Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

olafsw.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 125 posts

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#111

Post by Rochus »

Kelteseth wrote: post #103
Rochus wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. How did you solve the LGPL licencing issue? Did you have to pay a commercial licence and pay royalties to The Company? EDIT: ok I see, your project is AGPL. But that just moves the issues to your clients; how do they solve the issue?

When distributing qt on android you can simply write an guide on how to decompile the apk, replace the qt .so and compile it again. I haven't done it yet so I'm not 100% sure about this. Also you could simply install ministro for this. https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-deploying-android.html

I had so many linking issues because of the Qt so on Android that I finally had to statically compile the run some tests at all, and in consequence to replace Qt with something else to avoid royalties. The problem of "DLL hell" (i.e. symbol conflicts between library versions) is well known on Android.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#112

Post by elproxy »

cjensen wrote: post #55

The behavior of the Qt company lately is a bit troubling. First, the core can be licensed under Commercial or LGPL licensing. This let's non-paying developers use the core in commercial software. This policy was established to ensure trust with the community during one of the many company transitions. For all new modules, Qt evades that requirement by licensing under Commercial or GPL. I have mixed feelings on this.…

https://www.qt.io/licensing/ Commercial, GPL or LGPLv3 are available, which means they are going after embedded customers who typically don't want to open up their hardware (TVs, Cars, etc). Anybody else is free to reap the benefits, even for developing a commercial app on desktop (granted, that's a tough enough market to crack already these days).

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#113

Post by elproxy »

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…

Arguably, licensing revenue was a drop in the bucket for Nokia and they had a lot more to lose with the liability that came from commercial customers. It was a hard move to (at least partially) undo for the Qt Company.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#114

Post by mlvljr »

dev-il wrote: post #109
Nokinside wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your QT losing users is still unsubstantiated. Developers stop using Qt for good technical reasons in projects that don't require the unique features of Qt. Qt's strength is being multiplatform. It works in embedded and realtime operating systems. It's not even useful for scrape by contract workers who do better with free web framework/UI stuff. Your TV, car, Television, have Qt in them. Its in medical devices and in…

It just so happens that the biggest part of my work is in embedded. And while it's obvious that QTCOM is trying to establish itself in that domain… this here is merely wishful thinking: > Your TV, car, Television, have Qt in them no, actually neither has. And let's face it: while QTCOM does have clients in those domains… it doesn't have any huge share in either. Most use simpler lower-level graphical libs. Apart from…

Not sure about the rest, but looks like most if not all big car makers now use Qt (even VAG is switching from JavaFX).

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#115

Post by Nokinside »

dev-il wrote: post #109
Nokinside wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your QT losing users is still unsubstantiated. Developers stop using Qt for good technical reasons in projects that don't require the unique features of Qt. Qt's strength is being multiplatform. It works in embedded and realtime operating systems. It's not even useful for scrape by contract workers who do better with free web framework/UI stuff. Your TV, car, Television, have Qt in them. Its in medical devices and in…

It just so happens that the biggest part of my work is in embedded. And while it's obvious that QTCOM is trying to establish itself in that domain… this here is merely wishful thinking: > Your TV, car, Television, have Qt in them no, actually neither has. And let's face it: while QTCOM does have clients in those domains… it doesn't have any huge share in either. Most use simpler lower-level graphical libs. Apart from…

You realize that Qt is dual licensed?

If you work in embedded like me, you already know that we make actual money. Nobody cares about license cost of Qt. It's quite low compared to everything else. We don't use LGPLv3 in Qt. We buy commercial license.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#117

Post by Kelteseth »

de_watcher wrote: post #104
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…

Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL? Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.

No QtQuick3d [1] was from the beginning GPLv3 only (It is not even released yet, but Qt 5.14 release is tommorow). It is a bit awkward because now there are competing 3d engines inside one toolkit.

[1] https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#118

Post by mwcampbell »

api wrote: post #106
pjmlp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, that is why you can only have nice tools when working for big corps. FOSS made it fashionable to want to be paid for work, while refusing to pay for the work of others, and in the process using clunky tools. Naturally upstream cannot pay bills from PR and eventually moves on.

I wouldn't take it that far, but IMHO the free (as in beer) part needs to be questioned at least when it comes to for-profit commercial uses of software. I'd like software to be free and open source for people and academic or non-profit uses, but I would like it if corporations for their use if they are using them in certain ways. Particularly problematic is the use of FOSS to power closed SaaS. ZeroTier (of which I…

I think what ZeroTier is doing is totally reasonable, and more companies who aspire to make money from open source should do it. One thing I especially like about ZeroTier's approach is that you publish a standard price list for your commercial license.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#119

Post by detaro »

elproxy wrote: post #112
cjensen wrote: post #55

The behavior of the Qt company lately is a bit troubling. First, the core can be licensed under Commercial or LGPL licensing. This let's non-paying developers use the core in commercial software. This policy was established to ensure trust with the community during one of the many company transitions. For all new modules, Qt evades that requirement by licensing under Commercial or GPL. I have mixed feelings on this.…

https://www.qt.io/licensing/ Commercial, GPL or LGPLv3 are available, which means they are going after embedded customers who typically don't want to open up their hardware (TVs, Cars, etc). Anybody else is free to reap the benefits, even for developing a commercial app on desktop (granted, that's a tough enough market to crack already these days).

As the parent explicitly stated, not all components are available under LGPL.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#120

Post by dev-il »

de_watcher wrote: post #104
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…

Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL? Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.

What I did write was that they switched their licensing default for most new modules from LGPL to GPL. So unlike Qt Quick (the original 2D Qt Quick) which was started under Nokia and licensed LGPL (or commercial)… the new Qt Quick 3D (*) was never licensed under LGPL but is licensed only under GPLv3 (or commercial).

https://github.com/qt/qtquick3d

Post reply on HN