14 ms·

Leaving The Qt Company

158 points by TonyTrapp 4y ago

mschuster91 4y ago
To make that mess readable: `pre { width: 50%; white-space: pre-wrap; margin: 0 auto 0; }` I hate pipermail with a passion, it's 2022 and still it's a hassle to read mailing list posts...
- blumomo 4y ago
  or enable your browser's reader mode, i.e. firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
- eql5 4y ago
  Or read it from here (quoted in a response): https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-May/042491.html https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-May/...
colesantiago 4y ago
Who please?
- emddudley 4y ago
  "Lars Knoll is The Qt Company CTO and Qt Project Chief Maintainer. He has been working on Qt for more than 13 years starting as a software engineer to later leading the global Qt engineering team in Nokia before the Digia acquisition in October 2012." From https://www.qt.io/blog/author/lars-knoll https://www.qt.io/blog/author/lars-knoll
  - coldtea 4y ago
    It probably means: "more than 13 years BEFORE the 2012 accusation". Because I already knew Lars Knoll as involved with QT back in 2000 (except if he was just working on the KDE side then).
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      (“Acquisition”, not “accusation”.)
      - coldtea 4y ago
        With QT it could be both :-)
        kstrauser 4y ago
        Fair point. :-D
    - rayiner 4y ago
      I remember the kerfuffle about QT licensing and KDE. Back then I used KDE and dismissed the concerns. It’s been odd and unfortunate to see those concerns having been at least partially founded.
- bartvk 4y ago
  I feel you're trying to say something with your short comment. In the Wikipedia entry on The QT Company, he is (still) mentioned as the current CTO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company
- bluGill 4y ago
  The main guy behind QT, while not the first on the project, he has been the main vision behind all the technical parts for 25 years. He wrote the engine that we now know as webkit and chrome.
  - fullstop 4y ago
    He was also a major contributor to KHTML, which was adopted by WebKit, and subsequently Blink. It's the roots of both Safari and Chromium. His influence is monumental.
    - meijer 4y ago
      I wonder if he himself uses Firefox. That would be a nice irony.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        Considering what happened to khtml in the last 15 years I'd use firefox myself. Come to think of it I actually did get one patch into khtml back in the day (exactly one, don't read too much into this), and I now use firefox. I keep thinking I should resurrect the khtml project so we get a good open source engine again - (firefox is more than an engine), but realistically it needs more love than once part time person can give it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lewisjoe 4y ago
Qt is an amazing piece of tech that got many things right. 1. Performance that matches native speeds 2. Single codebase for multiple platforms (without relying on web technologies) 3. Not limited with a single language (has bindings to all major languages) 4. The core is written in a performant language (C++) But recent developments in UI programming is sidelining frameworks like Qt with some really good innovations. - Like React/React-native ecosystem pioneered the component based declarations of UI elements. - Flutter pushed it to all platforms with Skia as the rendering engine - Jetpack Compose is pushing it with a better language (Kotlin) - State management had matured a lot with redux style immutable stores The irony is even with all these recent developments there isn't a single UI framework that took the best parts of older frameworks like Qt and combined it with the recent ideas from Flutter and Jetpack-compose! If it did it all, the multi-platform support is handicapped. Either the native strategy becomes an afterthought or the Web becomes an afterthought, hurting accessibility, etc. We still have a long way to go in cross-platform UI frameworks :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bsnal 4y ago
  1. Qt is much faster than other UI technologies, but it’s far from being as performant as native solutions are. 2. You will need a big amount of hacks to make your project work on different platforms. Especially if you do something fancy. Not to mention serious licencing issues.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    Licensing has gotten much worse, so much so that my current firm is sticking with our Qt5 contract and will not negotiate to Qt6. So we're hitting the end of the road with Qt in the next few years. On top of that, priorities are just different now. I spent an afternoon chasing down why QtCore has incomplete or missing methods for handling JSON documents (TLDR: "won't fix"), but I get a constant stream of marketing email promoting their new in-app advertising structure. And now there's a speech recognition engine? I'm just done with it all. Guess I need to learn React.
simplehuman 4y ago
Curious where he is going next. Anyone on the inside know?
- bluGill 4y ago
  He said some sort of startup, but didn't say what one or what they are doing.
  - meijer 4y ago
    Haavard Nord, one of the Trolltech founders, has a startup named "Conclude".
hoseja 4y ago
