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A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

olafsw.de

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Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#81

Post by pjmlp »

wruza wrote: post #78
pjmlp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried and learned that most FOSS don't want to pay for their tools, so they turned their focus to those that actually care to pay and have been doing quite alright.

Numerous frameworks didn’t even bother to turn to FOSS, and maybe they’re also doing alright. We cannot be sure though, cause no one knows their name. The point of going foss, in my long-distance bystander observation, is to create an essential part of the market: skilled developers. Not to push your sales to everyone’s face, nor to whine that deals are too cheap. Foss folks will never pay, because they are not busin…

If you want names, OutSystems, Xamarin, VCL, WPF/UWP, Cocoa, UIKit, Telerik, CodenameOne, Gluon,...

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#82

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

dev-il wrote: post #71
laxd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fan of electron at all. But I think it points out the direction for the future of gui. There's a whole generation of new languages (rust, go, dart, D, ...) that wants to get into the gui-space and finding QT and GTK problematic. QT is known for "using every C++ feature", making it less than ideal for bindings. GTK is not very cross platform I think, and is criticized for beeing gnome-centric. Both toolkits are…

Qt isn't known for "using every C++ feature" at all. Quite to the contrary, as far as C++ goes, Qt is stuck in the old times BEFORE modern C++. And it really shows in the architecture, memory management and syntax. In fact, lots of Qt's non-gui stuff is precisely about features that were missing in standard C++ at the time and later found their way there, leaving Qt with its old non-standard stuff (including containe…

I recently started with Qt, and it seemed to me that it's trying to play nicely with new C++ features. I never used Qt smart pointers; only C++ ones.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#83

Post by Kelteseth »

jbk wrote: post #2

> Background is the wish of The Qt Company to change some of the contract provisions. It is still a bit unclear which ideas exactly they are pursuing I think this is the reason of the timing of this post. Because else, this post is just reminding the existing contracts around Qt.

Maybe because Qt6 is on the horizon? Also they changed the license of some Qt modules just 2 months ago: https://www.qt.io/blog/change-in-open-source-licensing-of-qt...

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#84

Post by Nokinside »

dev-il wrote: post #74

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt: Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)… … unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly t…

Digia does not own Qt Company. Digia was clenly split in 2016. Digia owners received QTCOM stock. see: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xhel/qtcom/ownership

Btw. Your claim that developers are switching is not true either. Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#85

Post by Nokinside »

toyg wrote: post #77
Nokinside wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license. QT stock is up 124% this year, +247,06% last 3 years. Qt has de facto monopoly in embedded, medical, automotive, appliance and industry automation. It works in Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, QNX, and VxWorks. Qt just launched Qt for MCUs (bare metal toolkit for low end microcontrollers). It runs on Cortex-M with several different 2D accelerators. It's yet…

That’s good, so why change the license now? Is it just greed?

Nobody knows what type of change they want. Their paying customers don't care because the product is double licensed.

I suspect it has something to do with some 3d libraries and code they would like to include, but I don't know.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#86

Post by wruza »

pjmlp wrote: post #81
wruza wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numerous frameworks didn’t even bother to turn to FOSS, and maybe they’re also doing alright. We cannot be sure though, cause no one knows their name. The point of going foss, in my long-distance bystander observation, is to create an essential part of the market: skilled developers. Not to push your sales to everyone’s face, nor to whine that deals are too cheap. Foss folks will never pay, because they are not busin…

If you want names, OutSystems, Xamarin, VCL, WPF/UWP, Cocoa, UIKit, Telerik, CodenameOne, Gluon,...

That’s lame argument, if it is, and I don’t feel like nitpicking. Almost all of these are either dual-licensed free to use for foss folks or charged very indirectly.

You still cannot be full-commercial and not have sap/oracle-like salesmen squad.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#87

Post by Rochus »

dev-il wrote: post #74

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt: Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)… … unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly t…

Yes, exactly. You have my vote and my support in case the Qt framework will be forked based on the LGPL 2 versions and continued from there independently of the Qt Company.

Here some figures: Nokia bought Trolltech and thus the intellectual property of Qt 4 for around 100 million Euros, and then released it to the public under LGPL. Nokia also payed for the development of Qt 4.4 to 5.0, and then "sold" everything to Digia for a piece of bread (about 4 Mio Euros). The contribution rate of Nokia was ~80% according to commit logs; the contribution rate of The Qt Company is at ~40% - and it's mostly on stuff important to them (i.e. which they can sell). So at least 50% are open source contributions by others. This information is all publicly available; you can read it yourself. So the Qt Company massively profited from this and should stop complaining and turning crooked things.

And they have to stop their u-boats, which act anonymously and make opinion.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#88

Post by Rochus »

toyg wrote: post #35
giancarlostoro wrote: post #4

> In case The Qt Company would ever attempt to close down Open Source Qt, the foundation is entitled to publish Qt under the BSD license. This notable legal guarantee strengthens Qt. It creates trust among developers, contributors and customers. Woah, I had no idea about this. I wonder what kind of new changes would take place if Qt were BSD licensed, such as languages like D embedding it as a solution for UIs as par…

Qt is massive , I doubt small communities would rush to integrate it and make it their job to maintain it all... I doubt anyone in OSS communities is seriously deterred from using Qt because of the LGPL. It’s just a very big and very complex project that requires a lot of manpower to “tame”.

It's not as big as Linux, Chromium, Dart and others. All of my projects are still compatible with C++ Qt 4. I'm able to and I will maintain it as soon as someone is estabilshing a free fork; up to now I'm being held back by this outrageous Contributor Agreement. A lot of unnecessary complexity started with all the JavaScript stuff. This can be replaced by the other existing (and free) scripting language bindings. So yes, I don't see any problem to continue maintenance of the Qt framework without the Qt company at all.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#89

Post by dev-il »

Nokinside wrote: post #84
dev-il wrote: post #74

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt: Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)… … unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly t…

Digia does not own Qt Company. Digia was clenly split in 2016. Digia owners received QTCOM stock. see: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xhel/qtcom/ownership Btw. Your claim that developers are switching is not true either. Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.

> Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.

As if that was of any relevance to the question whether many Qt developers are switching. Given that commercial licenses are only used by a very small minority of the professional developers using Qt (most using open source Qt), themselves only a subset of all developers using Qt… the fact that that small minority is currently increasing while remaining a small minority… doesn't say anything about the proportion of still Qt using developers switching away.

Besides, the sustainability of a temporary increase of that minority is highly questionable. Of course QTCOM's pressure towards Pay-to-Play temporarily forces some of those who are still tied by all of their still-Qt-based code to buy Qt licenses as long as they haven't finished switching to a better alternative… but on the long term most of them quit too. Precisely because of that.

We'll see how that strategy of maximal monetization and maximally squeezing developers works out for QTCOM in the long term

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#90

Post by Rochus »

ori_b wrote: post #53
toyg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt is massive , I doubt small communities would rush to integrate it and make it their job to maintain it all... I doubt anyone in OSS communities is seriously deterred from using Qt because of the LGPL. It’s just a very big and very complex project that requires a lot of manpower to “tame”.

Already happened: https://www.copperspice.com

Thanks for the hint. Didn't know it. As it seems it is no longer Qt. They once started with Qt (don't know which version) but they have "completely diverged" as they say. The goal is not to have a free Qt but to have "Extensive use of modern C++ functionality" (with all these buzzwords). Not even shure if their containers are still implicitly shared. Will even though continue to have a look at it.
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