@olmitch As far as I can tell, in 1998, Qt was proprietary software.

The audience wasn't NPC frowning, they were free thinker frowning, as they were rightfully disgusted that they just saw free software being turned into proprietary software in front of them.

The patch wasn't published as that would be copyright infringement, although he was free to do whatever he wanted on his own computer - recommending proprietary software by demonstrating "how easy" it was, was detestable.


It seems Qt was released as free software in 1999, but only under a GPL-incompatible license - thankfully eventually licenses from the GPL family were used later.