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Remember kids, every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source and more in favor of a second Yacht for the shareholders. I

Remember kids, every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source and more in favor of a second Yacht for the shareholders. I hate to recommend electron, but with the current closed direction they are going I to, better to stay away from Qt. The KDE foundation agreement is the only reason they still release Qt as open source, sadly. Qt for MCUs is completely closed for example.

MarcellusDrum 5y ago
> The KDE foundation agreement is the only reason they still release Qt as open source And the KDE foundation is the only thing putting QT on the map. They wouldn't dare break the agreement, unless they want to burn their company to the ground.
- jraph 5y ago
  I'd say KDE and this agreement are why I would still consider using an open source version of Qt for a new project today. The whole KDE ecosystem will probably always need more stuff from Qt than me and I don't see KDE disappear overnight so I feel covered. A Qt app is so much lighter, faster and more enjoyable to use than any electron app. GTK still doesn't click for me as a programmer. Alternatives don't feel as functional as those three options.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I like GTK, but the falloff in developer experience since 4.0 is really pathetic. Then there's a lot of petty changes I hate too, but that's a discussuon for another time. Word on the street is that KDE's maintainers plan to fork an older version of Qt for their desktop, but I guess only time will tell... Edit: The KDE bit is wrong, I still stand by the first portion though.
    - sho_hn 5y ago
      There's no such plan I am aware of.
- Longhanks 5y ago
  There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. On the other hand, I really doubt the open source community is responsible for a large chunk of the Qt company's income. Sure, breaking the agreement would further hurt their image in the open source community, but I doubt it would have a large impact on the company's future.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    > There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. I work for a car company using Qt. The open source community around Qt is a significant contributor to the talent pool we hire from (myself included), and it is also a regular contributor to (and indirectly/broadly, the inspiration for) integration-related Qt modules (e.g. QtWayland) we like. Its health is important.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  What puts Qt on the map are the companies keep paying their developers.
  - MarcellusDrum 5y ago
    But why would your average developer even bother learning about QT if not because of its popularity in the open source community? The companies that pay for QT will have a hard time finding talent if QT wasn't popular due to its open source nature.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      For the same reasons people actually pay for their worktools, and specific software or cloud certifications. Plus the GPL version is good enough for the said developer to learn Qt if it happens to be out of cash.
enriquto 5y ago
> every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source Where can we learn about this? As far as it seems, qt is still, as always, distributed under the LGPL; which is as "open source" as it gets. The main site of qt even lists explicitly the Four Freedoms of the FSF : https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations
- ttybird2 5y ago
  Probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451
- gmueckl 5y ago
  They can't just stop licensing the core of Qt under GPL or LGPL (I forget which) due to an old agreement between Trolltech and KDE e.V. that states (roughly) that if there are no more OSS releases of Qt for more than a year, the last public release gets automatically relicensed under something more liberal (BSD or MIT). But the Qt Company has tried to make using the open source releases more and more inconvenient: licensing terms for the commercial version that are not at all forthcoming to OSS-to-commercial converts (implying that you need to pay for commercial licenses from the start), more limited access to precompiled binaries and registration obligations when you want to use the official Qt installer. That behavior seems to say that the company is bound by an agreement that they honor only reluctantly.
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    To put that another way then: they seem to feel they have some freedom to decide which components should be covered by the KDE agreement. (To put a finer point on the specifics you mentioned: I believe they once had a policy of making the QML-to-C++ compiler available only to commercial customers, and not to FOSS users, treating it as something distinct from the 'core of Qt'. They later changed their minds on this. [0][1]) Presumably they could start work on a whole new toolkit, call it something other than Qt, and be free of the KDE agreement. This would no doubt be much more work than a typical major Qt release, but they do presumably have the option. [0] https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-in-qt https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translated-into-native-code-at-the-compilation-time-or-is-it-interpreted/23785650#comment110347258_23785650 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...
captn3m0 5y ago
We were trying to document EoL dates for Qt at endoflife.date/qt and it was made needlessly difficult by Qt patches being technically open-source via KDE patches. The whole thing felt so fragile.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrtksn 5y ago
Their business size doesn't really look THAT much Yacht-friendly though? $121M in revenue, $28M operating income with 445 employees[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company It doesn't look like they are in the take over the world then monetise business, more like make a niche product and charge for it business. Then kind of makes sense to charge enterprise level license fees and operate with enterprisey licences and not bother too much with making the world a better place?
api 5y ago
Building a cross-platform UI with support for theming, layouts, accessibility, high-DPI, internationalization, and lots of targets is brutally soul-crushingly hard. It involves a ton of the sort of work that is absolutely not fun and that therefore programmers have to be paid to do. How would you propose funding such a thing? Or would you like to volunteer to spend every waking moment of your life fixing bugs like "your layout manager misaligns buttons by 1-2 pixels but only on my system when the moon is full or on 64-bit CPUs in the Northern hemisphere while using Arabic languages." That's what working with UI/UX is like, especially if you support... well... really anything other than native macOS on systems sold by Apple in the last 4 years only. It's why FOSS has never crossed over into the mainstream in any meaningful way. Making software is fun. Making it polished, pretty, and usable is a house of pain. Doing that across platforms is a journey into the lower circles of hell. Electron is heavily subsidized by Google (and others) via Chromium. It's also a much more bloated user-unfriendly resource hog than Qt. But we use it because paying for quality software is unthinkable. Now off to Starbucks to buy another $12 coffee drink.
- _jordan 5y ago
  That's definitely a good point. But it's also sort of self-fulfilling: those layout misalignments and RTL font issues you mentioned become less of an issue as more people embrace Qt. Chrome presumably has figured it out simply because so many people are reliant on it working. If more people embraced Qt, they'd fix the hard parts as they would have more investment.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Gtk+ was originally picked up to face Qt back in the Linux pre-historic days. We all know how well those community contributions turned out.
tomc1985 5y ago
Ugh, literally anything but Electron
- judge2020 5y ago
  Internet explorer WebView? :)
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Arguably better
  - ______-_-______ 5y ago
    Say what you will, but an IE webview loads instantly and uses 3MB of RAM.
    - dTal 5y ago
      Not on Linux it doesn't!
pjmlp 5y ago
Remember kids, father and mamma have to put bread on the table somehow.

