Nokia Announces Qt Open Governance Model

chill writes "Over the past year the Qt Developers have been working to sort out how they can make development of Qt even more inclusive and open. After exploring various options, they are now almost ready to go live with the new solution. It's taken a little longer than expected, but they are now very close to moving hosting of Qt to a new domain: qt-project.org [domain not yet live when posted]. The domain will be owned by a non-profit foundation whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project. More details of the changes are available at the Qt Open Governance Model wiki."

Comments

One foot in?

[bill_mcgonigle]

This is a pleasant surprise. I had understood that Nokia had become entirely dependent on Windows Phone and was setting itself up to be acquired as Microsoft's mobile unit, but then why would they need Qt when MFC/.NET is readily available?

It sounds like somebody decided that they need to keep their options open, which is smart:

At the end of June 2011, Marco Argenti, SVP, Nokia Developer Experience, confirmed that Nokia will âoemake Qt core to bringing applications to the next billion,â and he reassured developers that investments made in Qt today will live on in the future with Nokia. Adding the information about the 9M+ downloads per day on the Ovi Store, already today, provides a hint about the opportunity developers have with Nokia.

To mince the fine points with the submitter:

foundation whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project

There seems to be at least two things going on. The above statement is true:

I want to make it very clear that the foundation will not steer the project in any way. The foundation is in place only to cover the costs of hosting and run the infrastructure.

But this is also different:

All technical decisions, as well as decisions about the project direction, will be taken by the community of Contributors, Approvers and Maintainers. For example this means that people in Nokia working on Qt will start working with Qt as an upstream project. Everyone will be using the same infrastructure, including mailing lists and IRC ... but it may surprise you that that around 15% of the initial Maintainers do not work for Nokia. We also have quite a few Approvers from companies and the community. ...

The Qt governance, roadmap and releases will be driven openly by the Qt Project â" open to all the stakeholders willing to contribute. It will have an open governance model based on equal access to all discussions and tools, an open contribution process and meritocratic assignment of roles. We want Qt to excel by all measurements as a transparent, merit-based and participative open source community project. We believe this is the key to speeding up development and increasing the adoption of Qt.

Yet, they recognize the elephant in the room and are open about it:

As a last point I wanted to talk about one thing that is fixed for the project and not going to go away. To contribute to Qt, you will have to sign a Contribution License Agreement with Nokia. We have put a lot of effort keeping the Qt codebase legally clear and clean, and this attention to detail will continue under the Qt Project. We have been over the last months reviewed the CLA extensively with many stakeholders and believe we have a solution that is as inclusive as possible for all companies and individuals that want to contribute to Qt. The CLA also enables the commercial ecosystem around Qt to continue to thrive and contribute to the project. Further, there are a number of legal obligations from Trolltech and Nokia that have to be taken into account.

This license has a few problems any contributing entity is going to feel leery about. Just a few that jump out:

For the avoidance of doubt, Nokia has the right and no obligation whatsoever to utilize any Contribution and Nokia shall have the right, at its exclusive discretion, to include, suspend and/or exclude any Contribution from any release of Nokia Software Products.

I can see why Nokia wants to not imply they'll maintain a useless patchset forever, but they also have a potential strategic weapon against competitors here.

The seat, or legal place, of arbitration shall be Helsinki, Finland.

Sad apathy.

[Microlith]

The sad apathy and silence around this move, and the Qt project, shows how far Slashdot's reader base has fallen from being interested in FOSS and open development models.

It's all about being treated as second-rate by Google these days, white knighting for Apple, or reading shit articles posted by samzenpus/kdawson/timothy.