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It's sad, but not unexpected, to see Qt in trouble. Qt is an amazing development environment, and I was getting rather psyched for the prospect of being able t
by elehack 16y ago
It's sad, but not unexpected, to see Qt in trouble. Qt is an amazing development environment, and I was getting rather psyched for the prospect of being able to use it to develop for phones, tablets, netbooks, and the desktop. I only hope that if Nokia is done with it, they spin it off or drop it completely (thus activating the FreeQt agreement) rather than defunding it so they maintain control but starve it to death.
However, spinning it off (as some are suggesting in the comment thread) has major difficulties. In particular, since buying Trolltech, Nokia has LGPLed Qt. That seems to me to drastically change the situation for prospective commercial licensing, as companies can ship commercial, proprietary products with Qt without paying licensing fees. How would Trolltech 2.0 make money? Sure, there would be a number of companies that still pay the commercial licensing fee, particularly for embedded systems or for support, but would there be enough to continue funding Qt development?
- mpyne 16y ago> However, spinning it off (as some are suggesting in the comment thread) has major difficulties. In particular, since buying Trolltech, Nokia has LGPLed Qt. That seems to me to drastically change the situation for prospective commercial licensing, as companies can ship commercial, proprietary products with Qt without paying licensing fees. How would Trolltech 2.0 make money? The business model would have to be different, that much is true. But where does the funding come from now for GTK+ for instance? Or the Linux kernel? There are enough Qt-using companies out there that maintaining and improving Qt should not be an issue if it is divested from Nokia. The concern would be making sure there is a neutral platform for the companies that contribute.