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."

Comments

First comment on referenced article

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:er...

[MrHanky]

It has. Also, anyone bothering to check facts, such as the public git repository, can see that it's still actively developed.

Wow, how can you be so far off the mark?

[t_hunger]

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!

Re:Wow, how can you be so far off the mark?

[suy]

Exactly, just a quick look at the dev blog shows the following updates with respect to new features (some stable releases, some tech preview):

• QML Scene Graph in master branch
• Qt Webkit minor releas
• Qt 4.8 tech preview
• Updates on Qt Creator, and its integration on the SDK
• Updates on the open governance
• Qt Quick 3D
• Qt Mobility 1.2
• First plans for Qt 5

This is only during May. If anything, I see Qt more alive than ever.

There is also the misconception that only the Qt developers do interesting research and add features. That's very wrong. Lots of KDE ideas were implemented in Qt at one point or another. Also note that companies like Digia or ICS (and several others) are now way more involved in Qt than ever, and will be more once the open governance transition finishes.

Re:The future of everything is uncertain; thats li

[ensignyu]

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.

Meanwhile.....

[diegocg]

...QT continues developing announcing cool features, like the QML scene graph (post from today)