It's been weird to not see much discussion about this abomination that Qt put out recently: https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free
- simplehuman 4y ago
  Probably why he is leaving
- SideQuark 4y ago
  What is an abomination? It lines up well with my experience using both Qt and open source and also using both in projects. Certainly issues 2,3,4 cause problems for any project wanting to integrate open source into commercial work. And 1 seems on par with experience. For all points they cite decent sources.
  - cpitman 4y ago
    It's wrong in so many ways: 1. Just because something is open source, doesn't mean you cannot get support for it. There are plenty of companies that offer support for open source software, and yes, this costs money. But the general rule of thumb is that $1 of open source support replaces $10 of proprietary revenue. 2. All software has licenses, even from proprietary vendors. But proprietary licenses have no standards, each and every one should be reviewed before acceptance. And they can also change at the drop of a hat and _you have no recourse_. Having a standard set of licenses, and a community that could support a fork are both value unique to open source. 3. Reviewing compliance is a thing with or without actually using open source software. Even if you say "we don't use open source software", that doesn't actually stop anyone from doing some copy-posta of code from some website.
    - ChrisLomont 4y ago
      None of these make the article wrong. 1. You can get support sometimes - the question is at what price and at what quality and at what timeliness. Open source is no cure here. A quick test: I googled "support for scipy" and found zero places I can buy fixes or support in the many pages I clicked through. I googled "support for Mathematica" and top hit (and the entire first page) were all support. Try the same thing for any open source project, and the comparable commercial product, and tell me which seems to have more support available. >general rule of thumb is that $1 of open source support replaces $10 of proprietary revenue. That "rule of thumb" doesn't show up in a google search except for your comment. I'm not even sure what it's supposed to mean. Clarify? 2. "But proprietary licenses have no standards": every single proprietary license I've bought or been on the group deciding what to license has been nearly trivial - usually you buy an outright license to use as you will (and no open source gotchas to worry about what code touches what), or has been some tiered revenue/sales thing, all trivial to navigate. They are much easier than all but an open source "use for anything at will" license. And they don't trigger a host of legal issues. And there are dozens of open source licenses in common use, each with a host of legal issues to work out. This is why legal depts on every project I've needed to integrate must oversee each item we want to integrate, but not on buying licenses from proprietary vendors. 3. Proprietary code is backed by a vendor you can sue when you get sued, especially if they claimed compliance they did not meet. This provides legal protection when using their products. Open source has none of this, so all risk is on you, and you have to price this in. All these factors have costs to development, risks to legal. Try integrating some open source into pacemaker code and see how much trouble and cost that is from legal, compared to buying proprietary, certified, components. Or car software (not dash entertainment, but driving critical stuff). Or infrastructure code like power line stuff, safety stuff, etc. I like open source, and use it for lots of playing around, and where applicable. But it's a nightmare for a significant amount of work outside the HN popular web apps and social media startups. Most software development is not in these spaces.
throwaway2037 4y ago
Somewhat unrelated: When I open the link, the lines of text are super long and do not wrap in a standard desktop browser. Am I doing something wrong? Or: Is there a trick to force wrap the text in a browser?
- blumomo 4y ago
  Enable the reader mode of your browser for his page. Firefox has it [0] and other browsers surely, too. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
  - markstos 4y ago
    It still doesn’t wrap in Safari mobile’s reader mode
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gunapologist99 4y ago
  It's because this is literally the only style specified in the page: <style type="text/css"> pre { white-space: pre-wrap; /* css-2.1, curent FF, Opera, Safari */ } </style> Perhaps it's to make sure code snippets are correctly aligned, but a link to a wrapping version would be very useful, or perhaps just letting very long lines wrap in a narrow browser window, because the current model means that you have to scroll horizontally as you read every single line, even on a very wide screen.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    pre-wrap should allow wrapping. And adding white-space: pre-wrap explicitly to the pre fixes it for me. So maybe that isn't applying for some reason. Edit: Ah, the problem appears to be that a Content-Security-Policy blocks it. > Content Security Policy: The page’s settings blocked the loading of a resource at inline (“default-src”).
joezydeco 4y ago
