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Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem
- higherpurpose 12y agoDigia, and anyone else who might still use it, please remove AddThis. http://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-online-tracking-device-that-is-virtually-impossible-to-block http://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-online-tracking-d...
- tekromancr 12y agoWhat exactly is the difference between this canvas tracking tech and cookies, flash cookies, and panopticlick? That just sounds like FUD because people are just learning about this.
- malka 12y agoblocked by disconnect.me , just as the rest of this tracking bullshit.
- Igglyboo 12y agoCan't you just block that by using noScript? Or is this an issue because you have to use noScript to block it? Genuinely curious as all I use is an ad blocker and have no experience with noScript.
- onli 12y agoI'm not too much concerned by this, but it does not sound like a good move. > The unified web page will give a broad overview of the Qt technology, both enterprise and open-source, from a technical, business and messaging perspective. So, the new web page will still have to be fragmented, because it has to serve open source and business visitors. Who speak a completely different language and look for different information. Might be a good thing if it leads to a better website, might reflect good changes, but that alone sounds rather complicated. In my eyes it is not bad to have a fragmentation between sites targeting business users and those who do not, and it seems sound to have the one for business users in the reign of the company. The new company seems to be the real news (at least it was new to me), that Qt will be managed by a company focussing solely on Qt.
- antocv 12y agoYeah, but the new company will be 100% owned by Digia. So basically this is a nice move from Digia to consolidate its ownership and leadership of Qt. I guess its similar to what Google does.
- toyg 12y agoOr a move from Digia to prepare a sale - it's much easier to sell something like QT if you also include all the relevant developers in one nice package. Or maybe it's a way to insulate Digia from losses resulting from QT operations, who knows? I have to say I'm happy they'll review the installer though; ever since they started packing their own compiler, I got the feeling things became a bit more chaotic than they were.
- octo_t 12y agoplenty of opensource-but-with-enterprise-offerings do the exact same thing, with high levels of success (although I can't think of any examples of this off the top of my head)
- Groxx 12y agoVarious *nix flavors, MySQL, Asterisk...
- e15ctr0n 12y agoAlso, see Wordpress[0][2] and Vanilla Forums[1][3]. They both offer an open source version that you can download and self-host, and a commercial offering which they host and you can customize through a limited set of themes and plugins. Open source, community edition: [0] http://wordpress.org/ http://wordpress.org/ [1] http://vanillaforums.org/ http://vanillaforums.org/ Hosted version with customization via themes and plugins: [2] https://wordpress.com/ https://wordpress.com/ [3] http://vanillaforums.com/ http://vanillaforums.com/
- onli 12y ago
- bananaoomarang 12y agoQt always seems like a thing that has so much potential, but whenever I use it I'm struck by how it never seems quite good enough. 5 seems a big imporvement on 4 though, so we'll see.
- FigBug 12y agoI agree, and I wonder how much further ahead it would be if they'd switched to the current licensing scheme years earlier. Other than writing native for each platform, which I don't have time to do, I haven't seen any good alternatives to Qt. And I'm not going back to MFC.
- Iftheshoefits 12y agoI haven't investigated Qt's mobile offerings or "Qt Quick", but I am fairly certain that on X11-based systems the basic core desktop SDK is as native as any other UI toolkit (e.g. GTK), and on Windows it uses the same core libraries that MSVC-written programs use, so it's as close to "native" as it gets there, too. Is that incorrect?
- jmaygarden 12y agoThat is incorrect unless things have changed in the last few years. Qt does not use native controls. Everything (list boxes, tables, buttons, etc.) is drawn and implemented by the Qt library. wxWidgets takes the opposite approach and uses native controls. I imagine they support a lot fewer platforms as a result. It's much easier to port when all you have to do is abstract the native drawing and input routines.
- joezydeco 12y agoJust great. As if their licensing cost wasn't high enough, this will probably make it way worse.
- milliams 12y agoI'm not sure it's going to affect it at all. What makes you think it will? All they're doing is spinning off a subsidiary to do what the Qt division is already doing.
