Open Source
I’m on the Qt(owned by Nokia now) mailing list since I have a commercial license for a client project, and I got a very interesting email today, telling me that on its release in March 2009, Qt 4.5 will be available under the LGPL. This is really big news. Up until the current Qt 4.4, your only licensing optionsare a per-seat and per-platform commercial license (which adds up if you have multiple developers and multiple target platforms, which you will do if you’re using Qt anyway), or alternatively the free option which means you use it under the GPL - meaning all your own code has to also be GPL, with an exceptionthat allows you to publish / use software under other open source licenses too, but nevertheless it all has to be public.
Note: I’m going to pick the way I discuss this carefully, since I have a good friendon the LINQ to SQL team (yes, we Guernseymen do get around) and I feel bad to criticise too much in this area; nevertheless I think there are lessons to be learned and I have a definite angle on this, being an ex-business coder and open source enthusiast. My thoughts here reflect pretty much what I’ve already suggested on his blog, but in more detail, so hopefully this won’t offend him!
Like most people I’ve been following the current economic news with a mixture of morbid entertainment and mild trepidation. I’m not likely to be out of a job soon (my employer and I are on very good terms), but inevitably my work is part of the global economy, so I can’t expect to be completely unaffected. There are a few interesting lines of thought in the blogosphere that I thought I’d share with you.
Some people think I bash Microsoft a lot on this blog, and maybe that’s true, but I don’t think I ever do it unfairly. To prove that I don’t just comment on the bad stuff, here’s a major piece of positive news about the software behemoth: Microsoft appears to have fixed the flaws in the Open Specification Promise(OSP). The major flaw in the OSP when it was originally announced is that the promise not to sue people who developed upon or used Microsoft protocols and formats extended only to those who operated non-commercially.
The main problem with democracy is that you give the vote to a large number of people who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing. They’ll believe hype, be swayed by style over substance, and vote for what’s fashionable, or blindly along party lines. As Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the other ones. I think the results of the latest Sourceforge Community Choice Awardsunderlines this from a somewhat less critical perspective.