interesting not relating to qt and gpl

[Holger Schroeder]

Chris January wrote:

>This is the biggest problem if we do our own native Windows port of Qt - it
>will be a fork of the code. Trolltech's fears would be justified. I don't
>think much at all of Trolltech's argument for not releasing their Win32
>version of Qt under the GPL however, so I think we should press ahead. Then
>again, I'm not a Free Software purist.
>
>  
>
Hi chris, if you look into the source code, it consists of several 
thousand files (i didnŽt count them). in the qt source directory you 
have a directory src/kernel. in this directory there are fifteen files, 
which contain the whole platform-dependant stuff. for x11 they have the 
names *_x11.cpp, and we only create the *_win32.cpp which do the same 
things on windows. so this is not really a fork, we only add 15 files 
and modify the build system accordingly.

i hope that in some time the trolls will release their 15 *_win.cpp 
files under the gpl, too. i think then they would boost their number of 
clients much more. i am here at the university of hannover and our 
computer science students have to work under windows xp and with office 
xp. many of them will install linux somewhen, but this step is much 
bigger as "simply" installing a kde with kdevelop on windows xp and 
being able to develop with it half an hour later. yes, i know we are not 
yet in a stage where we have an actual (3.1) version of kde which runs 
natively on windows, but this is what i want to have, perhaps we will 
get it done, weŽll see...

i think with kde on windows we would even get more kde developers 
contributing to kde.

>Chris
>  
>
Holger