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Whenever I hear about QT licensing changes I can't help but wonder if they had started off with a GPL based license and GTK never happened how the whole "Linux

by kaypro 11y ago

Whenever I hear about QT licensing changes I can't help but wonder if they had started off with a GPL based license and GTK never happened how the whole "Linux on the Desktop" situation would have panned out. Would open source developers eventually opted to just use QT for GUI applications? Would KDE have become the defacto standard DE across the top 10 Linux distributions? Would there have been a unified installation package allowing cross distribution installation of QT/KDE based applications thereby facilitating commercial software vendors being more open to porting their Windows applications to Linux? I realize it's a moot point but having spent my teen to college years heavily invested in Linux and being frustrated with the lack of standards at the time I can't help going down this thought experiment.

ksherlock 11y ago
I suspect it wouldn't have made a meaningful difference. There are people who are opposed to KDE/Qt for reasons that have/had nothing to do with the Qt license at the time. GNUStep (the official GNU desktop under a GPL license) predates KDE and it didn't stop KDE from happening.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  As someone that tried AfterStep | WindowMaker + GNUStep, I doubt it will ever be finished. Last time I checked they might eventually be compatible with Pather or something like that.
hugs 11y ago
Qt started off with a commercial license in 1995, adding GPL in 2000. But the lack of an LGPL option is what (arguably) lead to the rise of GNOME/GTK when that project started in 1997, because it's the LGPL that allows organizations to write closed-source proprietary software without paying a license fee. [Edit: corrected Qt's original license history.]
- lukaslalinsky 11y ago
  They started with their own license, which was considered to be incompatible with GPL. Only later it was changed to GPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Licensing
  - hugs 11y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I'll update my comment. Either way, GNOME started out as LGPL, and it was the lack of the LPGL in Qt option (added much later in 2009) that I believe lead to GNOME/GTKs larger uptake early on.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- VLM 11y ago
  The first decade was non-free with later various shades of semi-free. Around the turn of the century it was apparent Gnome was going to dominate the market unless they acted quickly, so they GPLed at that time to maintain relevance. They're still around; guess that strategy worked. Having lived thru it, the situation was much worse than you imply. Its not that the non-free licenses didn't allow closed source or whatever, they more or less intentionally carefully prevented distros from legally including Qt. Just barely tight enough that on technicalities it failed the DFSG, intentionally. Debian couldn't include Qt and therefore KDE in main until the 2000 relicense.
ctstover 11y ago
It was GPL (or pay license) to start with. I believe you mean you wonder if it had been LGPL to start with. Subtle, yet enormous difference for a library. As to the speculation, I don't know. Special preprocessing phases to extend C++ are odd. The signals and sockets paradigm is a mixed bag. Plus there are serious trade offs to the entire application framework vs a library choices in the first place. On the other hand, the runtime type system and heavily stylized macro style of GTK's gobject system was certainly an odd duck to say the least. Personally, between the web, mobile, "modern" UX/UI ideas, desktops that want to be tablets, etc, I think the 20-30 years of GUI exploration is coming up very empty handed. Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever. Where things are going from here?
- kaypro 11y ago
  I was under the impression that it was only at v2.2 that they finally GPL'd it. Prior it was there "QPL" license. Regardless valid points. I'll always wonder though :)
- pjmlp 11y ago
  > Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever. By mainstream do you mean the 1% desktop share or in the GNU/Linux world? Actually it was this PDP-11 mentality one of the reasons I eventually moved back into Windows / Mac OS X worlds. I had my share of CLI starting with Timex 2068, AmigaDOS, MS-DOS, multiple UNIX flavours in the 80 - 90's, to keep doing it daily in the 21st century. Xerox PARC REPLs were way more interesting way of interacting with the computer and live in modern IDEs.
  - ctstover 11y ago
    Obviously I having some fun with it. Developer/technician/hacker users a different audience. In my office for instance, people can use 'doz/osx/nix. If you walk around, 95% of every monitor you see has at least one terminal open. These are people doing totally different types of work for all sorts of projects.
    - 11y ago
zem 11y ago
i don't think so, because it's really hard to write bindings to qt, and relatively easy to write them for gtk. gtk therefore became the default choice for a lot of language communities when they wanted a more modern alternative to tk. had gtk never existed, i think tk could have become a lot more popular, and seen faster improvements, rather than qt taking over the desktop entirely.

