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It seems that Nokia funded a lot of the development behind QT. How is this going to affect the development of KDE?

somepony 14y ago
Lots of maintainers were Nokia guys: http://qt-project.org/wiki/Maintainers http://qt-project.org/wiki/Maintainers
sho_hn 14y ago
This is a complicated question, and at this time it's impossible to answer it without heading into the realm of speculation. I'm going to try anyway, to at least put some of the facts out there that many outside the direct community may not be aware of. First of, the Qt Project, that is the sum of all contributors within Nokia and without and so also including KDE, is currently busy putting together the next major generation of the technology, Qt 5. But our ongoing 4.x release series is still based on Qt 4, which Nokia's developers have not been targeting for a while now. Instead, commercial support of Qt 4 has passed to Digia some time ago, and they have been putting out new point releases since. So in the short term, this will not affect upcoming releases of KDE's platform, workspaces and applications. In the longer term, the loss of the Nokia-employed workforce would obviously hurt the Qt Project considerably. Hopefully, however, this loss would not actually be quite that complete: It's unclear at this point whether Nokia might try to sell Qt, which could preserve the workforce entirely in the best case scenario. Alternatively, many of the developers who spent much or all of their professional careers working and loving Qt would likely band together and go on in some way, or find new homes at any of the Qt-focussed software development consultancies out there, which might also band together with us and others in the community to form a new home for the project in Nokia's absence. For the cynics and skeptics in the audience, it also always pays to remind everyone that for the worst case, the community does have a poison pill in place: http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...
moondowner 14y ago
"The KDE Free Qt Foundation is an organization with the purpose of securing the availability of the Qt toolkit for the development of Free Software and in particular for the development of KDE software. " http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p... I think they will manage somehow...

Lots of maintainers were Nokia guys: http://qt-project.org/wiki/Maintainers http://qt-project.org/wiki/Maintainers

This is a complicated question, and at this time it's impossible to answer it without heading into the realm of speculation. I'm going to try anyway, to at least put some of the facts out there that many outside the direct community may not be aware of. First of, the Qt Project, that is the sum of all contributors within Nokia and without and so also including KDE, is currently busy putting together the next major generation of the technology, Qt 5. But our ongoing 4.x release series is still based on Qt 4, which Nokia's developers have not been targeting for a while now. Instead, commercial support of Qt 4 has passed to Digia some time ago, and they have been putting out new point releases since. So in the short term, this will not affect upcoming releases of KDE's platform, workspaces and applications. In the longer term, the loss of the Nokia-employed workforce would obviously hurt the Qt Project considerably. Hopefully, however, this loss would not actually be quite that complete: It's unclear at this point whether Nokia might try to sell Qt, which could preserve the workforce entirely in the best case scenario. Alternatively, many of the developers who spent much or all of their professional careers working and loving Qt would likely band together and go on in some way, or find new homes at any of the Qt-focussed software development consultancies out there, which might also band together with us and others in the community to form a new home for the project in Nokia's absence. For the cynics and skeptics in the audience, it also always pays to remind everyone that for the worst case, the community does have a poison pill in place: http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...

moondowner 14y ago

"The KDE Free Qt Foundation is an organization with the purpose of securing the availability of the Qt toolkit for the development of Free Software and in particular for the development of KDE software. " http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p... I think they will manage somehow...