MarcellusDrum 5y ago

> The KDE foundation agreement is the only reason they still release Qt as open source And the KDE foundation is the only thing putting QT on the map. They wouldn't dare break the agreement, unless they want to burn their company to the ground.

jraph 5y ago
I'd say KDE and this agreement are why I would still consider using an open source version of Qt for a new project today. The whole KDE ecosystem will probably always need more stuff from Qt than me and I don't see KDE disappear overnight so I feel covered. A Qt app is so much lighter, faster and more enjoyable to use than any electron app. GTK still doesn't click for me as a programmer. Alternatives don't feel as functional as those three options.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I like GTK, but the falloff in developer experience since 4.0 is really pathetic. Then there's a lot of petty changes I hate too, but that's a discussuon for another time. Word on the street is that KDE's maintainers plan to fork an older version of Qt for their desktop, but I guess only time will tell... Edit: The KDE bit is wrong, I still stand by the first portion though.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    There's no such plan I am aware of.
Longhanks 5y ago
There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. On the other hand, I really doubt the open source community is responsible for a large chunk of the Qt company's income. Sure, breaking the agreement would further hurt their image in the open source community, but I doubt it would have a large impact on the company's future.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  > There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. I work for a car company using Qt. The open source community around Qt is a significant contributor to the talent pool we hire from (myself included), and it is also a regular contributor to (and indirectly/broadly, the inspiration for) integration-related Qt modules (e.g. QtWayland) we like. Its health is important.
pjmlp 5y ago
What puts Qt on the map are the companies keep paying their developers.
- MarcellusDrum 5y ago
  But why would your average developer even bother learning about QT if not because of its popularity in the open source community? The companies that pay for QT will have a hard time finding talent if QT wasn't popular due to its open source nature.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    For the same reasons people actually pay for their worktools, and specific software or cloud certifications. Plus the GPL version is good enough for the said developer to learn Qt if it happens to be out of cash.

