6 ms·

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 (LG

by dev-il 7y ago

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 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 ago
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.
- Rochus 7y ago
  Working for the Company?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    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.
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
Agreed. We looked at Qt, but the cost for the commercial version was a bad joke. And this is at a publicly-traded company with money. The state of cross-platform development is truly and astonishingly pathetic in this day and age.
Nokinside 7y ago
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 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.
- dev-il 7y ago
  > 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 remaining a small minority… doesn't say anything about the proportion of still Qt using developers switching away. Besides, the sustainability of a temporary increase of that minority is highly questionable. Of course QTCOM's pressure towards Pay-to-Play temporarily forces some of those who are still tied by all of their still-Qt-based code to buy Qt licenses as long as they haven't finished switching to a better alternative… but on the long term most of them quit too. Precisely because of that. We'll see how that strategy of maximal monetization and maximally squeezing developers works out for QTCOM in the long term
  - Rochus 7y ago
    I hope the BSD case happens soon before these people scare all the developers away.
  - Nokinside 7y ago
    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.
Rochus 7y ago
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 Digia for a piece of bread (about 4 Mio Euros). The contribution rate of Nokia was ~80% according to commit logs; the contribution rate of The Qt Company is at ~40% - and it's mostly on stuff important to them (i.e. which they can sell). So at least 50% are open source contributions by others. This information is all publicly available; you can read it yourself. So the Qt Company massively profited from this and should stop complaining and turning crooked things. And they have to stop their u-boats, which act anonymously and make opinion.
- Kelteseth 7y ago
  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
  - Rochus 7y ago
    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.
    - Kelteseth 7y ago
      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.
de_watcher 7y ago
Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL? Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.
- Kelteseth 7y ago
  No QtQuick3d [1] was from the beginning GPLv3 only (It is not even released yet, but Qt 5.14 release is tommorow). It is a bit awkward because now there are competing 3d engines inside one toolkit. [1] https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html
- dev-il 7y ago
  What I did write was that they switched their licensing default for most new modules from LGPL to GPL. So unlike Qt Quick (the original 2D Qt Quick) which was started under Nokia and licensed LGPL (or commercial)… the new Qt Quick 3D (*) was never licensed under LGPL but is licensed only under GPLv3 (or commercial). https://github.com/qt/qtquick3d https://github.com/qt/qtquick3d
elproxy 7y ago
Arguably, licensing revenue was a drop in the bucket for Nokia and they had a lot more to lose with the liability that came from commercial customers. It was a hard move to (at least partially) undo for the Qt Company.

by dev-il 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

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.

Rochus 7y ago
Working for the Company?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  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.

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago

Agreed. We looked at Qt, but the cost for the commercial version was a bad joke. And this is at a publicly-traded company with money. The state of cross-platform development is truly and astonishingly pathetic in this day and age.

Nokinside 7y ago

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 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.

dev-il 7y ago
> 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 remaining a small minority… doesn't say anything about the proportion of still Qt using developers switching away. Besides, the sustainability of a temporary increase of that minority is highly questionable. Of course QTCOM's pressure towards Pay-to-Play temporarily forces some of those who are still tied by all of their still-Qt-based code to buy Qt licenses as long as they haven't finished switching to a better alternative… but on the long term most of them quit too. Precisely because of that. We'll see how that strategy of maximal monetization and maximally squeezing developers works out for QTCOM in the long term
- Rochus 7y ago
  I hope the BSD case happens soon before these people scare all the developers away.
- Nokinside 7y ago
  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.

Rochus 7y ago

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 Digia for a piece of bread (about 4 Mio Euros). The contribution rate of Nokia was ~80% according to commit logs; the contribution rate of The Qt Company is at ~40% - and it's mostly on stuff important to them (i.e. which they can sell). So at least 50% are open source contributions by others. This information is all publicly available; you can read it yourself. So the Qt Company massively profited from this and should stop complaining and turning crooked things. And they have to stop their u-boats, which act anonymously and make opinion.

Kelteseth 7y ago
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
- Rochus 7y ago
  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.
  - Kelteseth 7y ago
    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.

de_watcher 7y ago

Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL? Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.

Kelteseth 7y ago
No QtQuick3d [1] was from the beginning GPLv3 only (It is not even released yet, but Qt 5.14 release is tommorow). It is a bit awkward because now there are competing 3d engines inside one toolkit. [1] https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html
dev-il 7y ago
What I did write was that they switched their licensing default for most new modules from LGPL to GPL. So unlike Qt Quick (the original 2D Qt Quick) which was started under Nokia and licensed LGPL (or commercial)… the new Qt Quick 3D (*) was never licensed under LGPL but is licensed only under GPLv3 (or commercial). https://github.com/qt/qtquick3d https://github.com/qt/qtquick3d

elproxy 7y ago

Arguably, licensing revenue was a drop in the bucket for Nokia and they had a lot more to lose with the liability that came from commercial customers. It was a hard move to (at least partially) undo for the Qt Company.