A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

http://www.olafsw.de/a-better-qt-because-of-open-source-and-kde/

by t4h4 • 7 years ago

181 83 7 years ago

jbk2• 7 years ago

Background is the wish of The Qt Company to change some of the contract provisions. It is still a bit unclear which ideas exactly they are pursuing

I think this is the reason of the timing of this post.

Because else, this post is just reminding the existing contracts around Qt.

hoistbypetard2• 7 years ago

Can you briefly explain (or link an existing explanation) a summary of the changes the Qt Company is asking for, to someone who's interested but not intimately familiar with the details?

jbk2• 7 years ago

I know nothing more than you do.

thomascgalvin• 7 years ago

It says in the article and the quote that the proposed changes are still unclear.

Kelteseth6• 7 years ago

Maybe because Qt6 is on the horizon? Also they changed the license of some Qt modules just 2 months ago: https://www.qt.io/blog/change-in-open-source-licensing-of-qt...

shmerl5• 7 years ago

It would be good for KDE to get stronger backing, but I've heard RedHat avoids backing KDE and focuses on Gnome, due to aversion¹ to contributor agreements², is that correct in that case?

1. https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems

2. https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt

ognarb• 7 years ago

At KDE, we don't require signing CLA to contribute, this is a requirement in our manifesto[1]. But contributor can assign their right to the KDE e.V. if they want using a Fiduciary Licensing Agreement[2].

[1] https://manifesto.kde.org/commitments.html

[2] https://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php

shmerl5• 7 years ago

KDE itself no, but Qt requires one (second link above)?

Ironically, RedHat themselves sometimes make an exception, like the first link mentions:

We reluctantly sign tolerable upstream project CLAs out of practical necessity.

pjmlp8• 7 years ago

It all goes back to the early days of Gtk vs KDE, when Qt still had non-GPL compatible license.

Red-Hat is the biggest employer of Gtk/GNOME devs, so...

SuSE and Mandrake were historical the biggest ones that cared about KDE.

lmm• 7 years ago

Right, but surely it's time to reconsider that. Qt has "caught up" on licensing, whereas to my eyes at least Gtk is still behind in terms of developer usability.

KozmoNau73• 7 years ago

I recommend the KDE neon distro to every Linux-curious person I meet. It's the latest and greatest KDE on top of an Ubuntu base, and it's by far the best desktop distro I have tried in my ~20 years of using Linux on the desktop.

shmerl5• 7 years ago

I use KDE in Debian testing for a long time already. Easily the best DE around. Though I wish Debian would get faster updates. Even though testing is supposed to be rolling (besides freezes), something seriously stalls new Plasma uploads there.

K0SM0S• 7 years ago

A fantastic DE experience indeed.

Just some advice: public consensus is that if you don't want the bleeding edge of KDE, Kubuntu is basically just as good (KDE over Ubuntu) and reportedly is more compatible with various hardware — so if your laptop has issues with Neon, try Kubuntu as a nearly identical alternative.

Note that you can get KDE on any major distro, e.g. Fedora, Arch. I can't recommend it enough, KDE is the dream DE — great out-of-the-box, but settings for pretty much everything, set each once and then forget it as it gets out of your way without sacrificing any feature whatsoever. There are a few minor glitches, but much less so than Gnome or MacOS or Win 10 in my anecdotal experience (notwithstanding display support, that's driver-related and whole other ballgame).

lbeltrame• 7 years ago

To be pedantic, Neon is not a distro, it's a project made by some KDE contributors (they state so themselves) and FTR is by no means the "official" distribution by KDE.

Disclaimer: I package the KDE software stack for another distribution (openSUSE).

int_19h• 7 years ago

How well does it integrate with non-Qt apps in terms of look and feel these days? Stuff like LibreOffice and Firefox, but also really any random Gtk app.

giancarlostoro5• 7 years ago

In case The Qt Company would ever attempt to close down Open Source Qt, the foundation is entitled to publish Qt under the BSD license. This notable legal guarantee strengthens Qt. It creates trust among developers, contributors and customers.

Woah, I had no idea about this. I wonder what kind of new changes would take place if Qt were BSD licensed, such as languages like D embedding it as a solution for UIs as part of the standard library (they already do this for SQLite and Curl).

7thaccount3• 7 years ago

I didn't think D had SQLite in stdlib. When I googled for it recently I just found some single contributor package and assumed it wasn't super well maintained.

giancarlostoro5• 7 years ago

That might be why honestly.

https://dlang.org/phobos/etc_c_sqlite3.html

For anybody's reference, it also has zlib, and an ODBC library.

toyg3• 7 years ago

Qt is massive, I doubt small communities would rush to integrate it and make it their job to maintain it all...

I doubt anyone in OSS communities is seriously deterred from using Qt because of the LGPL. It’s just a very big and very complex project that requires a lot of manpower to “tame”.

giancarlostoro5• 7 years ago

I guess it depends on how much of Qt you need. If you just need the basics you can import mainly what you need[0]. In the case of D though one of it's focuses is to work well with C++ directly. I'm not talking about maintaining it all, I'm talking about embedding it directly into the standard library of a programming language.

I guess you do make a fair point in regards to the LGPL though.

