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Digia Spinning Off Qt Division Into New Company
An anonymous reader writes with news that, after a six year journey, Qt will once again be maintained by a standalone company. From the Digia weblog:
... Even though the open source project and the commercial side of Qt are highly dependent upon each other, they have over the last years drifted apart. ... Because of the separation between the open source and commercial offerings, we often end up competing against ourselves instead of competing against other technologies. ... We are now starting a conscious effort to overcome these problems. As you might have read, Digia has decided to move the Qt business into a company of its own. Thus we will soon have a company (owned by Digia), that will focus 100% on Qt. At the same time we would like to take the opportunity and retire qt.digia.com and merge it with the content from qt-project.org into a new unified web presence. The unified web page will give a broad overview of the Qt technology, both enterprise and open-source, from a technical, business and messaging perspective.
we often end up competing against ourselves instead of competing against other technologies
You don't compete against technologies, you compete against other businesses.
How about something like:
Trolltech 2.0
Qtrolls
CloudQ(t)
aQt Synergies
Re:Qt
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I think I heard something like this 15 years ago when I first started using KDE. That's a pretty slow death, don't you think?
Wonder if this is a coincidence that they are doing it now, when MS is laying off quite a lot of ppl in Finland. They could grab some of the workforce, possibly even some of the original Trolls who ended up being Nokia employees.
I'd say you are the imbecile. QT is crossplatform, and it can be used from embedded systems to mainframes, with different OSs. Are you that fucking clueless, that you think microsoft is the only game in town? I'm working on a project, though personally not with QT, that uses QT and i can tell you it's a multimillion dollar project.
I foresee plenty of dead links to qt.digia.com in the future.
I usually heard how nice is to develop using Qt. How it's easy, community friendly, last surprise, etc. But I never saw the big guys interest in the Qt owner.
Just wondering if a better future would be in the landscape if some big company with good open source compromise (in theory) like Intel buy Qt.
Don't feed the trolls
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I don't know one single person who uses QT for a serious, money making program.
Off hand, I can think of at least three S&P 500 companies who disagree with you: Autodesk uses it for Maya. Altera uses it for Quartus. And Microsoft (according to you, they "won") use it for Skype. However, there are countless other companies out there who use it. They don't all advertise it, though, so you're probably running programs that use Qt without realizing it. Companies that purchase the commercial license aren't required to announce prominently that they use Qt, and Qt by default uses native widgets wherever possible, so it's not always obvious whether you're using Qt or not.
No, they haven't been called Trolltech for a while...
Blizzard uses it for their integrated launcher application, just to name one that's probably extremely common.
I gotta say, I never understood Qt. I promise I don't mean for this to be a troll post. Qt seems like a neat idea. Every so often, I go over there and take a look at what the kids are up to. You know, sort of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. I download. I install. I try to build some of the samples. None of the projects are set up properly. I give up for another 6-9 months.
The most recent attempt was 5.3.1. Downloaded and installed on Ubuntu. Try to build some of the Qt Quick and QML samples. Nope. Include paths not set properly. One project is even missing a main.cpp.
This happens every time. I mean there is always something wrong with it somewhere. They can't even QA their own samples to make sure they work out of the box? Does anyone ever even look at this stuff?
How is this project still alive???
I don't know. Whatever. I guess this is good news, so .. congratulations. Or something.
Off hand, I can think of at least three S&P 500 companies who disagree with you
CadSoft also use it for EAGLE.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I've noticed Ubuntu has *WORSE* examples support than gentoo, and some of gentoo's packaging is pretty iffy.
In fact I can't think of a linux distro that has actually had consistently good example packaging that didn't require as much finagling as just writing an example from scratch.
I'm systems architect at a Fortune 50 business. Our division used to be so Microsoft oriented that their plaques still cover most of our lobby walls. We are moving at least most of our native applications to Qt. This process started several years ago, and one of our flagship product lines is already mostly Qt. We're removing MFC, WinForms, ActiveX, Silverlight and WPF and replacing with HTML5/CSS/JS and Qt. Most developers love it.
Qt is far easier to use and more elegant than .NET and other Microsoft solutions. The number of Windows-only apps leverage Qt is amazing. Your choice of desktop OS does not limit your choice of application development frameworks.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Most hardware sold last year can run QT, and does not run Microsoft.net. "already been fought, and won, by Microsoft". How exactly is having a minority (and falling) market share "won"?
