11 ms·

Qt and Open Source

115 points by alaenix 7y ago

lentil_soup 7y ago
I really like Qt for desktop development, use it everyday, but this post makes me feel uneasy. What "discussions on various internet forums" do they mean? there's been plenty. And, which ones "do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company"? Why such a rushed defensive blog post?
- zokier 7y ago
  It's direct response to https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h... In particular > Unfortunately, The Qt Company is currently considering to stop this healthy cooperation
- eqtn 7y ago
  "discussions on various internet forums" here probably means the KDE forums/mailing list. From the mailing list "During the past two years, there have been negotiations between The Qt Company and the KDE Free Qt Foundation for updating the contract.". More info: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h... There are talks in the mailing list about forking QT but KDE doesn't seems to want that currently due to lack of developers for maintaining a fork
- Nokinside 7y ago
  Qt Company can't wiggle out from the contract it has with KDE. It must release Qt as open source withing 12 months. Qt stays open source. The negotiations and uncertainty are related to all extra cooperation above that.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    12 months is fairly close to an eternity in software, though; that's a pretty big catch
    - pfranz 7y ago
      Yeah. I can't imagine KDE using Qt if there's a 12 month turnaround (and they don't have final word of what goes into a release). I would think they'd have to fork and hopefully merge on release.
leoedin 7y ago
Does anyone have context for what these discussions are? That's a pretty terse message for those of us not in the loop... Edit: This article gives a bit more context. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Open-Source-Statement https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Open-...
- Arnt 7y ago
  There's a crisis at the moment, more general, and the crisis has caused catastrophic loss of income at many companies. Some people say that qt.io is one of the companies in trouble, and that it's reacting by releasing new versions of qt to customers first, and to opensource users a year later. I've no idea how much income qt.io actually has lost.
  - Rochus 7y ago
    They lost long before Corona because the business model doesn't work.
    - slavik81 7y ago
      What makes you say that? They're still not making much of a profit, but their revenue has doubled since 2015. https://mb.cision.com/Public/14183/3035372/be360a13ae94ae9d.pdf https://mb.cision.com/Public/14183/3035372/be360a13ae94ae9d....
      - Rochus 7y ago
        Revenue of what?
        slavik81 7y ago
        The Qt Company (QTCOM). They're publicly traded, so they have to publish yearly financial statements. Their employee count has also doubled, which is why they're not making any profits despite the revenue growth. Edit: Ah, you're pointing out that only 25% of their revenue is commercial licenses, while most of their revenue is consulting. I don't know if that's really such a big deal.
dmytroi 7y ago
While the core product is LGPLv3+Commercial, most of their extensions are GPLv3+Commercial which makes them not suitable for a lot of apps. Hence I find it's a bit confusing to say "to be committed to open source" where in practice the only way to use their extension is either to release your apps code (given you distribute the app) or pay for commercial license. IMHO "to be committed to free software" would represent extensions situation a bit better.
- Rochus 7y ago
  I think most developers get along pretty well with only the parts available under LGPL; that's not the issue. It's more of an issue that the The Company only represents a fraction of the commit log but even though sells commercial licences of work done by other companies. I'm sure more companies would contribute to Qt if there wasn't this dual licence nuisance and they weren't forec to sign a contributor licence agreement which puts The Company in charge of their work.
  - slavik81 7y ago
    Commits by employer, for reference: https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/qt5.employer.relative.png https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/qt5.employer.r...
    - Rochus 7y ago
      Ok, a bit more than last year. One should also analyze what parts were commited. There is a significant difference in the commits by company to the core framework and the new 3D tools and other parts that The Company wants to make money with.
      - slavik81 7y ago
        The stats for qtbase are pretty similar. I suppose I might as well link the full page for folks: https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/ https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/
davidhyde 7y ago
A lot of developers are experimenting with languages and libraries outside their normal work requirements given the current uncertainties of the future. If you are considering learning QT and come across this bad PR you will most likely avoid the technology altogether. I was looking for a popular GUI framework to build front ends for my rust apps all the controversy around QT made me double my efforts to find a native alternative. I’m still experimenting but I know for sure that I won’t be using QT now. Same thing happened with Oracle and Java, they lost a lot of potential new developers with their hardline approach to open source.
- anoncake 7y ago
  What are you experimenting with? If there is any cross-platform GUI framework that comes close to Qt, I'd love to know.
  - billfruit 7y ago
    JavaFX for example. Its documentation is not up to the mark, but otherwise it is almost fully offers all gui functionality provided by QT.
  - smnthermes 7y ago
    UXP? https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP
techblogcorner 7y ago
Good one.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
It's interesting, I had no idea this is still an issue. For the record, this is the reason a couple of folks started Gnome and GTK over 20 years ago.
- simion314 7y ago
  No, at that time Qt was not free software. Now Qt is free software and you can fork it and do whatever you want. The issue seems to be that there are many people that use Qt for free including companies but they won't pay with money or contributions, so if a work will happen except KDE there will be few contributors. Qt includes a version of Webkit that is used in some application, so you need someone to keep on top of webkit security issues and backport the fixes.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    > many people that use Qt for free including companies but they won't pay with money or contributions That is one of the things that free software allows, yeah. > so if a work will happen except KDE there will be few contributors Even if that's true, is KDE not enough? > Qt includes a version of Webkit that is used in some application, so you need someone to keep on top of webkit security issues and backport the fixes. I assumed that the QT end of that was a thin wrapper around upstream webkit; is it really that involved?
