Hello everyone,
I saw a story running on slashdot today about Nokia buying Trolltech. Any
ideas on how this may effect EAGLE as it is based on QT (by Trolltech)? I
assume that CadSoft has a commercial license of the product so they have a
bit more leverage than KDE that uses a free license.
Cheers,
James.
--
James Morrison
www.eagletoolkit.com
Long-time EAGLE User and EAGLE Enterprise Toolkit Author
On 1/29/08 5:55 PM, in article fnoauh$tj3$1@cheetah.cadsoft.de, "Asko
Rupponen" <asko.rupponen@asko.cc> wrote:
James Morrison wrote:
Hello everyone,
I saw a story running on slashdot today about Nokia buying Trolltech. Any
ideas on how this may effect EAGLE as it is based on QT (by Trolltech)? I
assume that CadSoft has a commercial license of the product so they have a
bit more leverage than KDE that uses a free license.
Cheers,
James.
Look at eagle.announce.eng yesterday
Nokia Acquires Trolltech
Open Letter to the Open Source Community
.... We will continue to actively develop Qt and Qtopia. We also want to
underline that we will continue to support the open source community by
continuing to release these technologies under the GPL ...
That's a great thing to say. I hope its true. But CadSoft isn't GPL or
open-source by any definition. I suppose one could argue that if you're
supporting open-source then you're probably still going to sell the
commercial product since you're putting all the work into it.
But sorry if that doesn't convince me. Perhaps I've become jaded over the
years, but I don't exactly trust global multi-national corporations to
actually do what they say. Now if I had a legal contract, that might be
something more, but then a team of lawyers and endless litigation can make
that worthless if you don't have deep pockets.
Letter to Trolltech Customers
... Being acquired by Nokia*, we will continue to provide you with the
most advanced cross-platform software framework for desktop and devices
in the market. There will be further investments in Qt and Qtopia ...
That's good to hear. I hope its true. There are some specific bugs that
CadSoft has found that I'd like fixed 
James.
--
James Morrison
www.eagletoolkit.com
Long-time EAGLE User and EAGLE Enterprise Toolkit Author
James Morrison wrote:
On 1/29/08 5:55 PM, in article fnoauh$tj3$1@cheetah.cadsoft.de, "Asko
Rupponen" <asko.rupponen@asko.cc> wrote:
James Morrison wrote:
Hello everyone,
I saw a story running on slashdot today about Nokia buying Trolltech. Any
ideas on how this may effect EAGLE as it is based on QT (by Trolltech)? I
assume that CadSoft has a commercial license of the product so they have a
bit more leverage than KDE that uses a free license.
Cheers,
James.
Look at eagle.announce.eng yesterday
Nokia Acquires Trolltech
Open Letter to the Open Source Community
.... We will continue to actively develop Qt and Qtopia. We also want to
underline that we will continue to support the open source community by
continuing to release these technologies under the GPL ...
That's a great thing to say. I hope its true. But CadSoft isn't GPL or
open-source by any definition. I suppose one could argue that if you're
supporting open-source then you're probably still going to sell the
commercial product since you're putting all the work into it.
But sorry if that doesn't convince me. Perhaps I've become jaded over the
years, but I don't exactly trust global multi-national corporations to
actually do what they say. Now if I had a legal contract, that might be
something more, but then a team of lawyers and endless litigation can make
that worthless if you don't have deep pockets.
Letter to Trolltech Customers
... Being acquired by Nokia*, we will continue to provide you with the
most advanced cross-platform software framework for desktop and devices
in the market. There will be further investments in Qt and Qtopia ...
That's good to hear. I hope its true. There are some specific bugs that
CadSoft has found that I'd like fixed
James.
One of the things that Trolltech did before the sale was to release Qt
under GPL3. I'm not sure exactly how much of their product is GPL, but
you can go to the Trolltech web site at
http://trolltech.com/developer/downloads/qt/snapshots
I downloaded qt-x11-opensource-src-4.4.0-snapshot-20080130.tar.bz2 and
took a look at what was inside. I'm no programmer, but it looks to me
like this is the source code for Qt.
I guess if that is true, the project could be forked and some other
company/organization could continue supplying the product if Nokia
chooses to not support Qt adequately.
Am I correct? Can anyone else give more insight?
Thanks,
Tom Sneddon
