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 COLUMN
Troll Tech deserves fair wages for its excellent work on KDE and Qt ONCE UPON A TIME, Linux lacked a Windowslike desktop. So enterprising folks at Troll Tech put together a Windowslike desktop called the K Desktop Environment (KDE), based on a graphical interface toolkit called Qt.
Red Hat didn't like this license and refused to ship KDE with most of its distributions. Instead, Red Hat developed its own graphical interface called GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), based entirely on the GPL. Well, sort of. Some GNOME libraries are actually licensed under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), which lets programmers integrate closed-source software into GNOME without violating its open-source nature. Troll Tech then introduced the QPL (Q Public License). The QPL has many provisions, but you can modify the source code for the free version of Qt and redistribute it. There are conditions, of course. But that was good enough for Red Hat. Red Hat started to include KDE in its official distribution. But the GNU community wasn't satisfied. The folks who maintain the Debian distribution still refused to include KDE as part of its GNU/Linux. GNOME's foundation in the GNU GPL continued to attract more attention and developers than KDE. Despite its immaturity relative to KDE, Eazel and Helixcode based their work on GNOME. Sun announced its support of GNOME as the default desktop for Solaris and promised to integrate the next version of Star Office with GNOME. Then on Sept. 4, Troll Tech announced that the Qt 2.2 library would be available under the GPL, in addition to the QPL's and Troll's commercial license. Qt and KDE were now acceptable to the GNU community. Now if you had to ask me whether this was a good thing, I'd have to take a wait-and-see attitude. On one hand, I'm kind of sorry to see Troll Tech take this step. These developers have built an excellent toolkit and deserve to collect the rewards when others use it. On the other hand, Troll Tech developers may yet see financial rewards for their work. In theory, the new license should get more developers on board the KDE bandwagon and enable KDE to attract the endorsements. But I am afraid for Troll Tech that it won't play out that way. The problem for Troll Tech is that you still can't sell commercial software based on Qt without paying Troll Tech a license fee. In contrast, due to the LGPL nature of the GNOME libraries, you can sell proprietary software based on the GNOME libraries without paying anyone a cent. Let me put it this way: The fact that Qt is available under multiple licenses challenges developers to put up or shut up. KDE, along with Qt, is a centrally managed, wonderfully documented foundation for applications. The future effect of the recently formed GNOME Foundation notwithstanding, GNOME is a haphazardly managed, poorly documented foundation. If, therefore, KDE's popularity continues to diminish in spite of the new license for Qt, I must suspect the real difference comes down to what you must do to sell commercial applications. I'm afraid people just don't want to pay Troll Tech fair wages for excellent work. I hope I'm wrong. Nicholas Petreley is the founding editor of LinuxWorld ( www.linuxworld.com ). Reach him at nicholas.petreley@linuxworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Operating SystemsSoftware DevelopmentDiscuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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