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Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Free Software in Jeopardy
- bzb3 6y agoThis was already resolved favourably by both parts. This article is from April.
- pdimitar 6y agoHow was it resolved, sorry?
- lerax 6y agoKDE will migrate to GTK. [joke]
- azinman2 6y agoLink?
- toyg 6y agoIt's obviously a joke. I've not heard anything after the rumbles in April, but nothing seems to have changed, according to the website, so the 2015 agreement continues to be valid, afaik.
- azinman2 6y agoOk. I wasn’t sure. It seemed preposterous but then again if they needed to get away from QT...
- jcelerier 6y agothere'll always be this : https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
- adrianN 6y agoHow much of the development work is done by Qt the company compared to the KDE developers? Is a fork feasible?
- brobdingnagians 6y agoThere are already a few forks from the past like CopperSpice, I think there is probably quite a good chance of a fork occuring if a major move happened.
- pjmlp 6y agoAll of them eventually die, because working for free on something like Qt never matches on feature parity, deployment targets or support levels Qt customers are used to.
- toyg 6y agoI don't think it's really feasible to have a full fork. KDE people would probably be able to maintain the current features indefinitely, but probably not to undertake any big wave of innovation like Qt periodically has (the new 3d layer, QtQuick/QML, Qt4, etc).
- smnthermes 6y agoLet's not be defeatists. If KDE forks Qt, certainly more contributors will join during the process.
- Karliss 6y agoSomeone posted this https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/ https://macieira.org/~thiago/qt-stats/current/ in one of previous discussions. Commits from extrnal contributors are between 15-40% .
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> while commercial developers of immoral proprietary software have been required to license the toolkit under a commercial license. I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Now, because the data is not on your machine, you don’t own the data. Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days.
- cjfd 6y agoI would find it a bit hard to argue that the nature of free software has anything to do with this. Why couldn't all of this surveillance and the selling of user data have been based on proprietary software? You could maybe say it would be too expensive but really.... I am sure that if you want a billion licenses of something you could get a volume discount or otherwise write the necessary proprietary software yourself or buy from the least expensive party and so on.... Have we forgotten the economic principle that in an efficient market the price of a good approaches the marginal cost of producing one more instance of that good. The proprietary market may be a bit less efficient but as long as there are multiple parties who can offer the good the principle should work to a certain extent.
- bad_user 6y agoWhile I agree that proprietary software isn't necessarily immoral, I take objection with your premise. The software used for collecting and selling user data is proprietary, all of it. This is because: 1. if it were developed as open source, in the open, people could inspect what it does 2. profiling user data is most often a company's core competency, the trade secret that they won't give away If not, then please point out to free software packages I can use to collect and profile user data, because I have a business idea I'd like to try and no resources for software development. Oh, do you mean those companies run their proprietary stuff on top of Linux? Well, if not Linux, it would have been Solaris, or Windows. The higher cost wouldn't have been much of a deterrence, in capitalism due to competition the cost does eventually come down.
- speedgoose 6y agoWhat is going on with the pictures of girls in this linuxreviews.org website ?
- toyg 6y agoI think they are pictures of Wei Lin herself. I'd never seen this site before, not sure why it's suddenly making HN front page for rehashing a story from April.
- tomcam 6y agowho is Wei Lin herself? It’s a common name.
- cma 6y agoAuthor of the article (assuming he spelled it wrong)
- EdwardDiego 6y agoWai Lin (the biography and pictures) is a character from a Bond film - played by Michelle Yeoh, whose cover story was as a reporter for New China News Agency.
- toyg 6y agoAre you saying the whole thing is pseudonymous trollbait? Talk about the dangers of a “good” domain name...
- ratww 6y agoThe avatar is cropped from this image of the K-Pop band AOA: https://imgur.com/r/AceOfAngels8/0n1LG https://imgur.com/r/AceOfAngels8/0n1LG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOA_(group) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOA_(group)
- Lammy 6y agoI always dread these purity-spiral final stages when it suddenly becomes sexist to normalize having women in things.
