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Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

blog.qt.digia.com

11–20 of 92 posts

Re: Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

#13

Qt always seems like a thing that has so much potential, but whenever I use it I'm struck by how it never seems quite good enough. 5 seems a big imporvement on 4 though, so we'll see.

I'm wondering what you mean by "not quite good enough". It's by far the best UI toolkit out there and a very high quality application toolkit. It has shortcomings, but to the point it's unusable?

Not unusable at all! I think my comment sounded more negative than I am about Qt, I enjoy using it but there's a lot of little things, just glitches mostly, that are annoying and detract from it being amazing.

Re: Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering what you mean by "not quite good enough". It's by far the best UI toolkit out there and a very high quality application toolkit. It has shortcomings, but to the point it's unusable?

Not unusable at all! I think my comment sounded more negative than I am about Qt, I enjoy using it but there's a lot of little things, just glitches mostly, that are annoying and detract from it being amazing.

Ah. I understood your comment differently.

It definitely does have shortcomings, but I don't think any library is ever perfect, especially in a project as massive as Qt. I found the Qt community is very open to contributions, feature requests and such when things make sense.

Re: Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

#16
post #9

Qt always seems like a thing that has so much potential, but whenever I use it I'm struck by how it never seems quite good enough. 5 seems a big imporvement on 4 though, so we'll see.

I agree, and I wonder how much further ahead it would be if they'd switched to the current licensing scheme years earlier. Other than writing native for each platform, which I don't have time to do, I haven't seen any good alternatives to Qt. And I'm not going back to MFC.

I haven't investigated Qt's mobile offerings or "Qt Quick", but I am fairly certain that on X11-based systems the basic core desktop SDK is as native as any other UI toolkit (e.g. GTK), and on Windows it uses the same core libraries that MSVC-written programs use, so it's as close to "native" as it gets there, too. Is that incorrect?

Re: Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

#17
Dear lazyweb, what exactly is Qt's current business? The blog post makes it sound as if the commercial version of Qt wasn't free software. What freedoms does it take away? I know that Trolltech commercialised Qt by selling exceptions. What's the current business? Also, if 25% of all contributions are coming from non-Digia employees, does Digia require copyright assignment? Does their current commercial model require copyright assignments?

Re: Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

#18

Qt always seems like a thing that has so much potential, but whenever I use it I'm struck by how it never seems quite good enough. 5 seems a big imporvement on 4 though, so we'll see.

Personally, I think it's great, but I do dislike how it tends to take over the entire project. It's not just UI, it's also QNetwork and QProcess and QByteArray and QSqlDatabase.

Re: Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

#20
post #17

Dear lazyweb, what exactly is Qt's current business? The blog post makes it sound as if the commercial version of Qt wasn't free software. What freedoms does it take away? I know that Trolltech commercialised Qt by selling exceptions. What's the current business? Also, if 25% of all contributions are coming from non-Digia employees, does Digia require copyright assignment? Does their current commercial model require…

Yes, they release it under GPL/LGPL and make their money on proprietary licenses for users that can't or won't use those licenses. If you want to develop Qt itself and get your changes included you have to sign a copyright assignment agreement that gives Digia the right to re-license your work. See:

    http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/licensing.html
    http://qt-project.org/legal.html
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