[Texmacs-dev] Qt

[Marciano Siniscalchi]

Folks,

not to reopen a discussion on the various merits of different GUIs, but I 
(for my own curiosity) asked Trolltech about the licensing status of Qt/X11 
under Cygwin. Their Website seemed to suggest that Qt/X11 was available 
under the GPL regardless of environment where it runs, but in these 
matters, it's always better to get things straight from the horse's mouth. 
Well, here's what the "horse" had to say:

\begin{email_from_Trolltech}

Hi Marciano,

thank you for your interest in Qt. Qt/X11 is available under both an Open
Source, free license and under the commercial license. It's Qt/X11, not
Qt/Unix or Qt/Linux, so if you get Qt/X11 to run on a cygwin environment
with an X11 server there is no licensing issue.

[snap!]

Best regards,
Volker

--
Volker Hilsheimer, Support Manager
Trolltech AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway

\end{email_from_Trolltech}

I was actually quite impressed that they replied very quickly, given that I 
was basically asking if I could use their product for free instead of for a 
charge...

Anyways, if we content ourselves with porting TeXmacs to Cygwin/XFree86, 
licensing issues are non-existent: the situation is exactly the same as 
under Linux/Unix.

It is true that porting to Win32 native would be better, but: (1) there are 
other technical issues with the port (e.g. making sure Guile works fine 
under Win32 native, without Cygwin); and (2) if the TMGUI approach is 
followed, one could think about using a backend different from Qt (e.g. MFC 
or wxWindows) for the Win32 native version.

Just my 0.02 EUR worth.

M