- musicale 6y agoQt seems to be a self-correcting problem.
- hereisdx 6y agoIn fact,from Qt 5.15 onwards the offline installer is provided only for commercial license holders. Say goodbye to: - Installing on multiple PCs at once - Installing on PCs without internet connections. It's also possible that the online installer collects telemetry data.
- xenonite 6y agoWell, I am anyways stuck with Qt 5.11, which is the last version that runs on macOS 10.11.
- PunksATawnyFill 6y agoEXACTLY. I called them out on this bullshit the other day, and they tried to sell me a “small business” commercial license or something. FORK YOU, Qt Company!
- PostThisTooFast 6y agoSomeone from Qt modded you down. Sad sacks.
- Rochus 6y agoSo why don't we start providing Qt binary version installers ourselves? Most Linux distros already do it, so we can focus on Windows and MacOS. Maybe some subdomain of kde.org?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bsder 6y agoCome again, zoomer? My hearing is a bit poor and all I can hear is the ringing beatdown you got delivered at the ballot box. Perchance if you spent a little less snarky time on the Internet and a little more time in the real world, things might actually change for the better.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- growlist 6y agoNo great loss to me. I dislike both the technology and its licensing.
- hellozee 6y agoHow clickbaity, Qt could never go proprietary thanks to KDE Free Qt Foundation
- elcomet 6y agoThe KDE project already lacks manpower, I'm not sure they will be able to maintain a free Qt fork for long.
- langitbiru 6y agoMaybe we can have a separate foundation to maintain Qt fork. It's akin to MariaDB.
- Rochus 6y agoReferences? Have you ever heard of KDAB and other companies supporting Qt on a professional level?
- toyg 6y agoIt’s a perennial problem with all major FOSS projects and KDE is massive, it’s basically a given. At the time I followed it a bit more closely, there was clearly a churn of developers very similar to what JWZ described, with constant rewrites of entire applications because nobody had the time and inclination to maintain old ones (maintaining other people’s code is hard). Yes, the associated entities do a lot of good work, but it’s never enough - and realistically, nowhere near enough to be responsible for the entire Qt library.
- pferde 6y agoNot clickbait at all. The article explicitly discusses how Qt might go defacto proprietary _despite_ Qt Company's arrangement with KDE. "The 12 month restriction would, in principle, not make Qt proprietary software, but it might as well be proprietary from a practical point of view."
- dmoreno 6y ago> It would be very unfortunate if free software users would have to remain vulnerable for a full year before they could have access to a newer version with a fix. The last published version, even if its 12 months old, is and will be open source and free software, so it's up to the users and developers to keep it security updated. As with all free software. Is not as if Qt does not fix it nobody will. This is not closed software.
- Karliss 6y agoOpen source developers can keep working on the last published version but what happens after 12 months? Try to resolve 12 months worth of merge conflicts, hard fork and stop taking any further improvements from qt company, stop making any changes except the simplest bugfixes?
- em-bee 6y agoisn't this effectively like android now?
- Karliss 6y agoYes and it is working badly. Ecosystem is fragmented. Phone manufacturers are struggling to keep up. Phone support gets dropped quickly, code written by manufacturers for specific phones gets thrown out. Open source fork maintainers need to gather code not only from Google but also each phone manufacturer. Open source forks die. Open source fork support for running newer Android version than one provided by manufacturer is limited, only a few versions at best and only for most popular phones (because solving 12month merge conflicts is hard). That's with Android which is somewhat self-contained system and changes in external interfaces wifi protocols, mobile networks take long time and are incremental. Once a new version of windows or macOS comes out waiting 12 months is a big deal.
- baybal2 6y agoI myself would've contributed to GTK+, but... GTK is a tough project to contribute to. As many said, GTK has over the years turned from the Gimp Toolkit to a Gnome Toolkit, and with that comes all the pleasures of working with types like L.P, and other headstrong people.
