
A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE - t4h4
http://www.olafsw.de/a-better-qt-because-of-open-source-and-kde/
======
giancarlostoro
> In case The Qt Company would ever attempt to close down Open Source Qt, the
> foundation is entitled to publish Qt under the BSD license. This notable
> legal guarantee strengthens Qt. It creates trust among developers,
> contributors and customers.

Woah, I had no idea about this. I wonder what kind of new changes would take
place if Qt were BSD licensed, such as languages like D embedding it as a
solution for UIs as part of the standard library (they already do this for
SQLite and Curl).

~~~
toyg
Qt is _massive_ , I doubt small communities would rush to integrate it and
make it their job to maintain it all...

I doubt anyone in OSS communities is seriously deterred from using Qt because
of the LGPL. It’s just a very big and very complex project that requires a lot
of manpower to “tame”.

~~~
ori_b
Already happened: [https://www.copperspice.com](https://www.copperspice.com)

~~~
Rochus
Thanks for the hint. Didn't know it. As it seems it is no longer Qt. They once
started with Qt (don't know which version) but they have "completely diverged"
as they say. The goal is not to have a free Qt but to have "Extensive use of
modern C++ functionality" (with all these buzzwords). Not even shure if their
containers are still implicitly shared. Will even though continue to have a
look at it.

~~~
dev-il
> don't know which version

apparently, they forked from Qt 4.8 and QML is disabled in Copperspice. Ref:

[https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/timeline.html#t...](https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/timeline.html#tm-05-2012)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9685022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9685022)

[https://forum.copperspice.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1152](https://forum.copperspice.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1152)

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cjensen
The behavior of the Qt company lately is a bit troubling.

First, the core can be licensed under Commercial or LGPL licensing. This let's
non-paying developers use the core in commercial software. This policy was
established to ensure trust with the community during one of the many company
transitions. For all new modules, Qt evades that requirement by licensing
under Commercial or GPL. I have mixed feelings on this.

Second and more importantly, they have started sending aggressive audit
letters to customers. I guess that makes sense from a bean-counter point of
view where you poke the customer and try to get them to buy more licenses
either because the customer actually needs the licenses, or because the
customer is afraid to let any dev work without paying protection money. This
is a huge pain in the neck for me as a paying customer. They even sent the
aggressive audit letter to an old license we have that had not been renewed
(or used) in around a decade.

I'll definitely be rethinking my relationship as a customer when the next
renewal comes up.

~~~
api
Its weird what people and businesses will and will not support.

Businesses will shovel loads of money into SaaS and cloud hosting without
blinking, but support a programming tool? Never! Another hundred Office users
and 50 more AWS VMs? No problem.

People will spend $10 on a coffee but would never spend $5 to support a
project that saves them hundreds or thousands of hours of work. They'll spend
$15/month to host a site, but would never pay for the software that runs it
even though that took far more effort than racking up some servers.

No wonder everything is surveillanceware and mega-corp silos. We get what we
pay for, or rather we don't get what we won't pay for... like independent
software.

~~~
cjensen
Sure. In the case of Qt, it was very expensive but well worth paying for
because it does a good job. The LGPL stuff is important because it provides us
with an "out" if the Qt company goes crazy with prices.

Avoiding the "out" makes me not want to make use of the new modules. And the
hassle of audits makes be question the cost of the inconvenience to me, the
dev, of having a license.

It's tradeoffs all the way down.

~~~
Rochus
It's outrageously expensive. And you can't just buy what you really need, just
all or nothing. In many projects I only need Qt Core; for that I would have to
buy a license for everything from these people with a far worse contract than
LGPL and pay royalties. No thanks.

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dev-il
Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death
of Qt:

Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license
(LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract
developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as
Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)…

… unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly traded as QT-COM on
Nasdaq Helsinki) sees Qt as a direct revenue source to monetize to the maximum
and developers as milk cows to maximally squeeze out as long as possible. And
unlike Nokia, Digia's "Qt Company" does so in a quite unsustainable way. They
enormously increased the prices of commercial licenses to a level that can
only be qualified as extortion, and they do whatever possible to force
developers out of LGPL and into Pay-to-Play:

they switched Qt's open source edition from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3… and they
switched from LGPL to GPL or commercial only for most new modules, including
QtQuick 3D.

The bottom line is: it's really going down the drain, and lots of developers
of Qt-based programs and apps are drawn away and looking for something new.
The need for a new modern and more liberally licensed cross-platform UI lib is
bigger than ever.

Also, many devs are even switching out of Qt-based cross-platform development
and back to separate codebases for OS-dependent native UI toolkits… which is
kinda sad, though partly alleviated by some other factors (such as the
similarities between Swift and Kotlin)

~~~
de_watcher
Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL?

Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're
talking about.

~~~
Kelteseth
No QtQuick3d [1] was from the beginning GPLv3 only (It is not even released
yet, but Qt 5.14 release is tommorow). It is a bit awkward because now there
are competing 3d engines inside one toolkit.

[1] [https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html](https://doc-
snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html)

------
toyg
Trolltech were pretty awesome, in their days. The “poison-pill BSD” setup is
pretty smart; if i remember correctly , it was introduced when they started
wobbling a bit from the commercial perspective, in order to keep the community
calm while they went looking for buyers (which they eventually found in
Nokia). It would be sad if the switch had to be triggered at a time when QT is
supposed to be “back in the game” after years of uncertainty.

Dear Qt owners, don’t mess around. If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not
because of the license. Build more bridges, and more developers will come to
you.

~~~
Nokinside
>If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license.

QT stock is up 124% this year, +247,06% last 3 years.

Qt has de facto monopoly in embedded, medical, automotive, appliance and
industry automation. It works in Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, QNX, and VxWorks.

Qt just launched Qt for MCUs (bare metal toolkit for low end
microcontrollers). It runs on Cortex-M with several different 2D accelerators.
It's yet another market with no serious competitors.

~~~
toyg
That’s good, so why change the license now? Is it just greed?

~~~
Nokinside
Nobody knows what type of change they want. Their paying customers don't care
because the product is double licensed.

I suspect it has something to do with some 3d libraries and code they would
like to include, but I don't know.

------
jbk
> Background is the wish of The Qt Company to change some of the contract
> provisions. It is still a bit unclear which ideas exactly they are pursuing

I think this is the reason of the timing of this post.

Because else, this post is just reminding the existing contracts around Qt.

~~~
hoistbypetard
Can you briefly explain (or link an existing explanation) a summary of the
changes the Qt Company is asking for, to someone who's interested but not
intimately familiar with the details?

~~~
thomascgalvin
It says in the article and the quote that the proposed changes are still
unclear.

~~~
hoistbypetard
I understand that. I was hoping someone who's closer to the matter could
characterize them in broad strokes even if details were still unclear.

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shmerl
It would be good for KDE to get stronger backing, but I've heard RedHat avoids
backing KDE and focuses on Gnome, due to aversion¹ to contributor agreements²,
is that correct in that case?

1\. [https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-
problems](https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems)

2\. [https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-
qt](https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt)

~~~
KozmoNau7
I recommend the KDE neon distro to every Linux-curious person I meet. It's the
latest and greatest KDE on top of an Ubuntu base, and it's by far the best
desktop distro I have tried in my ~20 years of using Linux on the desktop.

~~~
K0SM0S
A fantastic DE experience indeed.

Just some advice: public consensus is that if you don't want the bleeding edge
of KDE, Kubuntu is basically just as good (KDE over Ubuntu) and reportedly is
more compatible with various hardware — so if your laptop has issues with
Neon, try Kubuntu as a nearly identical alternative.

Note that you can get KDE on any major distro, e.g. Fedora, Arch. I can't
recommend it enough, KDE is the dream DE — great out-of-the-box, but settings
for pretty much everything, set each once and then forget it as it gets out of
your way without sacrificing any feature whatsoever. There are a few minor
glitches, but much less so than Gnome or MacOS or Win 10 in my anecdotal
experience (notwithstanding display support, that's driver-related and whole
other ballgame).

~~~
KozmoNau7
Neon _is_ KDE over Ubuntu, with a completely stock KDE packaging rather than
the slightly Ubuntu-modified KDE in Kubuntu.

So hardware support really should be identical.

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BlueTemplar
Am I the only one that finds it weird that a document like this, that
basically shouldn't care about layout, and is very unlikely to be printed by
anyone (except maybe the author himself), would be distributed as a .pdf?

