Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: News and questions

[Joris van der Hoeven]

>     We have been considering four GUI's: Qt, Gtk, wxWindows and GNUstep.
>     What GUI would you suggest?
> 
> I hope you will use GTK so as to fit in best with the GNU system.

The problem is that it does not seem to port to Windows quite well.

What about wxWindows? Did you get any feedback about that project?
For us it also has the advantage of being written in C++.
So this might be the ideal free alternative for Qt for C++ programmers,
although we did not yet thoroughly analyze the project.
On the April mailing list, several programmers tended to choose it.

>     On the one hand side, I think that it gives an incitation for
>     people to switch to a free OS,
> 
> I don't follow--how does the license of Windows Qt encourage end
> users to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux or *BSD?

Because users are offered the same product for free on a free OS.

Imagine that there are a lot of Window ports of good free software under
this or a similar license. Then many people might start to use that
software. The institutions of these people would have to pay a lot of
money for that. Next, they discover that they can get all this for free
when switching to a free OS. I think that this might indeed encourage
people to switch. However, I do not think that this reasoning is
the motivation of Trolltech...

A good question is therefore: if we make a Window port,
how can we encourage people to switch to a free OS *without*
using a proprietary or even a non-copyleft license?