by kaypro 11y ago

ksherlock 11y ago

I suspect it wouldn't have made a meaningful difference. There are people who are opposed to KDE/Qt for reasons that have/had nothing to do with the Qt license at the time. GNUStep (the official GNU desktop under a GPL license) predates KDE and it didn't stop KDE from happening.

pjmlp 11y ago
As someone that tried AfterStep | WindowMaker + GNUStep, I doubt it will ever be finished. Last time I checked they might eventually be compatible with Pather or something like that.

hugs 11y ago

Qt started off with a commercial license in 1995, adding GPL in 2000. But the lack of an LGPL option is what (arguably) lead to the rise of GNOME/GTK when that project started in 1997, because it's the LGPL that allows organizations to write closed-source proprietary software without paying a license fee. [Edit: corrected Qt's original license history.]

lukaslalinsky 11y ago
They started with their own license, which was considered to be incompatible with GPL. Only later it was changed to GPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Licensing
- hugs 11y ago
  Thanks for the correction. I'll update my comment. Either way, GNOME started out as LGPL, and it was the lack of the LPGL in Qt option (added much later in 2009) that I believe lead to GNOME/GTKs larger uptake early on.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
VLM 11y ago
The first decade was non-free with later various shades of semi-free. Around the turn of the century it was apparent Gnome was going to dominate the market unless they acted quickly, so they GPLed at that time to maintain relevance. They're still around; guess that strategy worked. Having lived thru it, the situation was much worse than you imply. Its not that the non-free licenses didn't allow closed source or whatever, they more or less intentionally carefully prevented distros from legally including Qt. Just barely tight enough that on technicalities it failed the DFSG, intentionally. Debian couldn't include Qt and therefore KDE in main until the 2000 relicense.

ctstover 11y ago

It was GPL (or pay license) to start with. I believe you mean you wonder if it had been LGPL to start with. Subtle, yet enormous difference for a library. As to the speculation, I don't know. Special preprocessing phases to extend C++ are odd. The signals and sockets paradigm is a mixed bag. Plus there are serious trade offs to the entire application framework vs a library choices in the first place. On the other hand, the runtime type system and heavily stylized macro style of GTK's gobject system was certainly an odd duck to say the least. Personally, between the web, mobile, "modern" UX/UI ideas, desktops that want to be tablets, etc, I think the 20-30 years of GUI exploration is coming up very empty handed. Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever. Where things are going from here?

kaypro 11y ago
I was under the impression that it was only at v2.2 that they finally GPL'd it. Prior it was there "QPL" license. Regardless valid points. I'll always wonder though :)
pjmlp 11y ago
> Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever. By mainstream do you mean the 1% desktop share or in the GNU/Linux world? Actually it was this PDP-11 mentality one of the reasons I eventually moved back into Windows / Mac OS X worlds. I had my share of CLI starting with Timex 2068, AmigaDOS, MS-DOS, multiple UNIX flavours in the 80 - 90's, to keep doing it daily in the 21st century. Xerox PARC REPLs were way more interesting way of interacting with the computer and live in modern IDEs.
- ctstover 11y ago
  Obviously I having some fun with it. Developer/technician/hacker users a different audience. In my office for instance, people can use 'doz/osx/nix. If you walk around, 95% of every monitor you see has at least one terminal open. These are people doing totally different types of work for all sorts of projects.
  - 11y ago

zem 11y ago

i don't think so, because it's really hard to write bindings to qt, and relatively easy to write them for gtk. gtk therefore became the default choice for a lot of language communities when they wanted a more modern alternative to tk. had gtk never existed, i think tk could have become a lot more popular, and seen faster improvements, rather than qt taking over the desktop entirely.