- rrmm 6y agoYeah...yeah.
- baybal2 6y agoExpanding further on this, I can say that times since TOPAZ were all about GTK becoming more, and more of a RedHat toolkit, with all alienation of non-RedHat affiliated maintainers coming from that. TOPAZ was essentially a "coup" made by 3 RedHat affiliated developers. They worked completely behind closed door, and then came with fait accompli almost overnight, saying that the buggy hell of Gnome Shell, and its hello world level was the GNOME 3.0, and we will be wrapping all 2.0 development. It always come to a point where they first manage to alienate all worthy maintainers, and then complain that "nobody maintains this crap, and I now do what I want" Now, how do you go against such takeovers?
- rrmm 6y agoYup. I did extremely minor work on gtk, pygtk, and dynamic bindings, and agree with you regarding the alienation. It was especially hard with the attitudes on the mailing list. Are you involved in any toolkit stuff these days? EDIT: hahah i'm getting trashed for my "yeah...yeahh..." comment above. sorry I wasn't clear about my agreement. :D
- Lammy 6y agoNothing can really provide a "replacement" for any particular widget toolkit that will look+feel identical and support all the same widgets, but I'm a big fan of wXWidgets (nee wxWindows) for my personal projects: https://www.wxwidgets.org/ https://www.wxwidgets.org/
- mhd 6y agoSeems this will come up every few years again. I remember when I was part of the "Linux Interface Project" in the 90s, which started out as a bunch of fledgling Qt programmers trying to create some missing widgets. This was in the Qt 0.x days, where there was still a lot of "basic" functionality missing. And because of licensing issues and delusions of grandeur about proper OO design (i.e. reading Taligent papers etc.), we decided to do our own stuff. Others, including some German dude and his "Kool" desktop project were a lot more pragmatic. Still seems the better approach, or otherwise we'd all be using the Hurd.
- ryuukk_ 6y agoanother anti EU article wake up people, wake up before it's too late
- p4bl0 6y agoThe relevant thread on the KDE Community mailing list starts here, it contains a lot of information: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h... Most notably, it contains a discussion about the feasibility of a fork (and even a name is discussed). What emerges from the discussion is that the OSS community around the Qt project is quite large even outside of KDE (I remember VLC being cited, for example), and that if efforts are united, it would be feasible. The KDE project could provide the necessary infrastructure for development, including CI (which would necessitate some startup work to change framework if I understood correctly) and distribution.
- em-bee 6y agoforking qt for kde can't be that much harder than maintaining gtk for gnome. if the community is large enough, which i believe it is.
- distances 6y agoAccording to one coverage report the project sizes are 7 million lines for Qt vs. 1.2 million for GTK. If true, they are indeed much closer in size than I imagined -- I was sure it's at least one magnitude of difference in size if not even much more. https://scan.coverity.com/projects/qt-project https://scan.coverity.com/projects/qt-project https://scan.coverity.com/projects/gtk https://scan.coverity.com/projects/gtk
- xtracto 6y agoGiven the story of successful forks (MariaDB, LibreOffice) I think it can be a good option.
- mangecoeur 6y agoMaybe free software advocates should START by having a rational discussion with their partner organisations like qt to determine their intentions instead of starting an Internet dumpster fire flame war based on rumours. The qt company has said repeatedly they will support the open source community as they always have done. Maybe start by clarifying the situation with them before flying off the handle.
- PostThisTooFast 6y agoThey’ve already eliminated the offline installers and said they’re only for commercial licensees now. So this isn’t just rumors.
- dirtydroog 6y agoTo be honest, the only QT-using program I use is QT Creator.
- m4r35n357 6y agoStallman right again shocker!