I hate these emails, and LinkedIn is guilty of this too. 200 lines of how wonderful the company was and all the great people and all the great accomplishments and yadda yadda... and one cryptic line about why he's actually quitting. And the "I want to try something new" line is always a cover for something else.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xedrac 4y ago
  In the case of Lars, this may actually be true. Imagine working on the same project since the year 2000. I'd want to try something new too.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    Lars wrote Webkit in the middle of Qt development. Surely he could find out-of-band time and headspace to tinker with different technologies if he wanted to. To me, leaving completely signals something else.
    - xedrac 4y ago
      Your choice of words did not go unnoticed. You could say Lars is a bit of an expert on signals... he's off to some unknown slot, connected by destiny! ;)
- thijsvandien 4y ago
  At least they're not going to "spend more time with family".
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Isn't it possible that he's tired of c++ and Qt after 25 years? I mean he's starting a new startup so he probably can't reveal what that is, but it's obviously something he's excited about. Hell after 2 or 3 years at company I'm ready to finish up whatever I'm working and move on to somewhere else.
apitman 4y ago
I only recently became aware that Qt is actively trying to pull away from open source[0]. I understand that people do things for reasons, but this situation looks pretty sad to me. [0]: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...
- Nokinside 4y ago
  QT has retreated to what is the absolute minimum it has legally to do. They can't pull away any more. QT and KDE have legally binding agreement. >All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities. It's hassle to maintain LPGL version with 12 month lag for sure.
  - apitman 4y ago
    I'm more concerned about the show of intent than the specific actions up to this point. What if they decide to put all the docs behind a paywall? And if they can't because of licensing reasons, what if they just stop paying people to update the docs and make a new version of the docs without licensing restrictions? There are a lot of ways this can get worse. Licensing protection isn't a silver bullet. If the organization becomes hostile, it only guarantees you the ability to fork. While that's huge, it's of limited utility if the project is too big to fork. See Chromium. I think Qt may be too big to fork.
    - gmueckl 4y ago
      The Qt Company itself isn't bound by licenses on the code/documentation, but by a separate contract with the KDE Free Qt Foundation [1]. This document is publicly available and treats the documentation pretty much equal to the code itself. Qt is effin' huge, but it is also at the core of a big and diverse ecosystem. There are many, many users across various industries, including big players and there are companies that offer consulting and development services specifically around Qt. If the Qt Company was to piss enough of these users off, they could easily join forces to create an economically feasible fork. The real trick would be avoiding competing forks, I think. [1] https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
Nokinside 4y ago
QT Company (QTCOM.HE) has been an amazing investment. From 2016-NOW +1800% (TSLA +1600%).
- pavlov 4y ago
  It's an amazing example of how Nokia mismanaged their assets and sold them away for a song. Nokia bought Qt in 2008 for $150M. (The original name of the company was Trolltech.) Sold it in 2012 for only $5M. Ten years later, Qt Group is worth about $2 billion today, having reached as high as $5 billion last year. How do you first lose 97% of the value of an asset, then watch on the sidelines as it goes up 1000x? Nokia's management was both incompetent and incomprehensibly negligent in handling shareholder value when they let this asset go for 5 million. Of course these managers were selling Qt for almost-nothing to their good friends in Finland, while the bill was paid by Nokia's global shareholders... This kind of borderline theft is easier to pull off in a small country, even one that pretends to be the least corrupt in the world.
markus_zhang 4y ago
One question for GUI folks. Comparing to the classic RAD tools such as VB and Delphi, does QT match the efficiency and easy-to-use? Appreciate any insight.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  I had just superficial experience with each of these tools, which I think is more adequate to answer your question since VB and Delphi are very productive for people who have little experience. QT and Qt Creator is more evolved than both (I don't know recent Delphi versions, but still think so). In Delphi (not sure about VB) you can do Text1.Caption := "Hello World". In QT Creator (last time I tried), you have to create some code to connect the signals to slots and still call a method to achieve the same thing. It was a bit more work but, easy, clear intuitive, well documented and has advantages when implementing more advanced features in a more generic way. I'd choose QT over both others today even for beginners and even disregarding licenses.
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    Thanks! Good to know that QT manages to bring back or enhance the experience.
- lionkor 4y ago
