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Qt and Open Source

qt.io

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111–120 of 138 posts

Re: Qt and Open Source

#111

Post by pknopf »

gmueckl wrote: post #104
slezyr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My company currently uses the LGPL version of Qt, and would gladly pay for the commercial one. In the Trolltech and Nokia days they actually did pay for it, but the prices are no longer affordable us. So we are stuck with the LGPL version for now. Huh, price isn't even a THAT big problem. Software developed with LGPL version can't use the commercial one. > 2.13. If I have started development of a project using the…

There is no legal barrier for them to relicense Qt from LGPL to a commercial license for a customer. They are just strongarming customers into paying for licenses early on during development by refusing to do so.

Absolutely.

My company accidently used one of their GPL-only products (on screen keyboad), thinking it was LGPL. We did the right thing and reached out to them to pay for it after it was already deployed to customers.

We had to pay for the entire Qt platform. 20,000 dollars plus a per-device royalty. That was a big mistake on our part, not paying attention to the licensing.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#112

Post by justinclift »

oefrha wrote: post #109
justinclift wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

Not sure about online installers and not keen to find out, but I just built a Qt app last month and used the offline Windows installer for 5.14 from qt.io as part of the Windows build environment setup, and I’m sure I don’t have a Qt account (yeah checked in my password manager), so saying the open source Qt builds can’t be installed without an account is not accurate.

Thanks. That might be a workable avenue.

Hopefully having several offline installs of various versions in parallel doesn't cause problems.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#113

Post by plorkyeran »

brnt wrote: post #53
mmargerum wrote: post #31

I really want to use Qt for a project but between the absurd commercial cost and them playing games with licensing i'm going with either wxWidgets or Lazarus.

Does anyone here use Copperspice? Saw it mentioned elsewhere as a possible alternative. Theyre a kind of fork of Qt5, ditched the moc, and seem to be ran as a regular Floss project. I have no experience with it, but I do with Qt, which I like very much, so if there are users of Copperspice here I'd be very interested in your experience.

Copperspice was interesting as a technical experiment to see if improvements to C++ have made the moc no longer needed. The basic problem with using it to actually write applications is that the development effort on it isn't put into things which make your application better. Modernizing and cleaning up the Qt codebase is great for the people working on Qt (or Cs), but most of the changes aren't actually valuable for users of it.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#114

Post by smnthermes »

anoncake wrote: post #25
davidhyde wrote: post #11

A lot of developers are experimenting with languages and libraries outside their normal work requirements given the current uncertainties of the future. If you are considering learning QT and come across this bad PR you will most likely avoid the technology altogether. I was looking for a popular GUI framework to build front ends for my rust apps all the controversy around QT made me double my efforts to find a nativ…

What are you experimenting with? If there is any cross-platform GUI framework that comes close to Qt, I'd love to know.

UXP?

https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP

Re: Qt and Open Source

#115

Post by j1elo »

de_watcher wrote: post #106
justinclift wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not FUD. Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything: http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/ It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.

I took qt-unified-linux-x86-2.0.5-2-online.run, launched, pressed "Skip" when it was asking for the account, and it's downloading. Have you tried it? Does it ask after the download?

I also always pressed "Skip" on the Qt Creator standalone installer for Linux. But the Skip button doesn't exist any more.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#116

Post by bmn__ »

brnt wrote: post #53
mmargerum wrote: post #31

I really want to use Qt for a project but between the absurd commercial cost and them playing games with licensing i'm going with either wxWidgets or Lazarus.

Does anyone here use Copperspice? Saw it mentioned elsewhere as a possible alternative. Theyre a kind of fork of Qt5, ditched the moc, and seem to be ran as a regular Floss project. I have no experience with it, but I do with Qt, which I like very much, so if there are users of Copperspice here I'd be very interested in your experience.

A much less invasive solution to the problem: https://github.com/woboq/verdigris

Re: Qt and Open Source

#117

Post by j1elo »

troydavis wrote: post #78
j1elo wrote: post #42

I'd love to know more about opinions of fellow commenters, just a "what-if" question: If tomorrow you had some big project such as Qt in your hands, and had 100% freedom to choose how to proceed with it (in matters such as what license to apply, what sustainability model to seek, etc.) what would you do? I always feel that pure GPL is the best but only idealistic way to go, because working for free is not compatible…

One challenge specific to Qt is that their market is completely different than it was when KDE adopted Qt way back in the late 90s. I ran prerelease KDE briefly in that era and it was incredible for what it was. The other cross-platform options were things like Java Swing and Tk. They were ugly and had funky UI behavior. Even then, the total addressable market was pretty small, but at least it was anyone who wanted t…

When I wrote my first Qt-based code, it still was Trolltech. C++ seemed the obvious choice for a performant application.

But now, I think that C++ is more of a drawback than an advantage for the Qt project. C++ today seems a good fit for high-performance, very niche tools such as trading, games, machine learning libraries, and such, but not for "simpler" software such as the UI of an application. Also finding good competent C++ devs seems to be much harder now. I myself feel like having to go "back" to writing C++ is a bummer, having worked with other more modern technologies.

Bindings to other languages have always been a second-class citizen. The Python one is very nice, though, but that's all. I believe it comes, again, as a difficulty introduced by the language itself.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#118

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Nokinside wrote: post #21
lentil_soup wrote: post #3

I really like Qt for desktop development, use it everyday, but this post makes me feel uneasy. What "discussions on various internet forums" do they mean? there's been plenty. And, which ones "do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company"? Why such a rushed defensive blog post?

Qt Company can't wiggle out from the contract it has with KDE. It must release Qt as open source withing 12 months. Qt stays open source. The negotiations and uncertainty are related to all extra cooperation above that.

12 months is fairly close to an eternity in software, though; that's a pretty big catch

Re: Qt and Open Source

#119

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

simion314 wrote: post #33
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #27

It's interesting, I had no idea this is still an issue. For the record, this is the reason a couple of folks started Gnome and GTK over 20 years ago.

No, at that time Qt was not free software. Now Qt is free software and you can fork it and do whatever you want. The issue seems to be that there are many people that use Qt for free including companies but they won't pay with money or contributions, so if a work will happen except KDE there will be few contributors. Qt includes a version of Webkit that is used in some application, so you need someone to keep on top…

> many people that use Qt for free including companies but they won't pay with money or contributions

That is one of the things that free software allows, yeah.

> so if a work will happen except KDE there will be few contributors

Even if that's true, is KDE not enough?

> Qt includes a version of Webkit that is used in some application, so you need someone to keep on top of webkit security issues and backport the fixes.

I assumed that the QT end of that was a thin wrapper around upstream webkit; is it really that involved?

Re: Qt and Open Source

#120

Post by merb »

dman wrote: post #45
alxlaz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add a little: there's some concern, including among commercial users (including yours truly), that this is a Very Bad Idea (TM). Thing is, non-commercial and free software projects (KDE is one of the biggest ones, but not just KDE) have a significant contribution, quality-wise, to Qt. Most commercial users are on LTS releases. They rarely report bugs in current versions. With some exceptions (e.g. Wayland), t…

I have written a fair amount of software in Qt. It has been clear to me from the actions of the Qt company (via the amount they charge for it, getting rid of indie plans which allowed you to use it Qt for ~350 bucks a year vs the $5508 a year that they have chosen the strategy of milking the captive users that Qt has rather than expanding Qt out and courting new users. For better or for worse at this point I see clos…

i.e. you do not need a license to have commercial qt programs, as long as you correctly use LPGL as a license, which is really really simple. IANAL but their licensing pages and legal pages are extremly misleading.
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