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Qt and Open Source

qt.io

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121–130 of 138 posts

Re: Qt and Open Source

#121

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Rochus wrote: post #30
anoncake wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Promoting Open Source is the very point of the GPL.

You won't get any support of the "big money" unless the library is at least LGPL so it can be used in closed source applications. GPL is primarily for the idealists, not for business.

> You won't get any support of the "big money" unless the library is at least LGPL so it can be used in closed source applications. GPL is primarily for the idealists, not for business.

Right, of course; hence the failure of Linux and the dominance of the BSD family. /s

Re: Qt and Open Source

#122

Post by badsectoracula »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #121
Rochus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't get any support of the "big money" unless the library is at least LGPL so it can be used in closed source applications. GPL is primarily for the idealists, not for business.

> You won't get any support of the "big money" unless the library is at least LGPL so it can be used in closed source applications. GPL is primarily for the idealists, not for business. Right, of course; hence the failure of Linux and the dominance of the BSD family. /s

Haven't you heard? Sony's Playstation and Nintendo's Switch use FreeBSD, which somehow is good - especially for the consumers buying those products.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#123

Post by mgreenleaf »

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 don't have a lot of experience with it, but Copperspice looks promising, and doesn't need the MOC. Does anyone else have experience with any critical differences between Qt and Copperspice?

Re: Qt and Open Source

#124

Post by pfranz »

j1elo wrote: post #117
troydavis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I feel like Python bindings came along kicking and screaming by the Qt owners. PyQt was originally developed and licensed independently. Nokia was negotiating a relicensing with Riverbank Software. When that broke down and they wrote PySide--basically a reimplementation. That was kind of abandoned with Python 3 and Qt5 until the VFX industry made a big push for PySide2 (rebranded Qt for Python).

Even with all of that, you generally end up reading the C++ docs, it isn't particularly Pythonic, and there are weird gotchas. I can't really fault them for it because you're bound to get that with bindings to another language and it is much better than other UI toolkits.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#125

Post by pfranz »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #118
Nokinside wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah. I can't imagine KDE using Qt if there's a 12 month turnaround (and they don't have final word of what goes into a release). I would think they'd have to fork and hopefully merge on release.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#126

Post by evanmoran »

Deganta wrote: post #88

I think Qt needs to rethink their licensing model. Currently you either pay them a LOT of money for everything they offer, or you don't pay them anything and just use the LGPL version (when that's possible). It seems their current strategy is to milk the users that can't use the LGPL users as much as possible, Additionally they try to convince as many people as possible that the LGPL version won't work for them, by h…

Agreed completely. I think the licensing model is the issue, and if you look on this page alone people who have had to pay all say it was because of a mistake rather than as something they did because the money gave their company an advantage.

Also, I've personally tried out Qt a few different companies over the years and several of them would have been fine paying $50-200/dev/year (depending on company size), but the current price starts at $5508/dev/year! This is so much higher than Jetbrains or Visual Studio pricing that it's clearly targeting a market other than normal developers. This creates an awkwardness for Qt in my opinion. They want to build a community of developers to encourage and grow use of Qt, but most developers in the community are priced out from participating outside of open source.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#128

Post by kovac »

detaro wrote: post #68
kovac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the quality and capabilities of Qt, I really think they should just sell commercial licences. Considering the fact that the engineers at Qt need to pay to eat and pay their bills just like me, I find it absurd to expect something like this for free. In that sense, I think the current situation is very gracious.

What about all the people not working at Qt Company that wrote most of the code? Qt company immensely benefits from the work done by others under the condition it remains also available under open source licenses.

This is a good point but I'm not going to be too quick to comment on those developers. Because they may be working on paid products and they contribute to the upstream project when they find certain features missing.

I like opensource, I myself am a Linux user. I just like a world where perhaps individual devs can build nifty useful software that we pay a small fee for and use. This way the small guys can benefit. Unfortunately, the current state of OSS (which has changes since the early days) are concentrating more power in the hands of a few organizations.

Take Sublime Text for example. I like it that an engineer builds something useful, ask a one time fee for it and we pay something really affordable for it (while there was also a free version available). This way, talented software engineers could actually make a decent living without everyone has to build crappy software for an advert-based economy. So, IMHO, opensourcing the software is an act of grace and would be at the discretion of those engineers. To expect everything to be FOSS or perhaps even demand that, I find is detrimental for individual software engineers/small players.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#129

Post by stormdennis »

kovac wrote: post #128
detaro wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the people not working at Qt Company that wrote most of the code? Qt company immensely benefits from the work done by others under the condition it remains also available under open source licenses.

This is a good point but I'm not going to be too quick to comment on those developers. Because they may be working on paid products and they contribute to the upstream project when they find certain features missing. I like opensource, I myself am a Linux user. I just like a world where perhaps individual devs can build nifty useful software that we pay a small fee for and use. This way the small guys can benefit. Un…

One problem is reluctance to buy closed-source from a one man business, it could even be regarded as negligent. Actually, having said that, Delphi had a thriving third party component ecosystem where developers commonly purchased the source code for an additional fee.

Re: Qt and Open Source

#130

Post by justinclift »

j1elo wrote: post #115
de_watcher wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The offline installers seem to work:

http://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/

At least, after disconnecting the internet connection then ignoring the subsequent error (ironic for an "offline" installer!), it doesn't require a Qt account.

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