- joezydeco 12y agoAnd does that have a completely zero cost to accomplish? As I see it, leaving Qt entirely at the mercy of it's licensing revenue stream and not supplemented by Digia's consulting revenue stream means 1) Qt needs to sell more licenses going ahead or 2) Qt needs to charge more per license. The cost of doing business or paying developers will not be going down any time soon. It can only be flat or, more likely, up. And I don't see Qt license numbers making a radical change upward in the near future.
- walterbell 12y agoAre there other options to improve the financial health of the Qt ecosystem?
- joezydeco 12y agoSadly, no. And it's distressing. Especially as I finish work on a UI system that's using it.
- walterbell 12y agoMicrosoft is supposedly consolidating their Windows versions, including desktop and mobile. Too bad they didn't support Qt on mobile from the beginning, as it could have seeded their ecosystem. It's a shame that Digia pricing has no elasticity for the large pool of indie mobile developers. It's either LGPL for zero revenue or $$$ for a paid license. Within that large price gap are products which perform "cloud compilation" that require handing over your IP to a 3rd-party. MoSync had a good open-source run with their LLVM toolchain, but didn't reach stability. If a Qt-native mobile OS had been successful (e.g. Meego pre-Elop), the picture would be different today. Engineering feats have brought Qt to Android and iOS, but it's not the same as being a first-class business citizen of the platform.
- Deusdies 12y agoPhew, for a moment I thought that they will be focusing only on enterprise licenses and make Qt closed-source (which would probably be a suicide).
- milliams 12y agoIt would be suicide and it would also be impossible due to the agreement with the KDE Free Qt Foundation (http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...).
- rat87 12y agonote http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p... > The Foundation has a license agreement with Digia and Nokia. This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Digia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.
- Deusdies 12y agoAmazing, I did not know this (and I use KDE). Thanks.
- Sajeeb 12y agoWhat will be KDE's future?
- milliams 12y agoCompletely unchanged of course.
- milliams 12y agoOriginal announcement at http://qfx.quartalflife.com/Clients/fi/digia/rss/newsentry.aspx?id=1002481436&culture=en-EN http://qfx.quartalflife.com/Clients/fi/digia/rss/newsentry.a...
- jordigh 12y agoDear lazyweb, what exactly is Qt's current business? The blog post makes it sound as if the commercial version of Qt wasn't free software. What freedoms does it take away? I know that Trolltech commercialised Qt by selling exceptions. What's the current business? Also, if 25% of all contributions are coming from non-Digia employees, does Digia require copyright assignment? Does their current commercial model require copyright assignments?
- avar 12y agoYes, they release it under GPL/LGPL and make their money on proprietary licenses for users that can't or won't use those licenses. If you want to develop Qt itself and get your changes included you have to sign a copyright assignment agreement that gives Digia the right to re-license your work. See: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/licensing.html http://qt-project.org/legal.html
- milliams 12y agoThey sell a commercial version without any restrictions on usage. In order to accommodate this they do have a copyright license to Digia (https://codereview.qt-project.org/static/cla_individual.html https://codereview.qt-project.org/static/cla_individual.html).
- jordigh 12y ago> They sell a commercial version without any restrictions on usage. I understand I can't give it to my friends? That's would be a restriction that free software/open source doesn't have.
- milliams 12y agoYou can give it to your friends since all you have is a license to use the source-code under different conditions. It's the same source either way, just you have a special license. Your friends don't have that license and so presumably would be bound by the LGPL.
- codehero 12y agoOne thing you do not see fragmenting are command-line tools, because people tend to agree on their function(1). However, QT is huge; its scope goes far beyond GUI functionality, into string classes, SQL databases, networking, etc. And moc, its C++ code generator. More scope equals more possible disagreements, which necessarily entails fragmentation. I tried installing the Qt version of wireshark using exherbo (one of the most minimal Linux distros) and it wanted MySQL as a dependency! For me, if you cannot build a well focused tool with a GUI toolkit it's not worth using. 1 (sure different Unices have different options, but that is more historical)
- zanny 12y ago> it wanted MySQL as a dependency! For me, if you cannot build a well focused tool with a GUI toolkit it's not worth using. How is Wireshark not well focused? It probably uses a mysql database for its activity history (note: I didn't look, its just a common design pattern). I mean, it seems like a program like Wireshark would be better suited by a simpler sqlite database, but its really up to the project lead on these things.