  I used both Embarcadero Delphi and Qt extensively, and I prefer Qt due to their nice IDE integration with lots of other tools, like valgrind, clangd, gdb, etc., and simply a faster, snappier experience. And its unapologetically cross platform.
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    Thanks. Yeah that's a valid point. Sadly Delphi is way out of main stream these days.
    - lionkor 4y ago
      You'd be surprised ;)
muxneo 4y ago
I learned this amazing C++ based GUI framework called "QT" (cute :)) in 2003. At that time it was owned by Trolltech. I developed UI for a Digital Cinema system which was used to project movies in theaters. Amazing framework to work with and lots of good doc for developers.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  That sounds like a fascinating thing on its own. Any chance you’ve written about that experience somewhere? If you ever did, I’d love to read it.
  - muxneo 4y ago
    Now that I look back, I should have written about those good old days. Here are few press releases about the product https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=74 https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=74 https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=247 https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=247 I wish there were screenshots of the UI. I did lot of customization of many UI componentents like slider, ListView and much much more.
    - kiawe_fire 4y ago
      Screenshots would have been fun to see - I'm always fascinated by projects like these that are part of an industry-wide transition to something new. Especially considering you probably didn't have much or any prior works to guide what you built. Thanks for sharing the press releases!
kramerger 4y ago
Maybe it's time for another toolkit to step up and replace Qt? Maybe something that uses modern C++ all the way. Such as the serenityOS UI library?
- nullcipher 4y ago
  Slint is coming along nicely - https://github.com/slint-ui/slint https://github.com/slint-ui/slint
raydev 4y ago
Unrelated to the content of the email: Can we please get a better UI for mailing lists? The text is too small for me to comfortably read, so I used Chrome's zoom feature. But once I zoom in, the text wrapping is completely static so I'm forced to scroll horizontally. Is there a more accessible way to read content on mailing lists?
- digisign 4y ago
  It is responsive on my Firefox. Basic HTML has always been responsive, except when folks break it, on accident or on purpose.
Rochus 4y ago
Just went over the comments and am once again amazed that none of the comments goes into the referenced message; most people discuss something else, or ask questions that are answered in the referenced message; but hardly anyone seems to care that the most important technical head of the company is leaving, or why just now (that he is leaving at this time seems rather coincidental according to the text, and why leaving a well paid, secure position for a startup, at his age?).
- zepearl 4y ago
  > anyone seems to care that the most important technical head of the company is leaving To me the message didn't sound like a manifest but more like an info (to make the change smooth)? Therefore I guess that people that know QT just don't care about speculating about that (why now/before/later, who cares) - of course this info will be remembered if in the future problems arise.
  - Rochus 4y ago
    There has been quite a bit of controversy over the direction of Qt. I've been working with Qt for more than twenty years and find the news pretty amazing, as no doubt do many others. With Qt 6, the company has entered similar waters as the developers of Wayland: building something with a lot of effort, that is functionally only marginally different from the established technology, but significantly less mature.
    - zepearl 4y ago
      Thx - I used only Qt3 and for a short time Qt4. I liked the dual-license approach, but apparently it's not as "pure" as I thought was?
      - Rochus 4y ago
        Qt4 is/was much better than Qt3; and Nokia made it available to everyone under LGPL which was sensational; Qt5 mostly improved modularity and platform abstraction; after the Nokia aera, Qt has given itself a bit of an orientation log, adding features in all sorts of directions that didn't necessarily add to the core proposition, but increased complexity and development effort, without adequate value in my view.
jeffrallen 4y ago
I worked on a project using Qt for several years. It was okish, certainly a useful cross platform addition to C++ code. But it was so big and so opinionated... I mean come on: C++ has strings, what business do you have adding your own magical strings? It was certainly part of what made me hate programming and then wake up out of my stupor to find Go and learn to love programming again. Bye bye Qt and C++, never going to touch you again if I can possibly help it.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  > I mean come on: C++ has strings, what business do you have adding your own magical strings? C++'s std::string is Qt's QByteArray though, not QString which represents an actual Unicode string.
- brnt 4y ago
  I love Qt for Python, but in the process of a port to C++ my main wish is modern C++ bindings.
axilmar 4y ago
Now all we need is an open source c++ GUI library that allows us to write cross platform code with ease.