Here's a copy of QT that will run on most of the hardware sold last year:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5...
Where's the .Net that will run on more than a small portion of currently sold hardware?
The problem with Qt is that it is C++, and C++ is not widely used by developers. .NET uses a virtual machine which many languages (including C++) can target.
Digia got all of the trolls that were in Nokia, except for those from the office in Australia :-/
Any Qt users interested in this?
http://google.github.io/VoltAir/doc/main/html/index.html
There are a number of language bindings so that you can build Qt applications without writing a single line of C++. I've built medium sized desktop applications with Python and the pyside module. And it is pretty easy to do so. It is one of the best toolkits available for Python.
Another example, TortoiseHG, uses PyQt.
> use it for Skype
Small precision: only on Linux. It's native on MacOS and it's Delphi on Windows.
No more... "you tell us what you're doing and we'll decide how much we want to charge you" bullshit. I want clean and clear commercial licensing costs written down, up front. Otherwise I'm not even going to consider the technology for the project.
I believe it imitates the look of native widgets but doesn't actually use them. This should allow for consistent behaviour on all platforms (unlike, say, WxWidgets).
Sorry, i had a piece of sausage in my pocket and it was going bad.
This is probably subjective; I found the barrier of entry for Qt pretty significant, while mastering .NET seems almost trivial. Or maybe I'm just broken inside; all possibilities must be considered.
Seriously, anyone who invests in this technology is an imbecile. This war has already been fought, and won, by Microsoft. I don't know one single person who uses QT for a serious, money making program. As a hobby, or educational exercise, it's fine. To put food on the table and my kids through college - give me .NET.
Well, there's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... And I can assure you, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Every company I've worked for in the last 10 years have used Qt for some product or another.
Havoc Video
I can name some more: Halliburton, Shell, and Pixar.* One application I worked on made over $1 million a week last I heard.
For anyone doing serious 3D scientific computing on Linux, Qt is the de facto standard. Motif is simply awful and Gnome doesn't solve portability.
(*I wrote code that shipped for 2/3 the three companies.)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I've found it to be the other way around.
"Qt is far easier to use and more elegant than .NET and other Microsoft solutions." - Citation Required
I've used Qt and love it, but C#, NET and it's Visual Studio integration beats it hands down on Windows platforms.
How are Qt on Windows? On OS X, they look ugly and have loads of annoying trivial UI bugs (really simple things, like having the buttons the wrong way around in dialogs and having keyboard shortcuts in text fields do something different to every other text field in the system). On X11 systems I don't really expect any consistency, so they seem no more out of place than everything else (or, if you're using KDE, are the standard and so are at least self consistent). On Windows, do you get the same UI niggles, or does it integrate more cleanly?
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Qt by default uses native widgets wherever possible
Not true. Qt widgets appear to be native, but in fact they are not (but your post is proof that they made quite a good job with the appearance). This is a bit of problem on macos where Qt has some issues with appearance (or at least used to have).
Digia Mobile is a JOKE
They have practically zero abstractions that are useful for cross platform mobility applications and expect us to pay for it?
I just did an evaluation paper on it, told the company basically, save your money and wait.
The GP is probably an astroturfer rather than a troll. OTOH, there really *are* idiots who believe that kind of garbage, even after being shafted by MS a couple of times.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But even though the open source project and the commercial side of Qt are highly dependent upon each other, they have over the last years drifted apart.
Perhaps because major new functionality is only in the commercial edition?
Digia has made a -lot- of new functionality commercial-only. Charting, graphing, UI widgets, core updates to Creator, the Qt Quick compiler, the UI profiler, in-app purchasing... It's enough that the Free Qt Foundation should be asking "If all new major features of Qt are commercial-only, at what point is it abandoned and subject to the default BSD license clause?"
Developers use lots of things. I still use C, some use C++, some Python, some Java, even a few still use C#. Certainly it may make sense as a hiring manager to look for people who only know the currently fashionable trends in languages, but that shouldn't drive a technology choice.
And besides, Qt has started moving away from fast and smooth compiled languages to a markup-style QML. There are bindings to many different languages.
The problem with . NET is that it is Windows only. Mono is just a partially working proof of concept that does nothing more than try to obscure the fact that .NET is Microsoft controlled and intended by design to only be for Windows.
