@-~ Copyright and Licensing ~-@

Architektonas: Free Cross Platform 2D CAD software
Copyright (C) 2010 Underground Software.
Portions copyright (C) 2001-2003 RibbonSoft.
Trademarks used are the property of their respective owners.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin
Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.


@-~ History ~-@

Architektonas was started by James Hammons as a fork of QCad Community Edition
2.0.5.0 which was released under the GPLv2 by Andrew Mustun of RibbonSoft. The
author started working on a porting effort of the CE codebase from Qt 3 to Qt 4
for a couple of reasons: First, QCad CE had been stagnant for quite a long time
(not surprising, as it is likely that Mr. Mustun was holding off on releasing
QCad 3 because of the enormous difficulties involving in making QCad a pure Qt
4 application) and second, Gentoo (the author's Linux distribution of choice)
removed both Qt 3 and QCad CE from the Portage tree.

And so porting to Qt 4 using the Qt3Support module was done initially to see if
it would work, and if it was worth doing. Positive results were obtained in
both respects, so work started in earnest in doing a complete port to Qt 4
without any reliance whatsoever on the Qt3Support module.

Eventually, after much hard work, cursing, and gnashing of teeth, success was
won and the author ended up with a codebase that was quite a bit different from
that which he started with. And since the end goal was not just feature parity
with QCad CE but to surpass it, a new name was needed to prevent confusion with
RibbonSoft's product.

Initial thoughts on naming centered around FooCAD or CADFoo (with Foo being
whatever), but a long search on the internet brought forth the conclusion that
such paths have been well trodden by just about anyone who has even given a
thought towards creating computer aided design software. And so it was
manifestly clear that a different naming scheme would be required. After much
reflection and several false starts, the name Architektonas was chosen as a
rough English transliteration of the Greek word for architect. We feel it's a
good name and hope to live up to the expectations that such a name gives!


@-~ Installation ~-@

Architektonas is built on the Qt 4 framework; it requires version 4.6.3 or
later. We build it using gcc v4.4.3; we can't guarantee that it will compile on
lesser versions but you never know. Building Architektonas should be as easy as
typing:

make && make install

[*NOTE: make install doesn't do anything ATM]