mmargerum 7y ago
I really want to use Qt for a project but between the absurd commercial cost and them playing games with licensing i'm going with either wxWidgets or Lazarus.
- brnt 7y ago
  Does anyone here use Copperspice? Saw it mentioned elsewhere as a possible alternative. Theyre a kind of fork of Qt5, ditched the moc, and seem to be ran as a regular Floss project. I have no experience with it, but I do with Qt, which I like very much, so if there are users of Copperspice here I'd be very interested in your experience.
  - de_watcher 7y ago
    Copperspice is just a purity zealot project specifically against the moc, it's not a healthy goal. The focus should be on the GUI.
  - plorkyeran 7y ago
    Copperspice was interesting as a technical experiment to see if improvements to C++ have made the moc no longer needed. The basic problem with using it to actually write applications is that the development effort on it isn't put into things which make your application better. Modernizing and cleaning up the Qt codebase is great for the people working on Qt (or Cs), but most of the changes aren't actually valuable for users of it.
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    A much less invasive solution to the problem: https://github.com/woboq/verdigris https://github.com/woboq/verdigris
- mkl 7y ago
  If wxWidgets and Lazarus are options, why isn't using Qt under LGPL an option?
  - mmargerum 6y ago
j1elo 7y ago
I'd love to know more about opinions of fellow commenters, just a "what-if" question: If tomorrow you had some big project such as Qt in your hands, and had 100% freedom to choose how to proceed with it (in matters such as what license to apply, what sustainability model to seek, etc.) what would you do? I always feel that pure GPL is the best but only idealistic way to go, because working for free is not compatible with paying your bills. Then LGPL, and maybe other licenses such as Apache, are nice but at the end of the day allow that private companies with private pockets benefit from the project without helping it at all (either with work or with cash), which I know is one side of the "freedom" that those open-source licenses bring, but it's one side that I personally don't really like (I'm more of a pragmatist than an idealist). For that reason I feel like dual GPL+Commercial might be the best of both worlds. It would allow basing a company around it, and paying other devs to feed their families, and at the same time users of the GPL variant would themselves be benefiting from and contributing to open-source.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
  If your only goal is to pay devs fairly and do the best for the project, the best way for a library is MIT (for an app, GPL) and having a Foundation that companies support with money and development efforts. Examples: Linux, Blender. If you want to make actual profits, then it is the same license choice but with a company that sells valuable long-term support, development and perhaps proprietary extra features. Examples: RedHat, Canonical, GitLab.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Assuming the project is a library or a tool that people will need to somehow embed in their program I wouldn't go with GPL. It has some restrictions that are for various reasons hard to accept for a large amount of clients. People try arguing that "you could do this or that to accommodate" but the fact is that many for-profit corporations, even those working with open projects, will have a no-GPL policy. Also with the current trend for web services and what not GPL can be worked around, hence the AGPL. I'd probably go with LGPL and commercial plugins that enhance the functionality. But this depends on the product having some features that could be mainly useful for companies but not really for individuals.
Deganta 7y ago
I think Qt needs to rethink their licensing model. Currently you either pay them a LOT of money for everything they offer, or you don't pay them anything and just use the LGPL version (when that's possible). It seems their current strategy is to milk the users that can't use the LGPL users as much as possible, Additionally they try to convince as many people as possible that the LGPL version won't work for them, by having very confusing licensing terms on their website. My company currently uses the LGPL version of Qt, and would gladly pay for the commercial one. In the Trolltech and Nokia days they actually did pay for it, but the prices are no longer affordable us. So we are stuck with the LGPL version for now. We don't need a trillion supported platforms and tons of features. We have a Desktop App that runs on Windows (and in the future maybe Linux), and we use the old Widget stuff (currently no QML). We would gladly pay for the features we need, but not the ridicolous amound they are charging now.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  What’s wrong with the LGPL? If you dynamically link them, then you don’t need to open source your product. It’s only a problem if you want to statically link.
  - Deganta 7y ago
    Nothing is wrong with the LPGL version for us. Static linking would be nice sometimes, but really necessary. My point is that my company would be willing to pay for Qt (and it did pay in the past), but not that much. In the current situation they don't get any money from us at all.
    - de_watcher 7y ago
      You can link statically. Oh my god, we've been over this infinite number of times.
      - Deganta 7y ago
        Yes you can, but if you do that you have to release the Object files and make it possible for the customers to link them to their own Qt version. This is a much greater hassle than just linking dynamically, so we don't do it.
tkuraku 7y ago
I think Qt is an amazing product. I would use it for all desktop development if I could. The commercial license is a bit expensive to justify. I think they could do a lot better if the costs were more inline with a Visual Studio license. Right now it is hard to justify it over Visual Studio when I can buy a perpetual license or a yearly subscription for a reasonable amount of money.
- billconan 7y ago
  I think unreal engine’s pricing model is more suitable for me as an individual developer.
scalatronn 6y ago
Looking forward for kde moving to gtk ;) Would probably be good for gtk development

