Troll Tech [was Re: Sco vs. IBM]

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

These discussions always make me wonder if the open source crowd is ever
going to realize it's reasonable to be friendly with commercial companies.
Troll Tech is being nice.  They have a nice product, they've created a
business model that let's you have the product for free and ensures that
they will be in business to support that product.   That's a Good Thing,
you benefit from that.

The Gnome guys will do something very similar or just die out.  It's a
huge amount of work to keep making the toolkits both look good and work
well.  So far, what I see from Gnome is more on the look good front and
nowhere near enough on the work well front.  I'll take Microsoft's desktop
over Gnome any day.  KDE is better but not better than Microsoft.  Why?
Because it takes a lot of effort to do all the grunt work and if that
grunt work is behind the scenes in things like application to application
communication, there is less incentive for people to work on it.  The last
Gnome interview I read was all about the icons.  Icons are great if the
underlying system works well.  Otherwise they are just eye candy and
suck people in for a while and then they give up.

The world is not going to end up with all software working perfectly and 
being free.  Software is hard work, software tends to rot if you don't 
take care of it, there has to be an business plan better than

	1.  Give it away.
	2.  ???
	3.  Make lots of money.

Instead of fighting with people like Troll Tech, you should be figuring
out how to do more stuff like that.  It's a pretty sweet deal you have
there.

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 04:34:05PM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> In article <20030619141443.GR29247@fs.tum.de>,
> Adrian Bunk  <bunk@fs.tum.de> wrote:
> >There's no license reason today why there are two big desktop projects 
> >(GNOME and KDE).
> 
> There is. If you want to develop a commercial application under
> KDE you need to pay TrollTech for the Qt license. Basically
> TrollTech controls all commercial KDE applications.
> 
> Which makes no sense. You're not at the mercy of Linus or the
> kernel developers, neither at that of the KDE developers, but
> TrollTech controls the KDE desktop wrt commercial apps.
> 
> What if TrollTech decides to only license (or sell) Qt
> to, say, Microsoft? What does that mean for, say, the Kompany ?
> 
> Mike.
> 
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-- 
---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm