...the other side just haven't noticed yet!
A couple of months ago I asked my good friend
Knut Yrvin if Nokia had plans for disrupting the Desktop GUI space by LGPL licensing Qt. He answered no. Today my predictions came true!
Today Nokia announced that Qt will become LGPL! Read the full story
here...
This whole thing started because some stupid assholes wouldn't share their Lisp code with
Richard Stallman about 30 years ago. Then Thorvald (a left activist's son from Finland) came around and needed his own [FREE] version of Unix in the early 90s. He instantly joined Richard Stallman in the "battle for copyleft" when he understood what it was about...!
The first real victory however was when
Mozilla was founded and started to eat market shares from the "prime weapon" [IE] of the enemy...
Then came Apple tossing along thinking that they too wanted some piece of the pai with their
iPhone and completely destroyed MSFT's efforts in gaining terrain in the device space with their own WindowsMobile initiative. To make things even worse,
Steve Jobs even fucked around with MSFT's browser, probably for no other reasons then
"because he could" and was pissed at
Bill Gates for backstabbing him back in the 80s with MSFT's famous
IBM/Microsoft DOS deal...
Along the sides grew
a giant too big for MSFT to ignore and with a business model that sounded like Latin to most Microsoft strategists! Microsoft was all of a sudden fighting a battle with more fronts then any army so far in History have managed to push away...
And when Microsoft started pissing Google up the back, Google
took a stab back where it hurts the most for Microsoft...!
Then all of a sudden some cowboy (
Jesse James) "invents a new word". And
*BANG!* Everyone wants to build applications for the web which works on all browsers and all operational systems - made possible by Safari, FireFox and even a small Norwegian participant;
Opera.
But the "spike in the coffin" came today! Today Nokia and my friend Eirik-Chambe Eng announced that it will be *FREE OF CHARGE* to develop applications in the best Desktop GUI library ever created in History - That makes portability between all desktop systems and even Mobile systems a fucking *breeze*...!
Today we can create applications for the web that does all those great things that desktop systems used to do less then a decade ago for FREE. That works on ALL operational systems on the planet. And if we have to create Desktop or mobile Systems, say like Photo Shop 544 or Google Talk 128 or Media Players or even browsers. We get *portability for free* thanx to Eirik and our friends over at Nokia!
Today the war was won, the other guys just haven't noticed yet! :)Today the software world got rid of its last moisty lock-ins permanently! (Windows API) Today there's no longer any reasons at all to use lock-in APIs when doing "desktop development". Today the war was won!
Congratulations to all the world, and especially my kids who gets to eat the fruit of all the hard work done by the combined FOSS world!
Congratulations to Richard Stallman, Linus Thorvalds, Eirik-Chambe Eng, *YOU* who are reading this blog, every FOSS developer on the planet - And congrats to the
free world!
Congratulations!
And
*THANK YOU NOKIA*!.t