- Nokinside 6y agoPeople should think as normal business, not as moral issue. There will be tensions when business interests diverge. For open source people the interest is just few platforms: PC and Android and Apple. For Qt the direction is embedded and operating systems and customers that use embedded. If no common ground is found you get only what you have agreed on contract. In this case GPLed code after 12 months. Open source people have to maintain security patches themselves. There are also companies working on KDE and Qt that can do it. Alternatively just fork the Qt (again) and go on your merry way.
- thePunisher 6y agoIMHO the Qt company is simply using the corona-crisis as an excuse to jack-up prices. They would've done so in any case at some point. The Qt company is very shortsighted since KDE has meant a lot for them in terms of legitimacy and valuable feedback. The KDE developers also made some important contributions, such as KHTML (the basis for WebKit and Chromium, used in billions of web browsers). Why don't they apply this new license only to their Embedded and mobile versions? That's where the real money is being made by Qt anyway.
- Nokinside 6y agoEstablished companies rarely fall for the "We can't pay you but you get exposure". I don't think paying customers care about KDE or open source. If you can give concrete examples showing something else, it would be interesting. The way to make money in open source is to sell service attached to software, software development as QT does it where services is small component is just not generating enough money. That's why RedHat is owned by IBM and Canonical Ltd. has revenue only 2x of Qt despite large number of users.
- thePunisher 6y agoIf Qt hadn't been taken up by KDE some other UI framework (such as wxWidgets) could've had much larger user base thereby rendering Qt much less attractive to developers and undermining their business model. I personally prefer wxWigets over Qt, but I'm a user of both.
- thePunisher 6y agoIt was foolish of KDE to use commercial product as a base for their free desktop. They should've use wxUniversal (the self drawing version of wxWidgets). Now, the only option they have left is to fork QT, which would put enormous pressure on them since it would require a lot of effort to maintain.
- syockit 6y agoHindsight is 20/20. Back when KDE was being developed, Trolltech offered free software license claiming "if you create free software; Qt is backed up by a professional organization which won't disappear tomorrow.". On the other hand, wxWindows (now wxWidgets), although having started much earlier in 1992, only had its first alpha in 1997, while KDE was already in development (starting in 1996), preparing for its first beta release. Surely that would be a good time to consider the alternative, you'd say, but why bother, since Qt also had a free license and had a whole company backing it, while wxWindows didn't. Without the foresight, who would you have placed your bet on?
- Memosyne 6y agoI think the latest public update on this is the following quote from "Welcome Meet Qt (Qt Virtual Tech Con 2020): > Yes, of course Qt will remain open-source. I don't think anybody in our company is making any claims other than that and... let's be very practical: the only way we're going to have a big ecosystem going forward is to have open-source available. And we will have patch releases available for 5.15 until Qt 6.0 comes out and after that we will focus our efforts on 6.0. Having said that of course we will do the patch releases for our commercial only branch -- for our paying customers. But rest assured there's going to be a lot of different patch releases available for open-source and you'll always have the latest available. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioons0BMSvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioons0BMSvs
- mpol 6y agoThat sounds a bit vague :) I read into it that open source users get the latest patch release, as in 5.15.3 for example. But major/minor releases are first served to commercial users, like 6.0 and 6.1.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoLXQT based Lubuntu has been perfect for a lightweight VM to me as I couldn't deal with the Tiny Core Linux's compatability issues with Virtual Box. QT is the recommended framework for app development in Ubuntu Touch and other smartphone Linux OS; Postmarketos uses KDE Plasma. All these would be in extreme trouble if Qt goes ahead with this plan.
- ekvintroj 6y agoThat post is not true, check https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-open-source https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-open-source
- kavalg 6y agoIsn't this a good time for a new UI framework (e.g. Flutter) to conquer grounds. Especially if it would be possible to automatically translate large parts of the Qt UI to Flutter?
- dalu 6y agoWell with Stallman mobbed away from FSF and Linus mobbed away with a CoC over his mouth, the way is free for stupid things to happen. Good job corps. The real question is, why is he using a wiki to post articles?