And while that's a significant platform, it's still just a fraction of platforms that developers use. In fact Windows is probably in the minority of target platforms that are out there, it's overwhelmed by the number of embedded and mobile devices. .NET may be ok on Windows but it's nearly useless for designing a cross platform application that can also work on MacOS and Linux (and mono doesn't solve that problem either).
We use it for GUI interface in industrial controllers.
46137
I know quote a lot of big companies using Qt. I wonder who these people are who think nothing happens in the world unless it's on .NET. Are they sheltered inside of IT caves or something? Many of those companies use a variety of platforms and toolkits, so the same company that might be .NET in one area might be using Qt elsewhere. There are some very big companies that just about everyone in the world has heard of that uses Qt (including a company that dwarfs Microsoft).
What I liked Qt for is that before the mobile craze, Metro and all the other things happening recently was that it was a fairly simple way to create a functional UI on all the traditional desktops (Win/Mac/Linux) - all the platforms that mattered - and that looked native (where Java went horribly wrong) and did its best to follow platform conventions like button ordering and such. And it is a "standard" library that matches other modern platforms, you can get very far with only Qt. It wasn't very fancy but gave you all the windows, dialogs, menus, tool bars, status bars, buttons, checkboxes, radioboxes, lists, tree views, tables and so on and so forth. And file/network/database/i18n etc. support.
In the mobile world,. it just doesn't matter so much - every app is full screen and pretty much does their own thing. You'd rather have Angry Birds on Android look exactly like Angry Birds on iOS than following any kind of convention. If you want to do "real" graphics, it's OpenGL ES that is the Android/iOS cross platform solution. I guess not for WP, but that's more Microsoft's problem. If it'd been the primary development language for Nokia apps (pre-implosion) things might have been different, but now it just doesn't have many killer features.
Back on the desktop companies - or to be honest one company with something like 90% market share - is trying to throw away old paradigms that have been mostly the same since Windows 3.1, flame wars aside that's pretty bad news for a toolkit built on trying to make things work the same across all platforms while fitting in. And despite Qt fixing most issues, it still has inherited a lot of baggage from C/C++ that honestly could have been better. Java and C# has gone through several iterations, Swift is the result of a lot of ObjectiveC experience while C++ is changing very, very slowly by committee and a lot of bad behavior can never be unbroken.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Adobe uses it for Photoshop Elements, too. If you've got it installed you can look in the PSE install dir (at least for some versions) and see Qt4 libs. Not sure about proper Photoshop.
QT is technically fine but most graphic applications today are for phones using Android Java or Apple objective C libraries. That leaves QT fighting over a dying niche - non HTML desktop apps. So why argue over scraps?
Adobe Photoshop Elements Organiser, Bitcoin, Google Earth, Kindle Reader, Matlab, Mobile Partner for Huawei USB modem, OpenSCAM, ownCloud, Parallels, RouteBuddy, Stellarium, TaxCalc, VirtualBox. And that's on my mac, can't be bothered to boot the Windows lump to check.
Confirmed. Much of the Oil and Gas industry software now runs on QT. Except for the old legacy cruft. And there's plenty of that. Here's looking at you Z-map.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Charting, graphing, UI widgets, core updates to Creator, the Qt Quick compiler, the UI profiler, in-app purchasing...
Charting and graphing are one component that is commercial only. There are a couple of UI widgets in Qt Enterprise components that are also commercial only, but all the usual ones are part of the open source Qt Quick Components. Creator is all open source at this point, which the exception of a plugin to check and manage licenses -- not really interesting to the Open source community at all. The QML profiler is also mostly open source, but admittedly a couple of features are enterprise only.
In-app purchasing is indeed enterprise only. But frankly I find that very fair: If you want to earn money by making use of some technology, please pass on some of the profit to the people that implemented that technology.
Almost all the parts that are not open source are of little interest to the open source community and provide value mostly to commercial entities. I am fine with that.
It's enough that the Free Qt Foundation should be asking "If all new major features of Qt are commercial-only, at what point is it abandoned and subject to the default BSD license clause?"
There are pretty clear definitions of "abandoned" in the contract, go read it up. I do not think there is need to have that discussion.
You are forgetting about embedded devices. Most "computers" sold are hidden in washing machines, coffee machines, industrial controls, medical devices, etc. There are hugely more devices like that than there are phones in the world, and many of those want to have cool touch UIs.
Qt is really strong in that market.
Spotify client is QT app also, albeit one could argue if they are "money making" =)