[Texmacs-dev] News and questions

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Dear Richard,

I finally found a way so that people can make donations to TeXmacs.
The idea is to get associated to the SPI (software in public interest)
organization. I don't know if this would work for other projects,
but it worked for us, and they were quite fast to answer us.

Now a second thing starts to give me headaiches,
so I would like to have your opinion about it. We want to port
TeXmacs to Windows, because many potential users still want or have
to use this platform. We have therefore been searching for a GUI,
in preference based on C++, which would allow to do so.
We have been considering four GUI's: Qt, Gtk, wxWindows and GNUstep.
What GUI would you suggest?

Technically speaking, most developers prefer Qt,
but their license confuses me. Indeed, I thought that
the whole of Qt was available under the GPL license,
but this does not appear to be so in the case of their windows port.
I asked on the April mailing list, but I got many contradictory messages.
Do you know what the precise status is?

What do you think about the proprietary and expensive Qt license
for the windows version? I have a double feeling about it.
On the one hand side, I think that it gives an incitation for
people to switch to a free OS, and in that sense it might actually
be a good idea to let people pay the software on proprietary platforms.
On the other hand, it *is* a proprietary license and not good
for that single reason. Moreover, I am not convinced that
the reason why they have this license is to incite the use
of a free OS: they rather seem to use it in order to pay developers.
Also, I don't like the fact that they may decide to switch
the whole of Qt back to a sole proprietary license later on...

So please let us know what you think about this issue,
or maybe point us to a webpage where these issues are analyzed
in a way that you approve.

Best, Joris