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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

#91

Post by Rochus »

cjensen wrote: post #65
api wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its weird what people and businesses will and will not support. Businesses will shovel loads of money into SaaS and cloud hosting without blinking, but support a programming tool? Never! Another hundred Office users and 50 more AWS VMs? No problem. People will spend $10 on a coffee but would never spend $5 to support a project that saves them hundreds or thousands of hours of work. They'll spend $15/month to host a s…

Sure. In the case of Qt, it was very expensive but well worth paying for because it does a good job. The LGPL stuff is important because it provides us with an "out" if the Qt company goes crazy with prices. Avoiding the "out" makes me not want to make use of the new modules. And the hassle of audits makes be question the cost of the inconvenience to me, the dev, of having a license. It's tradeoffs all the way down.

It's outrageously expensive. And you can't just buy what you really need, just all or nothing. In many projects I only need Qt Core; for that I would have to buy a license for everything from these people with a far worse contract than LGPL and pay royalties. No thanks.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#92

Post by Rochus »

pjmlp wrote: post #75
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…

FOSS developers leeching Qt developers will be the death of Qt. It is hard to sustain a business out of donations and patreons, not everyone enjoys counting pennies every month. Also Qt is doing pretty well, thanks to enterprises, which still seem to value paying for developer tooling.

Working for the Company?

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#93

Post by pjmlp »

Rochus wrote: post #92
pjmlp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS developers leeching Qt developers will be the death of Qt. It is hard to sustain a business out of donations and patreons, not everyone enjoys counting pennies every month. Also Qt is doing pretty well, thanks to enterprises, which still seem to value paying for developer tooling.

Working for the Company?

No, working for the man, former FOSS zealot let down by what means selling tools to developers.

Got to learn that only enterprises or cloud walls work out.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#94

Post by Kelteseth »

Rochus wrote: post #87
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…

Glad to hear that. How about we change the name to QueTee so that we still can everything starting with a Q and people finally pronouncing the name right? :D

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#95

Post by Rochus »

dev-il wrote: post #89
Nokinside wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rem…

I hope the BSD case happens soon before these people scare all the developers away.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#96

Post by Rochus »

Kelteseth wrote: post #94
Rochus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Glad to hear that. How about we change the name to QueTee so that we still can everything starting with a Q and people finally pronouncing the name right? :D

I would rather recommend to stay with the name but add a prefix such as "Free Qt" to demonstrate that it is still and will remain a robust Qt branch doing without incompatible changes and focussing on the essentials. I wouldn't even mind to start with 4.8.6, but also 5.6 is OK (the last LGPL 2.1 version). Work should concentrate on stability, compatibility with relevant platforms and finer grained modularity using a standard build system (such as modern cmake). Rewriting everything just to worship the "modern C++ god" is a no-goal from my point of view.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#97

Post by Kelteseth »

Rochus wrote: post #96
Kelteseth wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear that. How about we change the name to QueTee so that we still can everything starting with a Q and people finally pronouncing the name right? :D

I would rather recommend to stay with the name but add a prefix such as "Free Qt" to demonstrate that it is still and will remain a robust Qt branch doing without incompatible changes and focussing on the essentials. I wouldn't even mind to start with 4.8.6, but also 5.6 is OK (the last LGPL 2.1 version). Work should concentrate on stability, compatibility with relevant platforms and finer grained modularity using a…

Nope as a QML developer 5.14 is bare minimum because of the many changes like proper 4k scaling support, Splitview, Table support, way better Android build, usable Qt3d and many quality of life improvements.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#98

Post by Rochus »

Kelteseth wrote: post #97
Rochus wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather recommend to stay with the name but add a prefix such as "Free Qt" to demonstrate that it is still and will remain a robust Qt branch doing without incompatible changes and focussing on the essentials. I wouldn't even mind to start with 4.8.6, but also 5.6 is OK (the last LGPL 2.1 version). Work should concentrate on stability, compatibility with relevant platforms and finer grained modularity using a…

Nope as a QML developer 5.14 is bare minimum because of the many changes like proper 4k scaling support, Splitview, Table support, way better Android build, usable Qt3d and many quality of life improvements.

Are you aware of Dart and Flutter? I also used Qt on Android and iOS once. Won't do it again. A lot of linking, deployment and licensing issues to use something where by the end of the day I have to take care myself that it meets the platform look and feel. QML/Qt Quick was a nice idea when Nokia and others wanted to establish a common mobile platform based on the Qt framework. Today for scripting/mobile UX focussed developers there are much better options.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#99

Post by Nokinside »

dev-il wrote: post #89
Nokinside wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rem…

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 industry automation.

Qt may lose market share for Adobe PhoneGap, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin but that's because those target restrictive subset of what Qt is good for. Again, it's for good technical reasons. Nothing to do with licenses or Qt being evil company.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#100

Post by Kelteseth »

Rochus wrote: post #98
Kelteseth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope as a QML developer 5.14 is bare minimum because of the many changes like proper 4k scaling support, Splitview, Table support, way better Android build, usable Qt3d and many quality of life improvements.

Are you aware of Dart and Flutter? I also used Qt on Android and iOS once. Won't do it again. A lot of linking, deployment and licensing issues to use something where by the end of the day I have to take care myself that it meets the platform look and feel. QML/Qt Quick was a nice idea when Nokia and others wanted to establish a common mobile platform based on the Qt framework. Today for scripting/mobile UX focussed…

Yes I am aware of the alternatives. Still having used a ton of UI libraries (Unity/Unreal/Godot/C#/QtWidgets/Flutter and web development) I would still choose QML by a landslide. My project ScreenPlay [1] (Cross plattform animated wallpaper and desktop widgets) is written 100% in QML and C++. I use the build in Material Design on desktop which works really nice with fancy animations. At work I develop a cross platform Qt app for desktop and Android tablets. With QtCreator 4.11 they unified the apk creation for all arch and arm versions.

[1] https://gitlab.com/kelteseth/ScreenPlay

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