enriquto 5y ago

> every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source Where can we learn about this? As far as it seems, qt is still, as always, distributed under the LGPL; which is as "open source" as it gets. The main site of qt even lists explicitly the Four Freedoms of the FSF : https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations

ttybird2 5y ago
Probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451
gmueckl 5y ago
They can't just stop licensing the core of Qt under GPL or LGPL (I forget which) due to an old agreement between Trolltech and KDE e.V. that states (roughly) that if there are no more OSS releases of Qt for more than a year, the last public release gets automatically relicensed under something more liberal (BSD or MIT). But the Qt Company has tried to make using the open source releases more and more inconvenient: licensing terms for the commercial version that are not at all forthcoming to OSS-to-commercial converts (implying that you need to pay for commercial licenses from the start), more limited access to precompiled binaries and registration obligations when you want to use the official Qt installer. That behavior seems to say that the company is bound by an agreement that they honor only reluctantly.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  To put that another way then: they seem to feel they have some freedom to decide which components should be covered by the KDE agreement. (To put a finer point on the specifics you mentioned: I believe they once had a policy of making the QML-to-C++ compiler available only to commercial customers, and not to FOSS users, treating it as something distinct from the 'core of Qt'. They later changed their minds on this. [0][1]) Presumably they could start work on a whole new toolkit, call it something other than Qt, and be free of the KDE agreement. This would no doubt be much more work than a typical major Qt release, but they do presumably have the option. [0] https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-in-qt https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translated-into-native-code-at-the-compilation-time-or-is-it-interpreted/23785650#comment110347258_23785650 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...

captn3m0 5y ago

We were trying to document EoL dates for Qt at endoflife.date/qt and it was made needlessly difficult by Qt patches being technically open-source via KDE patches. The whole thing felt so fragile.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mrtksn 5y ago

Their business size doesn't really look THAT much Yacht-friendly though? $121M in revenue, $28M operating income with 445 employees[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company It doesn't look like they are in the take over the world then monetise business, more like make a niche product and charge for it business. Then kind of makes sense to charge enterprise level license fees and operate with enterprisey licences and not bother too much with making the world a better place?

api 5y ago

Building a cross-platform UI with support for theming, layouts, accessibility, high-DPI, internationalization, and lots of targets is brutally soul-crushingly hard. It involves a ton of the sort of work that is absolutely not fun and that therefore programmers have to be paid to do. How would you propose funding such a thing? Or would you like to volunteer to spend every waking moment of your life fixing bugs like "your layout manager misaligns buttons by 1-2 pixels but only on my system when the moon is full or on 64-bit CPUs in the Northern hemisphere while using Arabic languages." That's what working with UI/UX is like, especially if you support... well... really anything other than native macOS on systems sold by Apple in the last 4 years only. It's why FOSS has never crossed over into the mainstream in any meaningful way. Making software is fun. Making it polished, pretty, and usable is a house of pain. Doing that across platforms is a journey into the lower circles of hell. Electron is heavily subsidized by Google (and others) via Chromium. It's also a much more bloated user-unfriendly resource hog than Qt. But we use it because paying for quality software is unthinkable. Now off to Starbucks to buy another $12 coffee drink.

_jordan 5y ago
That's definitely a good point. But it's also sort of self-fulfilling: those layout misalignments and RTL font issues you mentioned become less of an issue as more people embrace Qt. Chrome presumably has figured it out simply because so many people are reliant on it working. If more people embraced Qt, they'd fix the hard parts as they would have more investment.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Gtk+ was originally picked up to face Qt back in the Linux pre-historic days. We all know how well those community contributions turned out.

tomc1985 5y ago

Ugh, literally anything but Electron

judge2020 5y ago
Internet explorer WebView? :)
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Arguably better
- ______-_-______ 5y ago
  Say what you will, but an IE webview loads instantly and uses 3MB of RAM.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Not on Linux it doesn't!

pjmlp 5y ago

Remember kids, father and mamma have to put bread on the table somehow.