Mysql) or perhaps Finland (you know who...). What is Denmark doing, btw...?

  • What???? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:21PM (#8840271) Homepage Journal
    "EE (laughing): As some people mentioned on the dot, it has partly to do with finances, sales and Trolltech's business model. Another point is the fact that Windows is a closed source Operating System. There is no community for Free Software development under Windows."

    Well it sure as hell will not evolve using QT! This is just a load of monkey muffins. I use
    Eclipse
    Netbeans
    FireFox
    Thunderbird
    Open Office
    Perl
    Python
    DevCpp
    GCC
    and MySql on my windows box. No free software comunity by butt.
    • ...ICSharpCode.Net [icsharpcode.net], which has the GPL's Sharpdevelop [icsharpcode.net] IDE for .NET

    • Re:What???? (Score:2)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:06PM (#8840731) Homepage Journal
      His quote says "there is no community for Free Software development under Windows." I believe he is entirely correct. You are talking about what you use, not about the Free Software you are creating for Windows.

      There is no community of Windows developers that are actively developing Free Software for Windows users. You may find a few things (like your list of apps), but they are primarily developed by Unix developers on a Unix system, and not Windows originals.

      • Re:What???? (Score:2)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:56PM (#8841312) Homepage Journal
        Actually I have developed free (as in beer) software under Windows. It is only useful to a small group of people but I did release it free of charge. Why did I leave the source out? Not one user in the bunch is a programmer and no one ever asked for it. It they had we would have given it to them.

        What most people still do not seem to get is that the world is application driven and not OS driven. Programs that run under both Windows and Linux do not hurt Linux. My office is going to move to OpenOffice, and Thunderbird when it hits V1.0. The more apps that we can migrate to that run under Windows and Linux the quicker we can migrate to Linux as our OS.

      • Re:What???? (Score:2)

        by arkanes ( 521690 ) <arkanes@NoSPam.gmail.com> on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:59PM (#8841351) Homepage
        Theres plenty of open source apps developed for and on Windows, but they tend to be cross platform so perhaps they don't register as being a "Windows community". A good percentage of them start on Windows and move to other platforms, not the other way around (another good percentage are started as cross platform from the beginning).

        Of course, there might be more if Qt had GPL windows version. But I think the biggest problem with it's lack is that it's impossible to port GPL Qt/KDE apps to Windows, and I think that kinda sucks.

    • Re:What???? (Score:2)

      by Keith Russell ( 4440 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:21PM (#8840899) Journal

      Hmm, let's query sourceforge.net for GPL projects that target Win32, and see what comes up, shall we? So far, I see:

      • AbiWord
      • GAIM
      • PDFCreator
      • BitTorrent
      • Sodipodi
      • VirtualDub
      • eMule
      • CDex
      • 2 VNC apps, TightVNC and UltraVNC
      • 2 Doom engines, Doomsday and Doom Legacy
      • WASTE
      • WinMerge (which I use on a daily basis)

      Sorted by activity, the 100th project on the list has an Activity Percentile of 97.83.

      Mr. Eng needs to look in more places than Tucows.

  • Feel free to call it whatever you like, but don't expect your end-users to use a potentially suprising pronunciation. If someone reading your name in print is going to come to a different conclusion, you've probably got a problem. I certainly hear lots of 'Ess-Queue-Ell' instead of Sequel for SQL. There's the ever popular Tex and Latex with the surprising Tech and La-Tech. (And for some reason people get really touchy over that one.) And so Cute is, well, cute, but expect lots of Queue-Tee (or more likely, Cutie).

  • On cute (Score:2)

    by gspr ( 602968 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @03:45PM (#8840538)
    My theory: In Norwegian, q is pronounced "ku", and t is pronounce "te", which when said in English becomes "cute".

  • Pronounciation (Score:2, Interesting)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:04PM (#8840711)
    Yes, I know that Qt is pronounced as "Cute", but I refuse to pronounce it like that. It's hard enough to get Management to take it seriously as it is, since it lacks an IDE, but calling it "cute" would have gotten me 100% ignored.

    Calling Qt "cute" also makes conversation about it with outsiders obnoxious, as people think I'm using an adjective instead of a noun. It's just easier in all respects to stress both letters (cue tee).

    • "No! It's Tee-Cee-El" (Score:3, Funny)

      by soloport ( 312487 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @05:22PM (#8841600) Homepage
      I was happily producing tcl/Tk apps for more than a year, until a new employee came on board. He would pronounce it "tickle". "Tickle [this]" and "Tickle [that]" without so much as an ounce of shame. It bugged me so much! I used to pronouce it "Tee-Cee-El" as much as possible just to see if he'd get the hint and *stop*. I stopped working with tcl just to stay away from the small following he'd developed who all ran around discussing better ways to "tickle" -- or whatever.

      I still can't pronounce it "tickle" without feeling like I'm somehow being intimate with everyone in the room. It's all about the mental picture. At least "cute" doesn't conote a bad mental piture. I mean, come on... Have some cooth! What if someone came up with a language called BT or FK or SHT? How would you want people to pronouce those languages in a staff meeting?

  • Cross-platform OSS is very important! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Qwavel ( 733416 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @04:44PM (#8841176)
    I know that some people are against having Windows versions of OSS software, but I don't agree. It is important to get Windows users to use cross-platform stuff like OOo and Mozilla. This will help prepare them to switch to another OS when the time is right for them.

    The same could be said for developers. If Qt was a viable option for Windows developers then many would use it and they would be better prepared for, and more likely to switch to, another OS.

    This seems like a fairly straight-forward argument, which is why many important OSS projects make a big effort to work on Windows as well as Linux. I realize though, that none of this is within TT's mandate. They are a company, not a project, so their job is to make money. Sometimes this coincides with doing what is best for the OSS and Linux communities, but I am amazed at how often this is not the case.

    So, though I am a C++ developer, and I believe that Qt is much better than GTK, I'll have to side with GTK for Linux.

  • a wacky little society... (Score:2)

    by justins ( 80659 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @06:39PM (#8842296) Homepage Journal
    called "The Vast Majority of Unix Programmers." Maybe you've heard of them.

    From the interview:

    I would suspect that a society looking for a C solution would probably would go with Gtk, but I've never heard about them.

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