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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."
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.
The problem is that development is funded by the people who pay for non-free licences. If that income dries up, the KDE project would have to put their own development team together with volunteers or donation/grant funded developers.
It has. Also, anyone bothering to check facts, such as the public git repository, can see that it's still actively developed.
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.
3) Stop believing in crap opinion pieces by random know-nothings on the web.
... 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!
... hasn't QT been LGPL'd? I don't see the problem.
Some feel that Qt's superiority stems from its corporate sponsorship, and that being "demoted" to a sponsorless open-source project like GTK will result in a loss in quality. Others (like me) think that a lot of the quality is in the product design itself and that while development may slow down post-Nokia, it will still provide a superior open source toolkit for the forseeable future.
Hilarious. Translated: March faster to oblivion.
What fool would buy a Nokia smartphone after all the jerking around of customers and developers? The sad thing is Nokia had the best actual phone technology in the business (i.e., actually making calls with good voice quality).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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.
ITS ABOUT DAMN TIME!
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.
...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.
On the upside there is increasing confidence they'll be able to ship at least one WP7 product
A WP7 product is an upside?
I said stop believing, not stop reading. If you stopped reading Slashdot, then how would you know whom to flame?
It was GPL/commercial dual licence for ages, and more recently LGPL'd.
Development is continuing, this is a complete FUD non-story. Qt isn't going to disappear even if Nokia did.
Sent from my PDP-11
Thanks for the tasty FUD!
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
Looks like there's quite a bit of activity from just the last week
-the brand new Qt Developer Network has been deserted by the trolls
It'd be great if things were deserted by the trolls, I guess... Anyway, it doesn't seem deserted by the users
-the blog posts on Qt labs are just about future project, never anything concrete for the current library
Of the five posts on the front page, two are about merges of experimental features (the QML scenegraph and Lighthouse), two about conferences and summits, and one's about the release of QtWebkit 2.1.1. Not current enough for you?
-the plans for Qt 5 announced recently are ridiculous, no troll was involved in those
I'm not even going to reply to that one!
-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.
Latest commit is dated Jun 1 2011
Now, WTF are you talking about again?