But when we wrote it, it was basically an advertisement for ourselves, a way of saying "Hey, look what I can do. I can do the same thing for you" to some company.

Looks like Mister Allison isn't a big believer in business being able to make a profit from an OSS business model. I'm not sure this is a healthy thing for the OSS movement, especially when voiced by someone with some visibility like Warrick.

Now, i can't naysay how he sees thing. Currently the money is definitly more likley to come from a company hiring an Open Source programmer who's got a good track record writing free software, but I'm hoping (and betting on) ESR's services-based model. Allison says it breeds non-user firendly code. Hogwash. Only if your company or programming team is unscrupulous or lazy.

I am hoping that most leading OSS companies like VA and Red Hat don't fit into that particular category. We've all had enough of unscrupulous and lazy software companies. Or at least I have.

So yeah, Warrick is right about why he got a job, but by saying that's the way it should work, he may be pronouncing self-fulfilling prophesy.

I hope not. We all have too much to lose if OSS can't make the big leap to big business.

Beware the Whyte Wolf.

With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels... [ Reply to This | Parent ]

Chill out, it's just a different opinion.... (Score:3, Interesting) by Carnage4Life on Monday July 10, @05:21AM EDT (User Info) http://www.google.com/search?q=dare+obasanjo&meta=lr%3D%26hl%3Den When I read posts like yours I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at how religously people can take the decisions of other people. What Warrick Allison states is a very valid opinion which myself and many others have had. I've often asked myself, "if I was a developer working for a company whose livelihood depended on being able to sell support for the software I wrote wouldn't I be less motivated to write easy-to-use and bug free code as someone who worked for a company whose lifeline wasn't based on selling support contracts?" I've never been in that situation but from the attitudes of most OSS developers today usability isn't a key word they are interested in. Frankly I feel that the whole selling support concept only adds the current esoteric nature and general poor documentation of Open Source projects. Second question "Why spend time developing comprehensive training manuals, online help and documenting APIs if you are trying to get users to buy a support contract?". Laziness is a well documented trait of good programmers and bad ones as well, so why would one not expect that programmers would take the easy way out especially when it would be beneficial for their employer? PS: Exactly what do we have to lose if OSS doesn't make the leap to big business? I'm in it cuz I like it not for the IPO money, aren't you? I hope you realize that VA Linux is a hardware company that sells relatively overpriced servers which has nothing to so with making money on supporting OSS. VA Linux subsidizes its OSS forays by marking up their server prices, which to me seems like an alternate business model to ESRs. PPS: This isn't a troll, if you disagree, post a response instead of moderating this down and making this place seem more like a mad house for raving zealots instead of a forum for rational discussion. What kind of Flame Warrior are you?

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You know, i'd like to see some hard numbers as to just how many people have actually purchased a Qt License from Troll Tech.. And, more specifically, if that number is sufficiently large enough to really warrant keeping Qt something other than GPL'ed.

The only thing standing in the way (as I see it) of KDE being the dominant desktop for Linux is this persistant, irritating, annoying, pointless debate over the nature of the Qt libraries. Its a boat anchor that has been dragged behind KDE for far, far too long. Get it over with, guys.

Its only by pure luck that GNOME development has been centered more on building pointless foo-foo options as of late, rather can concentrating on basic usability issues. Both efforts have boat anchors. One has to do with politics, the other has to do with direction.

Want KDE to win? Make Qt free. Game over.



Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA Desktop Enhancement Graphics For Linux (Now at MetaLab/UNC!) [ Reply to This | Parent ]

don't free Qt, just don't use it (Score:3, Insightful) by jetson123 (br_9801 at hotmail dot com) on Monday July 10, @06:59AM EDT (User Info) I agree that calls for Qt to be placed under some different license are not justified: Troll Tech can license their software whatever way they want. But users of Qt and KDE should realize that the Troll Tech QPL license is bad for open source and for Linux. If Linux had been licensed like Qt, it would have never caught on. And if KDE succeeds at displacing other Linux desktops, it will largely spell the end of Linux as a competitive, open source client desktop operating system: if you have to pay Troll Tech under the conditions they require you to pay, as a developer, you might as well go with BeOS or Windows, pay less money, get more development tools, and (in the case of Windows) cover a much bigger market segment. However, I disagree with your statement that "Troll Tech has been very nice to the Linux community". Troll Tech was merely business savvy and opportunistic. Adoption of Qt by KDE was one sweet deal for the company: they made software available to people who otherwise wouldn't pay for it anyway, they got a huge user community, lots of naive university students started hacking free software in it, and they got lots of feedback, bugfixes, and improvements, and adoption by several big companies in return. Without the exposure from KDE, Qt would have remained just one of many mediocre, tool-poor cross platform toolkits with a tiny user community. Troll Tech's "donation" paid handsomely for them. The open source community has nothing to excuse for or be thankful for. Altogether, I agree: don't ask Troll Tech to free Qt, or KDE to change their license. Instead, just don't use those systems. Develop and support truly free desktop software instead.

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It is encouraging to see a success story about making money in the open source world. I believe that the industry should move towards open source as much as possible, and I completly understand how companies withstand the urge to go open source.

I have planned on going the same route that the author took in my software developement career. I am planning on doing some development work on some open source projects as an experience and resume builder so that I can fill in the part that talks about experience on my resume. It is a perfect place for new programmers to gain useful experience programming, but I have concerns about a market that is totally open source.

For all products to be open source is scarey. Now I know that open source doens't necesarily mean free. It means letting everyone know what your software is doing, possibly fixing it for their own use. This type of use is great. But what should a company do if they are making some true innovations. Release that software for the world to look at.

For example, Oracle may or may not have the most scalable and fastest database. But lets say that their programmers have developed some new methods that enable there database server to be faster and more scalable than the competition. How do the open source gurus claim that opening that software up would help Oracle. This is precisely the part that I have yet to understand. It is the same as patenting a new device. It lets the inventor or inventing company protect there investment for awhile so that even doing the research to begin with is worth it. The patent gives the garantee that the innovation is protected.

The article didn't help clarify my view of the issues with open source either. There method of dealing with the problem is by having some products open source and free and other products closed source and for sale. This doesn't really answer the question of how to deal with open source software and make money, unless this happens to be the final solution.

For example, Microsft opens the source to DirectX, IE, etc.. but keeps the source on NT and Office. Of course, this isn't really the core of what they do, it would be like giving out some toys, but not the real thing. Do people think this is the answer to the open source questions, or do people really think everything can go open source?


cp -R /* /dev/null [ Reply to This | Parent ]

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Because those weren't available on all platforms when Qt was written (it has always been cross platform, earlier versions had both macro- and template-based containers, for those compilers that didn't support templates back then).

Besides, QString is UniCode (while std::string is not, since it's just std::basic_string) and reference counted, so you get a performance bonus as well.

As for bidirectional scripts: there's some support in KDE I think, but as I don't speak any of the involved languages I'm not too sure about it, ask someone. Heck, write to Trolltech and ask them to pay you for writing it!


-- KDE programmer and computer science student in Klagenfurt, Austria. [ Reply to This | Parent ]

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