I’ve been rather quiet lately, but that’s because I’ve been busy helping put the finishing touches on LSB 3.1, which was released early last week. New in LSB 3.1 are the integration of the ISO standard LSB Core (ISO/IEC 23360) and the addition of the LSB Desktop platform above the core (which stops at the desktop toolkits in 3.1, i.e., GTK and Qt, but that will move up the stack to encompass more of GNOME and KDE in 3.2 and 4.0). LSB 3.1 also lays a solid foundation on which to build LSB 3.2 and 4.0. Key milestones here include alignment of the LSB roadmap with the roadmaps of the major Linux distros and more direct participation of the key stakeholders in the standard (distro vendors, ISVs, and upstream project maintainers). Much, much more to come on these points as soon as I’m fully recharged.
In the meantime, I’m pleased to report we had a very successful launch last week. The release was supported by a who’s who of the Linux industry: Dell, HP, IBM, Linspire, Novell, RealNetworks, Red Flag, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and others. Importantly, no fewer than ten major Linux distributions have committed to LSB 3.1 certification, including upcoming versions of Asianux, Linspire, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Enterprise Desktop, Sun Wah Linux, Turbolinux, Ubuntu, and Xandros. In short, if you’re an application developer, and you want to easily target all of the major Linux distributions, LSB 3.1 is a great way to do it.
More details here: BusinessWeek (and dozens of others via the Associated Press, including ABC News, the Boston Herald, Forbes, FOX News, MSNBC, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News), eWEEK, InformationWeek, InfoWorld (and others via the IDG News Service), Slashdot (twice, here and here), and many other places.
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It’s a little disconcerting to see TrollTech’s Qt development tools being included in 3.1 when it is still shown as blocked on freedekstop’s status pages.
I like developing with the kit, but the licensing has been a nightmare. I work in an industry that produces code that is halfway between commercial and free. It’s closed source during development, but will eventually become open source. In this case, TrollTech gets a free ride–I have to buy licenses for all the developers first, then give the code away later, by law!
The licensing issues with this toolkit have really slowed down the advance of Linux adoption in government software development. Prior to Qt there were not too many issues. Now the spectre of every .so and every header file in the LSB requiring some type of payment to some entity somewhere rasies it’s ugly head….and it’s MY responsibility to go examine all the files and send all the payments.
Having a single company, like Microsoft, setting the rules up front is a lot easier, and can even be a lot cheaper for a small software house (like ours).
Do the math (from amazon, full editions, no upgrades):
Windows Xp Professional (OEM) : $280.00
Windows Visual Studio .NET Professional: $700.00
(Note : these are one-time fees, NO YEARLY RENEWAL required for continued use)
From TrollTech’s website, converted to USD :
LSB Qualifed Development System using Qt : $3350 with enterprise features (openGL and database connectivity)–and this is for ONE YEAR.
Yep…Linux with a TrollTech license costs more than 3x the Microsoft solution. Without the baggage of being called a “Linux Zealot”, and all the advantages of commonality with 90% of the desktops in use worldwide.
If the free software community lets this kind of thing continue, where one .so changes the entire legal status of my devemopment chain, and the end user/developer has no idea it’s even dual licensed, then linux is utterly doomed.
If it gets to the point where I have to pay Sun to use Java, TrollTech to use Qt, Oracle to use God knows what, well, then Linux just isn’t free anymore, and there will be no reason to use or recommend it.
—
A Tired and Frustrated Developer.
The LSB just standardizes what is existing best practice, and Qt ships in all the major Linux distributions. Also, if you don’t like Qt’s licensing terms, you can always use Gtk, which is also included now. -ian