115 points by alaenix 7y ago

I really like Qt for desktop development, use it everyday, but this post makes me feel uneasy. What "discussions on various internet forums" do they mean? there's been plenty. And, which ones "do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company"? Why such a rushed defensive blog post?

zokier 7y ago
It's direct response to https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h... In particular > Unfortunately, The Qt Company is currently considering to stop this healthy cooperation
eqtn 7y ago
"discussions on various internet forums" here probably means the KDE forums/mailing list. From the mailing list "During the past two years, there have been negotiations between The Qt Company and the KDE Free Qt Foundation for updating the contract.". More info: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h... There are talks in the mailing list about forking QT but KDE doesn't seems to want that currently due to lack of developers for maintaining a fork
Nokinside 7y ago
Qt Company can't wiggle out from the contract it has with KDE. It must release Qt as open source withing 12 months. Qt stays open source. The negotiations and uncertainty are related to all extra cooperation above that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  12 months is fairly close to an eternity in software, though; that's a pretty big catch
  - pfranz 7y ago
    Yeah. I can't imagine KDE using Qt if there's a 12 month turnaround (and they don't have final word of what goes into a release). I would think they'd have to fork and hopefully merge on release.

leoedin 7y ago

Does anyone have context for what these discussions are? That's a pretty terse message for those of us not in the loop... Edit: This article gives a bit more context. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Open-Source-Statement https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Open-...

Arnt 7y ago
There's a crisis at the moment, more general, and the crisis has caused catastrophic loss of income at many companies. Some people say that qt.io is one of the companies in trouble, and that it's reacting by releasing new versions of qt to customers first, and to opensource users a year later. I've no idea how much income qt.io actually has lost.
- Rochus 7y ago
  They lost long before Corona because the business model doesn't work.
  - slavik81 7y ago
    What makes you say that? They're still not making much of a profit, but their revenue has doubled since 2015. https://mb.cision.com/Public/14183/3035372/be360a13ae94ae9d.pdf https://mb.cision.com/Public/14183/3035372/be360a13ae94ae9d....
    - Rochus 7y ago
      Revenue of what?
      - slavik81 7y ago
        The Qt Company (QTCOM). They're publicly traded, so they have to publish yearly financial statements. Their employee count has also doubled, which is why they're not making any profits despite the revenue growth. Edit: Ah, you're pointing out that only 25% of their revenue is commercial licenses, while most of their revenue is consulting. I don't know if that's really such a big deal.