- geraldcombs 12y agoWireshark doesn't use MySQL or any other SQL backend. I'm not sure what sort of dependency chain would trigger the installation of MySQL but it's unusual to say the least.
- milliams 12y agoAlmost certainly a packaging error where Wireshark depends on Qt and Qt includes all modules, including QtSql.
- regularfry 12y agoLooking at the exherbo package list, it seems that the qt4 package has an optional (or opportunistic) dependency on mysql. And on sqlite. So it ought to be possible to do the equivalent of an `apt-get install --no-install-recommends` to get it without mysql.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y agoOne of the things "missing" from Go is the ability to do a GUI. Some work is being done to build out a QT library, but it seems like the progress on atom-shell and node-webkit may almost make Qt overly cumbersome to work with. Other than native controls and the potential DOM lag of a webkit interface, is there any particular reason why someone programming in Go, Python, Ruby, etc. would want to engage Qt; assuming a stable, working library?
- comex 12y agoYou say "other than", but native controls are a big deal. As an OS X user, I for one would strongly avoid using an application that uses (often generally poor, almost always slightly off with keyboard shortcuts and such) HTML replacements for native UI. (For the record, I don't use Atom, but in that case the horrid performance is more important.) Actually, Qt suffers from this as well compared to native Cocoa, because of both small issues with reimplemented controls (as of recently, anyway) and, more importantly, generally Windows-focused UI paradigms. But it's not as bad as HTML.
- zura 12y agoWhen I hear "GUI" and "native", wxWidgets immediately pops up in my head, which is a decent framework and wraps native controls. I wish it had more publicity.
- comex 12y agoAfter trying to maintain a wxWidgets project about a year ago, I'm afraid I must disagree. It wraps native controls, but it is a horrible broken framework. Among other things, - It uses macros instead of C++ templates in order to support ancient compilers. - To handle events, you're supposed to make an enum for your controls and go through these EVENT_TABLE macros - it works, but generally it's a mess compared to nicer frameworks like Qt. - Threading support is really lame, e.g. this quirk of AddPendingEvent: http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_evt_handler.html#a0737c6d2cbcd5ded4b1ecdd53ed0def3 http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_evt_handler.html#a07... - Then and probably still today, OS X Retina support was completely broken. Not a great turnaround time - it was already a year after the release of Retina laptops.
- e15ctr0n 12y agoHow big is Qt's commercial market? Any breakdown by license fee and professional consulting fee?
- joeld42 12y agoI wish they could just spin off a QT3-era widget library for cross platform desktop only stuff. All the new QtQuick declarative and mobile stuff just confuses me and gets in the way. Believe it or not, Qt used to be a small and lightweight library.
- emilsedgh 12y agoQWidgets are still there.You don't have to use QtQuick.
- bostik 12y agoAnd the best part is that in Qt 5.x the individual components are separate source packages. Off the top of my head ... base for the core Qt; widgets for old style widget library; script and declarative for QtQuick; system for I-don't-remember-what; and so on. If you don't need QtQuick or QtWebKit, you can actually drop quite a few of the packages.
- cyorir 12y agoI do not see this as being very practical. I think that many of the people who use Qt today have been using Qt 4.x or Qt 5.x, whereas the people who would use something like Qt 3.x are probably already using something more along the lines of WxWidgets. Changes that made Qt 4 and up different from Qt 3 were made for a reason. That being said, if a Qt 3-type spin-off were desired and had enough support, I do not see the current developers of Qt (both Digia and outside of Digia) as spending a lot of time on it, since most of the focus is specifically on the features you would want to avoid. My suggestion would be that if you want a widgets-only version of Qt, you could gather a group to create an LGPL spin-off of Qt 4 or Qt 5 using the specific modules you want as a starting base. (I may be wrong, but I think Qt3 still has messy licensing from the Trolltech days).
- v3ss0n 12y agoFor me , Qooxdoo (qooxdoo.org) making QT almost obselete. Qooxdoo + CEF (nodewebkit, atom-shell) making QT un-necessary. I wonder why qooxdoo is very less known around here.