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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Well done!
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?"
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?
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.