158 points by TonyTrapp 4y ago

To make that mess readable: `pre { width: 50%; white-space: pre-wrap; margin: 0 auto 0; }` I hate pipermail with a passion, it's 2022 and still it's a hassle to read mailing list posts...

blumomo 4y ago
or enable your browser's reader mode, i.e. firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
eql5 4y ago
Or read it from here (quoted in a response): https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-May/042491.html https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-May/...

colesantiago 4y ago

Who please?

emddudley 4y ago
"Lars Knoll is The Qt Company CTO and Qt Project Chief Maintainer. He has been working on Qt for more than 13 years starting as a software engineer to later leading the global Qt engineering team in Nokia before the Digia acquisition in October 2012." From https://www.qt.io/blog/author/lars-knoll https://www.qt.io/blog/author/lars-knoll
- coldtea 4y ago
  It probably means: "more than 13 years BEFORE the 2012 accusation". Because I already knew Lars Knoll as involved with QT back in 2000 (except if he was just working on the KDE side then).
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    (“Acquisition”, not “accusation”.)
    - coldtea 4y ago
      With QT it could be both :-)
      - kstrauser 4y ago
        Fair point. :-D
  - rayiner 4y ago
    I remember the kerfuffle about QT licensing and KDE. Back then I used KDE and dismissed the concerns. It’s been odd and unfortunate to see those concerns having been at least partially founded.
bartvk 4y ago
I feel you're trying to say something with your short comment. In the Wikipedia entry on The QT Company, he is (still) mentioned as the current CTO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company
bluGill 4y ago
The main guy behind QT, while not the first on the project, he has been the main vision behind all the technical parts for 25 years. He wrote the engine that we now know as webkit and chrome.
- fullstop 4y ago
  He was also a major contributor to KHTML, which was adopted by WebKit, and subsequently Blink. It's the roots of both Safari and Chromium. His influence is monumental.
  - meijer 4y ago
    I wonder if he himself uses Firefox. That would be a nice irony.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Considering what happened to khtml in the last 15 years I'd use firefox myself. Come to think of it I actually did get one patch into khtml back in the day (exactly one, don't read too much into this), and I now use firefox. I keep thinking I should resurrect the khtml project so we get a good open source engine again - (firefox is more than an engine), but realistically it needs more love than once part time person can give it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lewisjoe 4y ago

Qt is an amazing piece of tech that got many things right. 1. Performance that matches native speeds 2. Single codebase for multiple platforms (without relying on web technologies) 3. Not limited with a single language (has bindings to all major languages) 4. The core is written in a performant language (C++) But recent developments in UI programming is sidelining frameworks like Qt with some really good innovations. - Like React/React-native ecosystem pioneered the component based declarations of UI elements. - Flutter pushed it to all platforms with Skia as the rendering engine - Jetpack Compose is pushing it with a better language (Kotlin) - State management had matured a lot with redux style immutable stores The irony is even with all these recent developments there isn't a single UI framework that took the best parts of older frameworks like Qt and combined it with the recent ideas from Flutter and Jetpack-compose! If it did it all, the multi-platform support is handicapped. Either the native strategy becomes an afterthought or the Web becomes an afterthought, hurting accessibility, etc. We still have a long way to go in cross-platform UI frameworks :)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bsnal 4y ago
1. Qt is much faster than other UI technologies, but it’s far from being as performant as native solutions are. 2. You will need a big amount of hacks to make your project work on different platforms. Especially if you do something fancy. Not to mention serious licencing issues.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Licensing has gotten much worse, so much so that my current firm is sticking with our Qt5 contract and will not negotiate to Qt6. So we're hitting the end of the road with Qt in the next few years. On top of that, priorities are just different now. I spent an afternoon chasing down why QtCore has incomplete or missing methods for handling JSON documents (TLDR: "won't fix"), but I get a constant stream of marketing email promoting their new in-app advertising structure. And now there's a speech recognition engine? I'm just done with it all. Guess I need to learn React.

simplehuman 4y ago

Curious where he is going next. Anyone on the inside know?

bluGill 4y ago
He said some sort of startup, but didn't say what one or what they are doing.
- meijer 4y ago
  Haavard Nord, one of the Trolltech founders, has a startup named "Conclude".

