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A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE
- jbk 7y ago> Background is the wish of The Qt Company to change some of the contract provisions. It is still a bit unclear which ideas exactly they are pursuing I think this is the reason of the timing of this post. Because else, this post is just reminding the existing contracts around Qt.
- hoistbypetard 7y agoCan you briefly explain (or link an existing explanation) a summary of the changes the Qt Company is asking for, to someone who's interested but not intimately familiar with the details?
- jbk 7y agoI know nothing more than you do.
- thomascgalvin 7y agoIt says in the article and the quote that the proposed changes are still unclear.
- hoistbypetard 7y agoI understand that. I was hoping someone who's closer to the matter could characterize them in broad strokes even if details were still unclear.
- Kelteseth 7y agoMaybe because Qt6 is on the horizon? Also they changed the license of some Qt modules just 2 months ago: https://www.qt.io/blog/change-in-open-source-licensing-of-qt-wayland-compositor-qt-application-manager-and-qt-pdf https://www.qt.io/blog/change-in-open-source-licensing-of-qt...
- shmerl 7y agoIt would be good for KDE to get stronger backing, but I've heard RedHat avoids backing KDE and focuses on Gnome, due to aversion¹ to contributor agreements², is that correct in that case? 1. https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems 2. https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt
- ognarb 7y agoAt KDE, we don't require signing CLA to contribute, this is a requirement in our manifesto[1]. But contributor can assign their right to the KDE e.V. if they want using a Fiduciary Licensing Agreement[2]. [1]: https://manifesto.kde.org/commitments.html https://manifesto.kde.org/commitments.html [2]: https://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php https://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php
- shmerl 7y agoKDE itself no, but Qt requires one (second link above)? Ironically, RedHat themselves sometimes make an exception, like the first link mentions: > We reluctantly sign tolerable upstream project CLAs out of practical necessity.
- pjmlp 7y agoIt all goes back to the early days of Gtk vs KDE, when Qt still had non-GPL compatible license. Red-Hat is the biggest employer of Gtk/GNOME devs, so... SuSE and Mandrake were historical the biggest ones that cared about KDE.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago> In case The Qt Company would ever attempt to close down Open Source Qt, the foundation is entitled to publish Qt under the BSD license. This notable legal guarantee strengthens Qt. It creates trust among developers, contributors and customers. Woah, I had no idea about this. I wonder what kind of new changes would take place if Qt were BSD licensed, such as languages like D embedding it as a solution for UIs as part of the standard library (they already do this for SQLite and Curl).
- 7thaccount 7y agoI didn't think D had SQLite in stdlib. When I googled for it recently I just found some single contributor package and assumed it wasn't super well maintained.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoThat might be why honestly. https://dlang.org/phobos/etc_c_sqlite3.html https://dlang.org/phobos/etc_c_sqlite3.html For anybody's reference, it also has zlib, and an ODBC library.
- 7thaccount 7y agoIs there a page on how to use it? Thanks for the link!
- giancarlostoro 7y agoUnfortunately I do not have any handy resources. I would look at some of the SQLite implementations you saw to confirm if they are just using the builtin SQLite. This seems to be mapping to SQLite code itsef instead of a more higher level driver. Edit: Did find this topic on the D forums: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/sqrkjhzafvrycgdrzlxq@forum.dlang.org https://forum.dlang.org/thread/sqrkjhzafvrycgdrzlxq@forum.dl...
- 7thaccount 7y ago
- positronium 7y agoA better Qt already exists. It's called Electron.
- neilsimp1 7y agoI'll bite. Define "better" here.
- cosmic_quanta 7y agoI also would like to know how "better" is defined. Is it developer ergonomics? That's the only thing I can think of, and even then that's debatable.
- jchw 7y agoI think “better” here might be defined by `du -s .` inside the application directory. :)
- laxd 7y agoNot a fan of electron at all. But I think it points out the direction for the future of gui. There's a whole generation of new languages (rust, go, dart, D, ...) that wants to get into the gui-space and finding QT and GTK problematic. QT is known for "using every C++ feature", making it less than ideal for bindings. GTK is not very cross platform I think, and is criticized for beeing gnome-centric. Both toolkits are object-oriented, making them a poor fit for any language that is not. Something like mozilla's webrender could be used in a more language agnostic way (declerative, reactive), while having the support required for the gargantuan task of a graphics/toolkit backend.
