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Free Software Faces a Test With Qt
An anonymous reader writes with an article in TechRadar. From the article: "Thanks to Nokia's jump to Windows Phone 7, from the frying pan into the fire, its Free Software darling, the Qt toolkit, has been left living on vague promises and shell-shocked, hollow enthusiasm. Nokia has pledged some continued investment, bonuses for developers who stick with the platform and even a phone or two that might use it. But the truth is that Qt is deprecated, the project has stalled, and its future is uncertain."
Nokia today restated their sales and profit projections for this quarter and retracted the full year prediction completely. They report seeing strong competition in emerging markets and pricing pressures around the world. The stock's price fell over 14 percent on the day and plumbed a new full-year low. On the upside there is increasing confidence they'll be able to ship at least one WP7 product before the end of the year.
... hasn't QT been LGPL'd? I don't see the problem.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
It hasn't.
From the first comment on the linked article:
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, and have not been following the Qt project's development lately.
Development is steaming ahead, releases are coming out, and they are hard working on Qt 5. They are also putting Qt into open governance, so even "outside" people may take "ownership" of certain parts of the project, and be more involved in the development of the project.
Qt is, in other words, no way near its end of life. (Also, KDE wouldn't *need* to fork, if Qt did come to its End of Life. Obviously you haven't heard of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which was set up very early on between KDE and then Trolltech (and updated when Nokia bought Trolltech). Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3 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.)
So please, stop spreading FUD.
This is a lot more accurate than the article or the Slashdot post. Seriously, folks, Qt existed a long time before Nokia. KDE never needed Nokia's support, and Nokia didn't use KDE. Keep calm and carry on.
Sometimes I get the feeling that all you need to do in order get on Slashdots front page is to post an inflammatory article about open source.with no real basis.
Palm trees and 8
... where a reputable news source would have checked its sources for accuracy first. stagnated and stalled? Hmm... Just two weeks ago we had very different news.
In reality, even if Qt stopped dead in the water with no development from anyone, it'd still be one of the best documented GUI libraries out there. I've never been a fanboy of any particular software suite, but the more and more I've dove into Qt in the last year the more I'm truly impressed with the design and documentation of the toolkit. Somehow I don't think it's going away.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
They can spin Trolltech back out, if as a product it is worth the money. Or, all the fans/supporters can pick up the GPLed portions of QT and keep the ball rolling (if there is indeed a groundswell of community support). It's not like Nokia is holding the only copy of the QT source code, and is dangling it over a bottomless pit...
This happens to projects and products all the time. The article, for it's good intentions, makes it sound like no software ever died on the vine before. Yeah, right.
KDE is already involved in the changes it wants for QT that are KDE-specific, aren't they? It's not like that would stop development cold. Hell, it might even make it easier for them to get the changes they want put in. Whether that adversely effects the rest of the developers who use QT for other things... well, I can't speak to that.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Since the windows 7 announcement the following things happend in Qt land: The Qt SDK had mayor update, Qt Creator had a new release, Qt had some minor updates, the open governance program is in full swing, Qt 5 was announced with open planning, there is a Contributor Summit coming up to discuss all these changes with non-Nokia developers...
Yeap, Qt has all the hallmarks of a dead project!
Regards, Tobias
Qt is actually LGPL now. Furthermore, if Nokia decides to stop developing Qt, the KDE Free Qt Foundation can vote to release Qt under a BSD license.
Report of Qt's death is greatly exaggerated.
ITS ABOUT DAMN TIME!
They're losing market share hand over fist and their share price has fallen to almost half what it was when they announced their switch from Meego.
Regardless of what the Qt developers do, the toolkit is very good and available. You can just use it to build your software and let the rest of the world jump in a lake. The worst that can happen is that Qt development will be slow and steady.
I18N == Intergalacticization
I hate to come across as advertising, but for those worried about the possibility of any specific API going away ...
I've found that most small to mid-sized GUI applications only really need the basics: windows, menus, buttons, check/radio boxes, list/tree views, sliders, scollbars, combo boxes, and something to render graphics (Direct3D/OpenGL/raw pixels) onto. It won't get you Photoshop or Quark Xpress, but that's enough for most CLI frontends, emulators, text/hex editors, office tools, etc.