hoseja 4y ago

It's been weird to not see much discussion about this abomination that Qt put out recently: https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free https://www.qt.io/blog/is-open-source-really-free

simplehuman 4y ago
Probably why he is leaving
SideQuark 4y ago
What is an abomination? It lines up well with my experience using both Qt and open source and also using both in projects. Certainly issues 2,3,4 cause problems for any project wanting to integrate open source into commercial work. And 1 seems on par with experience. For all points they cite decent sources.
- cpitman 4y ago
  It's wrong in so many ways: 1. Just because something is open source, doesn't mean you cannot get support for it. There are plenty of companies that offer support for open source software, and yes, this costs money. But the general rule of thumb is that $1 of open source support replaces $10 of proprietary revenue. 2. All software has licenses, even from proprietary vendors. But proprietary licenses have no standards, each and every one should be reviewed before acceptance. And they can also change at the drop of a hat and _you have no recourse_. Having a standard set of licenses, and a community that could support a fork are both value unique to open source. 3. Reviewing compliance is a thing with or without actually using open source software. Even if you say "we don't use open source software", that doesn't actually stop anyone from doing some copy-posta of code from some website.
  - ChrisLomont 4y ago
    None of these make the article wrong. 1. You can get support sometimes - the question is at what price and at what quality and at what timeliness. Open source is no cure here. A quick test: I googled "support for scipy" and found zero places I can buy fixes or support in the many pages I clicked through. I googled "support for Mathematica" and top hit (and the entire first page) were all support. Try the same thing for any open source project, and the comparable commercial product, and tell me which seems to have more support available. >general rule of thumb is that $1 of open source support replaces $10 of proprietary revenue. That "rule of thumb" doesn't show up in a google search except for your comment. I'm not even sure what it's supposed to mean. Clarify? 2. "But proprietary licenses have no standards": every single proprietary license I've bought or been on the group deciding what to license has been nearly trivial - usually you buy an outright license to use as you will (and no open source gotchas to worry about what code touches what), or has been some tiered revenue/sales thing, all trivial to navigate. They are much easier than all but an open source "use for anything at will" license. And they don't trigger a host of legal issues. And there are dozens of open source licenses in common use, each with a host of legal issues to work out. This is why legal depts on every project I've needed to integrate must oversee each item we want to integrate, but not on buying licenses from proprietary vendors. 3. Proprietary code is backed by a vendor you can sue when you get sued, especially if they claimed compliance they did not meet. This provides legal protection when using their products. Open source has none of this, so all risk is on you, and you have to price this in. All these factors have costs to development, risks to legal. Try integrating some open source into pacemaker code and see how much trouble and cost that is from legal, compared to buying proprietary, certified, components. Or car software (not dash entertainment, but driving critical stuff). Or infrastructure code like power line stuff, safety stuff, etc. I like open source, and use it for lots of playing around, and where applicable. But it's a nightmare for a significant amount of work outside the HN popular web apps and social media startups. Most software development is not in these spaces.

throwaway2037 4y ago

Somewhat unrelated: When I open the link, the lines of text are super long and do not wrap in a standard desktop browser. Am I doing something wrong? Or: Is there a trick to force wrap the text in a browser?

blumomo 4y ago
Enable the reader mode of your browser for his page. Firefox has it [0] and other browsers surely, too. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
- markstos 4y ago
  It still doesn’t wrap in Safari mobile’s reader mode
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gunapologist99 4y ago
It's because this is literally the only style specified in the page: <style type="text/css"> pre { white-space: pre-wrap; /* css-2.1, curent FF, Opera, Safari */ } </style> Perhaps it's to make sure code snippets are correctly aligned, but a link to a wrapping version would be very useful, or perhaps just letting very long lines wrap in a narrow browser window, because the current model means that you have to scroll horizontally as you read every single line, even on a very wide screen.
- kevincox 4y ago
  pre-wrap should allow wrapping. And adding white-space: pre-wrap explicitly to the pre fixes it for me. So maybe that isn't applying for some reason. Edit: Ah, the problem appears to be that a Content-Security-Policy blocks it. > Content Security Policy: The page’s settings blocked the loading of a resource at inline (“default-src”).

