Tonight I updated SASs TeamSpeak 3 server, and discovered that my TS3 client was too darn out of date to work with it, haha. After updating things, I also noticed in the nifty about dialog they shipped, that the version of Qt used, denoted the GNU LGPL v2.1.
It has been a good while since I updated Qt on my windows system, last time was about one year ago. So I dropped by Qt’s website to download an updated SDK, and also found that they had MinGW and Visual C++ 2008 library packages available. Last time I really focused on Qt/C++ development, Microsoft Visual C++ was just becoming supported by the Open Source Edition (OSE), having long been supported by the commercial editions of Qt.
In perusing the website, I noticed that GPLv3 is now also a supported license for Qt. They really have gone through a few licenses over the years, I still remember when the OSE was a chose between GPLv2 and their own Qt Public License agreement.
While I really hate doing cross platform development in C++, Qt is both the least painful widget toolkit I’ve ever seen, and really makes the process *a lot* less painful. Well, as less painful as dealing with template implementations between GNU/MS C++ compilers anyway.
It is note worthy that the SDK only includes the necessary library files to link using MinGW, the port of the GNU Compiler to Windows. So if you plan on using Microsoft’s compiler, you will want the vs2008 package, or the source code if you need to shoe horn into an older version.
One thing I like about all the *decent* operating systems shipping a system compiler on their install disk, that usually means pre-compiled packages will be in sync with your compiler. Microsoft Visual C++ is not quite so lucky, since being a separate product, most people shipping binary packages of libs/headers, usually support 7.1 or 8.0 instead of 9.0. Oh well, maybe when VC10 is released :-/.