I put all my eggs in the Qt basket and got burned by a lot of platform-specific bugs. So I took all the core features and wrote a unified wrapper around all of the major toolkit APIs: pure Win32, GTK+ and Qt. In this way, there are no 4-10MB run-time library dependencies, the code is much simpler, and I feel my applications are more portable: the wrapper is so small one could port it to eg Haiku, Cocoa, etc in roughly one weekend. I can also target any platform (Win32, Win64, Linux, OS X), and any toolkit available on each, with the exact same codebase. Eg both Gnome and KDE users gets 100% native apps.
Doesn't have a snazzy public name, but internally I call it phoenix, and it's available here, if anyone is interested. There are, of course, obvious downsides: if you want a complex GUI, you would have to add the higher-order, platform-specific (floating docks, grid views, tab bars, sheets) controls yourself. And it also targets C++0x, which is great for lambda callbacks, but bad for portability at the moment.
As opposed to GTK+, where the project is healthy, the toolkit project is changing rapidly, and GNOME's future is uncertain because there's a giant user backlash over the changes.
...QT continues developing announcing cool features, like the QML scene graph (post from today)
The only truth here is that the article was written by a completely ignorant asshat.
Reform Trolltech?
Some comments here claim Qt is not dying because Nokia made some announcement and the Qt blog is hyperactive.
But look at the facts:
-the IRC channel they used: #qt-labs, has almost no activity since February
-the brand new Qt Developer Network has been deserted by the trolls
-the blog posts on Qt labs are just about future project, never anything concrete for the current library
-the plans for Qt 5 announced recently are ridiculous, no troll was involved in those
-the development on qt.gitorious.org stalled since February
If there is not quickly a fork of Qt, we will discover in 2 years that Qt is outdated and there is no longer any professional GUI library for Linux.
If QT gets a wrapper so it can handle GTK apps, then its future would be more certain than ever. With the crap that is Gnome 3, I'd happily switch to KDE so long as all my apps work there. Of course you can install GTK along with KDE so they'll work, but not needing the whole of GTK would be nice. Or I suppose I can just find KDE apps, but what about GIMP and Inkscape on KDE?
When you overuse commas, it has the effect, of making your writing, read as though it were being read, by William Shatner.
Qt is THE best Cross Platform software development solution. It is mature and is going to new heights once again in Qt 5 to make it easier to develop software and deploy anywhere, Android devices included.
Nokia however may be currently a target of an attack on it's image to spread FUD on it's investors, see today market opening for nokia and this FUD right here on Slashdot.
There is one thing that established players fear, and that is concurrence, and when those people can't compete technologically go the legal/marketing(cheaters) way. See Apple teasing Samsung recently.
The deal with MSFT is obscure and against the nature of open source. The deal with digia to sell commercial QT licenses feels like disablement also.
The core stuff in Linux is hardly Qt. If there were ever any issue with the Apache Software Foundation, the GNU Compiler Collection or similar stuff then I would begin to worry. The reality is that Linux is mostly used for server stuff and in my case, I think the best setup is to have a Linux server with either Mac or Windows desktops. Sure, you can do an all Linux, all Mac or all Windows setup but in my opinion going fully with Mac or Windows is too expensive and fully with Linux a little incompatible when it comes to file formats (AutoCAD, some Office stuff) plus the training of clueless users.
There seems to be a lot of talk about whether KDE might (eventually) need to fork Qt, but this misses an important point - Qt is not just a "KDE widget toolkit". It's the best cross-platform UI (and many other things, actually) framework at the moment. If Nokia drops future development and KDE takes over, will they have desire and resources to maintain Windows and OS X ports? what about embedded?
It would be a damn shame to see Qt relegated to KDE backend, with future development being restricted to X11 version.
This was the sort of license/ownership issue forseen by Miguel and the crew back 'round '97.
That's when the GNOME project was initiated, as a hedge against Qt forking up - despite the stated good intentions of TrollTech.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
OR the community will, under the Foundation Trolltech assigned rights to so long ago, to address concerns of KDE developers, promote the continued development of KDE, and clear out doubts about Qt's future free status (vs. Gnome's):
As soon as Nokia's stock price drops another 8 percent, I'm buying a bunch to hold.
As soon as the Nokia Windows phones start coming out, I'm going to be out of Nokia like a prom dress.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Dont be Douches...
LGPL the whole thing. free it to the world completely. If you want to make a difference do this.