joezydeco 4y ago

I hate these emails, and LinkedIn is guilty of this too. 200 lines of how wonderful the company was and all the great people and all the great accomplishments and yadda yadda... and one cryptic line about why he's actually quitting. And the "I want to try something new" line is always a cover for something else.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xedrac 4y ago
In the case of Lars, this may actually be true. Imagine working on the same project since the year 2000. I'd want to try something new too.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Lars wrote Webkit in the middle of Qt development. Surely he could find out-of-band time and headspace to tinker with different technologies if he wanted to. To me, leaving completely signals something else.
  - xedrac 4y ago
    Your choice of words did not go unnoticed. You could say Lars is a bit of an expert on signals... he's off to some unknown slot, connected by destiny! ;)
thijsvandien 4y ago
At least they're not going to "spend more time with family".
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Isn't it possible that he's tired of c++ and Qt after 25 years? I mean he's starting a new startup so he probably can't reveal what that is, but it's obviously something he's excited about. Hell after 2 or 3 years at company I'm ready to finish up whatever I'm working and move on to somewhere else.

apitman 4y ago

I only recently became aware that Qt is actively trying to pull away from open source[0]. I understand that people do things for reasons, but this situation looks pretty sad to me. [0]: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...

Nokinside 4y ago
QT has retreated to what is the absolute minimum it has legally to do. They can't pull away any more. QT and KDE have legally binding agreement. >All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities. It's hassle to maintain LPGL version with 12 month lag for sure.
- apitman 4y ago
  I'm more concerned about the show of intent than the specific actions up to this point. What if they decide to put all the docs behind a paywall? And if they can't because of licensing reasons, what if they just stop paying people to update the docs and make a new version of the docs without licensing restrictions? There are a lot of ways this can get worse. Licensing protection isn't a silver bullet. If the organization becomes hostile, it only guarantees you the ability to fork. While that's huge, it's of limited utility if the project is too big to fork. See Chromium. I think Qt may be too big to fork.
  - gmueckl 4y ago
    The Qt Company itself isn't bound by licenses on the code/documentation, but by a separate contract with the KDE Free Qt Foundation [1]. This document is publicly available and treats the documentation pretty much equal to the code itself. Qt is effin' huge, but it is also at the core of a big and diverse ecosystem. There are many, many users across various industries, including big players and there are companies that offer consulting and development services specifically around Qt. If the Qt Company was to piss enough of these users off, they could easily join forces to create an economically feasible fork. The real trick would be avoiding competing forks, I think. [1] https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

Nokinside 4y ago

QT Company (QTCOM.HE) has been an amazing investment. From 2016-NOW +1800% (TSLA +1600%).

pavlov 4y ago
It's an amazing example of how Nokia mismanaged their assets and sold them away for a song. Nokia bought Qt in 2008 for $150M. (The original name of the company was Trolltech.) Sold it in 2012 for only $5M. Ten years later, Qt Group is worth about $2 billion today, having reached as high as $5 billion last year. How do you first lose 97% of the value of an asset, then watch on the sidelines as it goes up 1000x? Nokia's management was both incompetent and incomprehensibly negligent in handling shareholder value when they let this asset go for 5 million. Of course these managers were selling Qt for almost-nothing to their good friends in Finland, while the bill was paid by Nokia's global shareholders... This kind of borderline theft is easier to pull off in a small country, even one that pretends to be the least corrupt in the world.

markus_zhang 4y ago

One question for GUI folks. Comparing to the classic RAD tools such as VB and Delphi, does QT match the efficiency and easy-to-use? Appreciate any insight.

marcodiego 4y ago
I had just superficial experience with each of these tools, which I think is more adequate to answer your question since VB and Delphi are very productive for people who have little experience. QT and Qt Creator is more evolved than both (I don't know recent Delphi versions, but still think so). In Delphi (not sure about VB) you can do Text1.Caption := "Hello World". In QT Creator (last time I tried), you have to create some code to connect the signals to slots and still call a method to achieve the same thing. It was a bit more work but, easy, clear intuitive, well documented and has advantages when implementing more advanced features in a more generic way. I'd choose QT over both others today even for beginners and even disregarding licenses.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Thanks! Good to know that QT manages to bring back or enhance the experience.
lionkor 4y ago
I used both Embarcadero Delphi and Qt extensively, and I prefer Qt due to their nice IDE integration with lots of other tools, like valgrind, clangd, gdb, etc., and simply a faster, snappier experience. And its unapologetically cross platform.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Thanks. Yeah that's a valid point. Sadly Delphi is way out of main stream these days.
  - lionkor 4y ago
    You'd be surprised ;)

muxneo 4y ago

I learned this amazing C++ based GUI framework called "QT" (cute :)) in 2003. At that time it was owned by Trolltech. I developed UI for a Digital Cinema system which was used to project movies in theaters. Amazing framework to work with and lots of good doc for developers.

