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KDE Developers Discuss Merging Libraries With Qt
An anonymous reader writes "A proposal has been brought up with KDE developers by Cornelius Schumacher to merge the KDE libraries with the upstream Qt project. This could potentially lead to KDE5 coming about sooner than anticipated, but there's very mixed views on whether merging kdelibs with Qt would actually be beneficial to the KDE project, which has already led to two lengthy mailing list talks (the first and second threads). What do you think?"
No! No! No! I enjoy having Qt free from other stuff! It's big enough already! If you want, just make a system better of find a way to communicate better, but DO NOT FUCK MY PRECIOUS Qt!
I'll fork it if I have too!
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
After seeing the last attempt at cooperation over Phonon - which was half-implemented in Qt, then Nokia went with Qt Multimedia while KDE continued evolving Phonon but all the new things aren't in Qt I wouldn't want them to try. Some of the functionality that exists on the KDE layer should be pushed down into Qt, but most should stay out otherwise there will be far too much platform in the toolkit.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They just want to change everything all the fucking time until all the users flock to something less flashy and more productive, and then the KDE devs will be free to play Starcraft all day long.
So why haven't you moved to something less flashy and more productive? I certainly have and I suspect a large number of others have too. The straws that broke this camel's back were the ridiculous weight of the "semantic desktop" and the seemingly endless supply of visual fluff that adds nothing to utility.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
This is a quote from the Qt licensing FAQ:
"Can I switch from using Qt under the LGPL to commercial afterwards?
"No. Users of the LGPL versions of Qt need to comply with the LGPL licensing terms and conditions. Qt's commercial license agreement contains a restriction that prohibits customers from initially beginning development with the LGPL-licensed version of Qt and then transitioning to a commercial version of Qt."
Four sections earlier, the FAQ says this, in part:
"... If you are uncertain as to whether or not you will be able to comply with the LGPL requirements at the time you begin your development, our recommendation is that you purchase a commercial license as it gives you the flexibility to decide licensing (commercial or LGPL) at the time of distribution."
It seems to me that it would be easy for a company to create a legal mess for itself. What a company will do in the future cannot be foreseen.
What would happen if a developer at a company who did not have a commercial license, but was using a free license, contributed to a commercial project? Often there are discussions about architecture, and someone may contribute ideas for an architecture that are later adopted. The sociology of programming is not as clean as Qt licensing apparently considers it to be.
Note that this problem was not created by Nokia. It existed when Qt was owned by Trolltech.
I have: XFCE. I still use Kate and kio though. A few times a day, I have to run a few killalls to reap zombie kio processes, but at least the WM doesn't get in my way anymore.
-Billco, Fnarg.com