If you want to be jerks... kill it and keep it in a safe forever to rot away.
Because you either can gain great credit and renown, or become that company that squirreled away something you though had value, but was made value-less by the OSS version that will be created within moments of you doing the jerk move.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here's why.
Qt5 will have the maturity needed to accomplish the following:
Whole client-side programs written in Javascript (QML) that use OpenCL/GL and web resources. (Better than Flash)
LGPL (Better than Flash)
Client and server apps (Better than Flash)
One platform for Web, Phone and desktop (same as AIR)
Qt went 4.8-rc-1 recently with all these features, but when Qt5 comes out it'll have the maturity it needs. SceneGraph went into mainline today.
Awesome is coming.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Thank goodness. That is exceptionally good forward thinking on the part of the founders. I almost hope Nokia goes dumps Qt.
I'll fix it for you:
"As opposed to GTK+, where the project is healthy, the toolkit project is changing rapidly, and GNOME's future is uncertain because the Gnome developers lost their goddam minds and shat out a turd called Gnome3."
"Unknown Lamer", hey, I know your from Microsoft. Its interesting to see that you guys read /. But let us get this straight: Say ballmer, you failed to drop the nokia stock price by FUD for the coming Nokia Mobile Division buyout.
NokiaWatch
We already have.
-- Nokia
It's entirely possible that the fruits we've been seeing released these past few months are the product of development that happened before Nokia went Windows. While I personally hope to see Qt thrive, I think its future won't really be clear for another half a year or so.
Microsoft has done what it wanted to do with QT.
There has been a lot of effort put in to intentionally confusing copyleft (GPL) with open source. So much so that people often mix the two up and there are many articles, conferences and debates where open source is centre stage - giving the impression to some that the GPL is alive and kicking.
In reality many of the people currently pushing open source are in it simply to kill the GPL. They push BSD style licenses because they know they can take that code, including your contributions, amend it then close source the result any time they like. With the resources available to a corporation with a lot of money it would be impossible for a volunteer effort to fork the code and still keep up. Even if you tried, your open source version would be sidelined.
The only license which guarantees that code, and all code spawned from it, remain open is the GPL (has anyone taken the precaution of archiving a copy of the last QT version to be GPL'd?).
Open source licenses which do not require that all derived code be kept open are just mechanisms to outflank the GPL and steal code. Nobody in their right mind would volunteer code to a BSD/LGPL licensed project unless they intended that the code be closed sourced at some point.
A GPL license is like a democratic constitution which states that "Every person will have one vote except that no vote may be taken to abolish this system" Some people would say it is less free because it has that 'restriction' (in fact it's a guarantee). Using much the same logic some people say that GPL is less open than, say, the BSD - because the GPL guarantees that it and all derivatives will remain open while the BSD/LGPL allow it. If you can't see the crooked logic involved in that conclusion you are a sad person indeed.
I have never heard of 'techradar.com'. Now I know that they don't bother to exercise any editorial control over quality of content, so I will know to never look again. Very poor.
Yeah, because all the email and SMS capabilities work real well when most of the time you're communicating with someone on a landline.
I wish I had mod points right now; I'd bump you down just for the flamebait phrasing.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
while i agree that insulting people is generally not a good way to get your point across, what he's saying is that the landline is just about dead - I doubt anyone that moved out of their parent's house after around 2003 or so got one - why would you? When all the boomers (like my parents, and many other's parents) die out, the land lines will die with them.
don't get me wrong, this is not about me (or anyone else) WANTING the land line to die, and I completely understand why people keep them (everyone has your number, etc) - but for those of us that never got a chance to buy one (i grad'ed college in '05 and already had a cell when i moved to an apt), there's just no reason to ever get one.
develop for gtk?
Fixed that for you.
Is it because of unwillingness to license under BSD the real motivation that keeps Nokia continuing development of Qt?
Isn't the author here one of the hardcore "WE HATE KDE!"/"Choice is confusing!"/"Why can't Linux just be a version of Mac OSX that we don't have to pay for?" people on the "TuxRadar" podcast?
That would explain the apparent overexcitement about the imagined doom of Qt. Premature Schadenfreud.
(Try thinking about baseball next time, ...uh, or cricket, I guess.)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
This blog post is terribly misinformed, and the author is panicing over an imagined threat.
The QT Project is not dying. End of story.