kiawe_fire 4y ago
That sounds like a fascinating thing on its own. Any chance you’ve written about that experience somewhere? If you ever did, I’d love to read it.
- muxneo 4y ago
  Now that I look back, I should have written about those good old days. Here are few press releases about the product https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=74 https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=74 https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=247 https://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr?newsID=247 I wish there were screenshots of the UI. I did lot of customization of many UI componentents like slider, ListView and much much more.
  - kiawe_fire 4y ago
    Screenshots would have been fun to see - I'm always fascinated by projects like these that are part of an industry-wide transition to something new. Especially considering you probably didn't have much or any prior works to guide what you built. Thanks for sharing the press releases!

kramerger 4y ago

Maybe it's time for another toolkit to step up and replace Qt? Maybe something that uses modern C++ all the way. Such as the serenityOS UI library?

nullcipher 4y ago
Slint is coming along nicely - https://github.com/slint-ui/slint https://github.com/slint-ui/slint

raydev 4y ago

Unrelated to the content of the email: Can we please get a better UI for mailing lists? The text is too small for me to comfortably read, so I used Chrome's zoom feature. But once I zoom in, the text wrapping is completely static so I'm forced to scroll horizontally. Is there a more accessible way to read content on mailing lists?

digisign 4y ago
It is responsive on my Firefox. Basic HTML has always been responsive, except when folks break it, on accident or on purpose.

Rochus 4y ago

Just went over the comments and am once again amazed that none of the comments goes into the referenced message; most people discuss something else, or ask questions that are answered in the referenced message; but hardly anyone seems to care that the most important technical head of the company is leaving, or why just now (that he is leaving at this time seems rather coincidental according to the text, and why leaving a well paid, secure position for a startup, at his age?).

zepearl 4y ago
> anyone seems to care that the most important technical head of the company is leaving To me the message didn't sound like a manifest but more like an info (to make the change smooth)? Therefore I guess that people that know QT just don't care about speculating about that (why now/before/later, who cares) - of course this info will be remembered if in the future problems arise.
- Rochus 4y ago
  There has been quite a bit of controversy over the direction of Qt. I've been working with Qt for more than twenty years and find the news pretty amazing, as no doubt do many others. With Qt 6, the company has entered similar waters as the developers of Wayland: building something with a lot of effort, that is functionally only marginally different from the established technology, but significantly less mature.
  - zepearl 4y ago
    Thx - I used only Qt3 and for a short time Qt4. I liked the dual-license approach, but apparently it's not as "pure" as I thought was?
    - Rochus 4y ago
      Qt4 is/was much better than Qt3; and Nokia made it available to everyone under LGPL which was sensational; Qt5 mostly improved modularity and platform abstraction; after the Nokia aera, Qt has given itself a bit of an orientation log, adding features in all sorts of directions that didn't necessarily add to the core proposition, but increased complexity and development effort, without adequate value in my view.

jeffrallen 4y ago

I worked on a project using Qt for several years. It was okish, certainly a useful cross platform addition to C++ code. But it was so big and so opinionated... I mean come on: C++ has strings, what business do you have adding your own magical strings? It was certainly part of what made me hate programming and then wake up out of my stupor to find Go and learn to love programming again. Bye bye Qt and C++, never going to touch you again if I can possibly help it.

jcelerier 4y ago
> I mean come on: C++ has strings, what business do you have adding your own magical strings? C++'s std::string is Qt's QByteArray though, not QString which represents an actual Unicode string.
brnt 4y ago
I love Qt for Python, but in the process of a port to C++ my main wish is modern C++ bindings.

axilmar 4y ago

Now all we need is an open source c++ GUI library that allows us to write cross platform code with ease.