dmytroi 7y ago

While the core product is LGPLv3+Commercial, most of their extensions are GPLv3+Commercial which makes them not suitable for a lot of apps. Hence I find it's a bit confusing to say "to be committed to open source" where in practice the only way to use their extension is either to release your apps code (given you distribute the app) or pay for commercial license. IMHO "to be committed to free software" would represent extensions situation a bit better.

Rochus 7y ago
I think most developers get along pretty well with only the parts available under LGPL; that's not the issue. It's more of an issue that the The Company only represents a fraction of the commit log but even though sells commercial licences of work done by other companies. I'm sure more companies would contribute to Qt if there wasn't this dual licence nuisance and they weren't forec to sign a contributor licence agreement which puts The Company in charge of their work.
- slavik81 7y ago
  Commits by employer, for reference: https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/qt5.employer.relative.png https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/qt5.employer.r...
  - Rochus 7y ago
    Ok, a bit more than last year. One should also analyze what parts were commited. There is a significant difference in the commits by company to the core framework and the new 3D tools and other parts that The Company wants to make money with.
    - slavik81 7y ago
      The stats for qtbase are pretty similar. I suppose I might as well link the full page for folks: https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/ https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/

davidhyde 7y ago

A lot of developers are experimenting with languages and libraries outside their normal work requirements given the current uncertainties of the future. If you are considering learning QT and come across this bad PR you will most likely avoid the technology altogether. I was looking for a popular GUI framework to build front ends for my rust apps all the controversy around QT made me double my efforts to find a native alternative. I’m still experimenting but I know for sure that I won’t be using QT now. Same thing happened with Oracle and Java, they lost a lot of potential new developers with their hardline approach to open source.

anoncake 7y ago
What are you experimenting with? If there is any cross-platform GUI framework that comes close to Qt, I'd love to know.
- billfruit 7y ago
  JavaFX for example. Its documentation is not up to the mark, but otherwise it is almost fully offers all gui functionality provided by QT.
- smnthermes 7y ago
  UXP? https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP

techblogcorner 7y ago

Good one.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

It's interesting, I had no idea this is still an issue. For the record, this is the reason a couple of folks started Gnome and GTK over 20 years ago.

simion314 7y ago
No, at that time Qt was not free software. Now Qt is free software and you can fork it and do whatever you want. The issue seems to be that there are many people that use Qt for free including companies but they won't pay with money or contributions, so if a work will happen except KDE there will be few contributors. Qt includes a version of Webkit that is used in some application, so you need someone to keep on top of webkit security issues and backport the fixes.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > many people that use Qt for free including companies but they won't pay with money or contributions That is one of the things that free software allows, yeah. > so if a work will happen except KDE there will be few contributors Even if that's true, is KDE not enough? > Qt includes a version of Webkit that is used in some application, so you need someone to keep on top of webkit security issues and backport the fixes. I assumed that the QT end of that was a thin wrapper around upstream webkit; is it really that involved?

mmargerum 7y ago

I really want to use Qt for a project but between the absurd commercial cost and them playing games with licensing i'm going with either wxWidgets or Lazarus.

brnt 7y ago
Does anyone here use Copperspice? Saw it mentioned elsewhere as a possible alternative. Theyre a kind of fork of Qt5, ditched the moc, and seem to be ran as a regular Floss project. I have no experience with it, but I do with Qt, which I like very much, so if there are users of Copperspice here I'd be very interested in your experience.
- de_watcher 7y ago
  Copperspice is just a purity zealot project specifically against the moc, it's not a healthy goal. The focus should be on the GUI.
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  Copperspice was interesting as a technical experiment to see if improvements to C++ have made the moc no longer needed. The basic problem with using it to actually write applications is that the development effort on it isn't put into things which make your application better. Modernizing and cleaning up the Qt codebase is great for the people working on Qt (or Cs), but most of the changes aren't actually valuable for users of it.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  A much less invasive solution to the problem: https://github.com/woboq/verdigris https://github.com/woboq/verdigris
mkl 7y ago
If wxWidgets and Lazarus are options, why isn't using Qt under LGPL an option?
- mmargerum 6y ago

