Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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!