Interview With Trolltech's CEO and CTO Eirik Eng 266
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?"
Cute (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:cute? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Canopy Representatives Sit on Trolltech Board. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
GNOME: Views and thoughts from an apps developer (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Definitely needs a non-commercial Windows licen (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What???? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well it sure as hell will not evolve using QT! This is just a load of monkey muffins. I use
Eclipse
Netbeans
FireFox
Thunderbird
Ope
Perl
Python
DevCpp
GCC
and MySql on my windows box. No free software comunity by butt.
Re:cute? (Score:2, Interesting)
Qt became that after the original programmer liked the way Q was rendered under X in emacs. The 't' was for tookit. The 'Q' was because it looked "cute".
I realize (I think?) that the parent of this post was a joke.
Re:Canopy/SCO Connection (Score:1, Interesting)
Pronounciation (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
Re:Visual Tool (Score:4, Interesting)
You look at windows and Visual Basic and Visual C, those are all anyone would ever need in windows land.
Wrong. There are plenty of non-Microsoft tools available. To name a few open source or OSS-friendly tools: ActivePerl, MinGW, CygWin, Visual-MinGW, GTK+, Eclipse, Java/NetBeans, et al. I use most of those to develop Windows applications rather than Microsoft's offerings. The only thing missing is a good GUI toolkit that is open source (sorry, Java GUIs are fugly), or at least open-source compatible, and Qt fits the bill. Unfortunately, TrollTech refuses to release a free version for Windows because there is no community (bullshit) and trolls like you think Microsoft makes the only decent Windows tools (bullshit).
If projects like OpenOffice and Mozilla can have faith in Windows users and developers, why not TrollTech? TrollTech could help the OSS community make huge strides toward Linux adoption if they would help bridge the gap.
Re:sigh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SwingQT (Score:3, Interesting)
The Qt API is already about as easy to use as Swing anyway, and people can use QtJava if they want to use Qt. But honestly what we needed Sun to do was to increase the number of widgets in AWT rather than developing Swing. Then we could implement more AWT peers using native toolkits and everyone would be happy.
And most importantly, SWT would never have existed.