j1elo 7y ago

I'd love to know more about opinions of fellow commenters, just a "what-if" question: If tomorrow you had some big project such as Qt in your hands, and had 100% freedom to choose how to proceed with it (in matters such as what license to apply, what sustainability model to seek, etc.) what would you do? I always feel that pure GPL is the best but only idealistic way to go, because working for free is not compatible with paying your bills. Then LGPL, and maybe other licenses such as Apache, are nice but at the end of the day allow that private companies with private pockets benefit from the project without helping it at all (either with work or with cash), which I know is one side of the "freedom" that those open-source licenses bring, but it's one side that I personally don't really like (I'm more of a pragmatist than an idealist). For that reason I feel like dual GPL+Commercial might be the best of both worlds. It would allow basing a company around it, and paying other devs to feed their families, and at the same time users of the GPL variant would themselves be benefiting from and contributing to open-source.

jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
If your only goal is to pay devs fairly and do the best for the project, the best way for a library is MIT (for an app, GPL) and having a Foundation that companies support with money and development efforts. Examples: Linux, Blender. If you want to make actual profits, then it is the same license choice but with a company that sells valuable long-term support, development and perhaps proprietary extra features. Examples: RedHat, Canonical, GitLab.
yoz-y 7y ago
Assuming the project is a library or a tool that people will need to somehow embed in their program I wouldn't go with GPL. It has some restrictions that are for various reasons hard to accept for a large amount of clients. People try arguing that "you could do this or that to accommodate" but the fact is that many for-profit corporations, even those working with open projects, will have a no-GPL policy. Also with the current trend for web services and what not GPL can be worked around, hence the AGPL. I'd probably go with LGPL and commercial plugins that enhance the functionality. But this depends on the product having some features that could be mainly useful for companies but not really for individuals.

Deganta 7y ago

I think Qt needs to rethink their licensing model. Currently you either pay them a LOT of money for everything they offer, or you don't pay them anything and just use the LGPL version (when that's possible). It seems their current strategy is to milk the users that can't use the LGPL users as much as possible, Additionally they try to convince as many people as possible that the LGPL version won't work for them, by having very confusing licensing terms on their website. My company currently uses the LGPL version of Qt, and would gladly pay for the commercial one. In the Trolltech and Nokia days they actually did pay for it, but the prices are no longer affordable us. So we are stuck with the LGPL version for now. We don't need a trillion supported platforms and tons of features. We have a Desktop App that runs on Windows (and in the future maybe Linux), and we use the old Widget stuff (currently no QML). We would gladly pay for the features we need, but not the ridicolous amound they are charging now.

colejohnson66 7y ago
What’s wrong with the LGPL? If you dynamically link them, then you don’t need to open source your product. It’s only a problem if you want to statically link.
- Deganta 7y ago
  Nothing is wrong with the LPGL version for us. Static linking would be nice sometimes, but really necessary. My point is that my company would be willing to pay for Qt (and it did pay in the past), but not that much. In the current situation they don't get any money from us at all.
  - de_watcher 7y ago
    You can link statically. Oh my god, we've been over this infinite number of times.
    - Deganta 7y ago
      Yes you can, but if you do that you have to release the Object files and make it possible for the customers to link them to their own Qt version. This is a much greater hassle than just linking dynamically, so we don't do it.

tkuraku 7y ago

I think Qt is an amazing product. I would use it for all desktop development if I could. The commercial license is a bit expensive to justify. I think they could do a lot better if the costs were more inline with a Visual Studio license. Right now it is hard to justify it over Visual Studio when I can buy a perpetual license or a yearly subscription for a reasonable amount of money.

billconan 7y ago
I think unreal engine’s pricing model is more suitable for me as an individual developer.

scalatronn 6y ago

Looking forward for kde moving to gtk ;) Would probably be good for gtk development