- blargmaster33 7y agoWe where using QT and then they started send aggressive license compliance e-mails. We are no longer using QT.
- toyg 7y agoTrolltech were pretty awesome, in their days. The “poison-pill BSD” setup is pretty smart; if i remember correctly , it was introduced when they started wobbling a bit from the commercial perspective, in order to keep the community calm while they went looking for buyers (which they eventually found in Nokia). It would be sad if the switch had to be triggered at a time when QT is supposed to be “back in the game” after years of uncertainty. Dear Qt owners, don’t mess around. If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license. Build more bridges, and more developers will come to you.
- Nokinside 7y ago>If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license. QT stock is up 124% this year, +247,06% last 3 years. Qt has de facto monopoly in embedded, medical, automotive, appliance and industry automation. It works in Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, QNX, and VxWorks. Qt just launched Qt for MCUs (bare metal toolkit for low end microcontrollers). It runs on Cortex-M with several different 2D accelerators. It's yet another market with no serious competitors.
- toyg 7y agoThat’s good, so why change the license now? Is it just greed?
- Nokinside 7y agoNobody knows what type of change they want. Their paying customers don't care because the product is double licensed. I suspect it has something to do with some 3d libraries and code they would like to include, but I don't know.
- pjmlp 7y agoThey tried and learned that most FOSS don't want to pay for their tools, so they turned their focus to those that actually care to pay and have been doing quite alright.
- 7y ago
- BlueTemplar 7y agoAm I the only one that finds it weird that a document like this, that basically shouldn't care about layout, and is very unlikely to be printed by anyone (except maybe the author himself), would be distributed as a .pdf?
- cjensen 7y agoThe 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. Second and more importantly, they have started sending aggressive audit letters to customers. I guess that makes sense from a bean-counter point of view where you poke the customer and try to get them to buy more licenses either because the customer actually needs the licenses, or because the customer is afraid to let any dev work without paying protection money. This is a huge pain in the neck for me as a paying customer. They even sent the aggressive audit letter to an old license we have that had not been renewed (or used) in around a decade. I'll definitely be rethinking my relationship as a customer when the next renewal comes up.
- mroche 7y ago> commercial software I think (could be wrong) you meant to imply closed-source, as one can have commercial open-source software. I’m not a huge fan of them using GPL for their newer modules, either, like charts. It seemed a bit unnecessary other than driving those who don’t like/can’t use the GPL license into a dev subscription.
- pjmlp 7y agoWhich is quite fair, they have to live from something.
- Rochus 7y agoLGPL was decided by Nokia who bought the IP from Trolltech for ~150 Mio $ and also came up for the development costs up to Qt 5.1. Digia and The Qt Company "bought" the IP for about 5 Mio $ from Nokia and now earn money with commercial licenses of a library where the most important development steps were already done before. According to the commit logs the contribution rate of Nokia was at ~80%, wheras the Qt Company is rather at ~40% and with focus on stuff they can sell. I regularly meet people who bought a licence to use the Qt framework not realizing that they could use it under LGPL. I know the wording of the commercial license. It places the licensee clearly worse than with the LGPL variant. Personally, I find the business practices of this company, which have been observed for some time, rather questionable.I had a commercial license with Trolltech, which cost me a lot of money. As soon as LGPL was available, I cancelled the contracts and avoided projects that could not be done with LGPL rather than signing such a single-edge contract with this company.
- dev-il 7y agoSadly, 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 traded as QT-COM on Nasdaq Helsinki) sees Qt as a direct revenue source to monetize to the maximum and developers as milk cows to maximally squeeze out as long as possible. And unlike Nokia, Digia's "Qt Company" does so in a quite unsustainable way. They enormously increased the prices of commercial licenses to a level that can only be qualified as extortion, and they do whatever possible to force developers out of LGPL and into Pay-to-Play: they switched Qt's open source edition from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3… and they switched from LGPL to GPL or commercial only for most new modules, including QtQuick 3D. The bottom line is: it's really going down the drain, and lots of developers of Qt-based programs and apps are drawn away and looking for something new. The need for a new modern and more liberally licensed cross-platform UI lib is bigger than ever. Also, many devs are even switching out of Qt-based cross-platform development and back to separate codebases for OS-dependent native UI toolkits… which is kinda sad, though partly alleviated by some other factors (such as the similarities between Swift and Kotlin)
- pjmlp 7y agoFOSS 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.