[0]: Here's an example of someone building only a minimal amount of Qt: https://github.com/dirtycold/qt-minimal-build

ori_b• 7 years ago

Already happened: https://www.copperspice.com

Rochus11• 7 years ago

It's not as big as Linux, Chromium, Dart and others. All of my projects are still compatible with C++ Qt 4. I'm able to and I will maintain it as soon as someone is estabilshing a free fork; up to now I'm being held back by this outrageous Contributor Agreement. A lot of unnecessary complexity started with all the JavaScript stuff. This can be replaced by the other existing (and free) scripting language bindings. So yes, I don't see any problem to continue maintenance of the Qt framework without the Qt company at all.

toyg3• 7 years ago

Trolltech were pretty awesome, in their days. The “poison-pill BSD” setup is pretty smart; if i remember correctly , it was introduced when they started wobbling a bit from the commercial perspective, in order to keep the community calm while they went looking for buyers (which they eventually found in Nokia). It would be sad if the switch had to be triggered at a time when QT is supposed to be “back in the game” after years of uncertainty.

Dear Qt owners, don’t mess around. If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license. Build more bridges, and more developers will come to you.

Nokinside5• 7 years ago

If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license.

QT stock is up 124% this year, +247,06% last 3 years.

Qt has de facto monopoly in embedded, medical, automotive, appliance and industry automation. It works in Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, QNX, and VxWorks.

Qt just launched Qt for MCUs (bare metal toolkit for low end microcontrollers). It runs on Cortex-M with several different 2D accelerators. It's yet another market with no serious competitors.

toyg3• 7 years ago

That’s good, so why change the license now? Is it just greed?

pjmlp8• 7 years ago

They tried and learned that most FOSS don't want to pay for their tools, so they turned their focus to those that actually care to pay and have been doing quite alright.

wruza2• 7 years ago

Numerous frameworks didn’t even bother to turn to FOSS, and maybe they’re also doing alright. We cannot be sure though, cause no one knows their name.

The point of going foss, in my long-distance bystander observation, is to create an essential part of the market: skilled developers. Not to push your sales to everyone’s face, nor to whine that deals are too cheap. Foss folks will never pay, because they are not business for client, they are people for people (who work for business and sometimes make tech decisions based on a weekend experience).

BlueTemplar• 7 years ago

Am I the only one that finds it weird that a document like this, that basically shouldn't care about layout, and is very unlikely to be printed by anyone (except maybe the author himself), would be distributed as a .pdf?

cjensen2• 7 years ago

The behavior of the Qt company lately is a bit troubling.

First, the core can be licensed under Commercial or LGPL licensing. This let's non-paying developers use the core in commercial software. This policy was established to ensure trust with the community during one of the many company transitions. For all new modules, Qt evades that requirement by licensing under Commercial or GPL. I have mixed feelings on this.

Second and more importantly, they have started sending aggressive audit letters to customers. I guess that makes sense from a bean-counter point of view where you poke the customer and try to get them to buy more licenses either because the customer actually needs the licenses, or because the customer is afraid to let any dev work without paying protection money. This is a huge pain in the neck for me as a paying customer. They even sent the aggressive audit letter to an old license we have that had not been renewed (or used) in around a decade.

I'll definitely be rethinking my relationship as a customer when the next renewal comes up.

mroche• 7 years ago

commercial software

I think (could be wrong) you meant to imply closed-source, as one can have commercial open-source software.

I’m not a huge fan of them using GPL for their newer modules, either, like charts. It seemed a bit unnecessary other than driving those who don’t like/can’t use the GPL license into a dev subscription.

pjmlp8• 7 years ago

Which is quite fair, they have to live from something.

Rochus11• 7 years ago

LGPL was decided by Nokia who bought the IP from Trolltech for ~150 Mio $ and also came up for the development costs up to Qt 5.1. Digia and The Qt Company "bought" the IP for about 5 Mio $ from Nokia and now earn money with commercial licenses of a library where the most important development steps were already done before. According to the commit logs the contribution rate of Nokia was at ~80%, wheras the Qt Company is rather at ~40% and with focus on stuff they can sell. I regularly meet people who bought a licence to use the Qt framework not realizing that they could use it under LGPL. I know the wording of the commercial license. It places the licensee clearly worse than with the LGPL variant. Personally, I find the business practices of this company, which have been observed for some time, rather questionable.I had a commercial license with Trolltech, which cost me a lot of money. As soon as LGPL was available, I cancelled the contracts and avoided projects that could not be done with LGPL rather than signing such a single-edge contract with this company.

api2• 7 years ago

Its weird what people and businesses will and will not support.

Businesses will shovel loads of money into SaaS and cloud hosting without blinking, but support a programming tool? Never! Another hundred Office users and 50 more AWS VMs? No problem.

People will spend $10 on a coffee but would never spend $5 to support a project that saves them hundreds or thousands of hours of work. They'll spend $15/month to host a site, but would never pay for the software that runs it even though that took far more effort than racking up some servers.

No wonder everything is surveillanceware and mega-corp silos. We get what we pay for, or rather we don't get what we won't pay for... like independent software.

cjensen2• 7 years ago

Sure. In the case of Qt, it was very expensive but well worth paying for because it does a good job. The LGPL stuff is important because it provides us with an "out" if the Qt company goes crazy with prices.

Avoiding the "out" makes me not want to make use of the new modules. And the hassle of audits makes be question the cost of the inconvenience to me, the dev, of having a license.

It's tradeoffs all the way down.

pjmlp8• 7 years ago

Exactly, that is why you can only have nice tools when working for big corps.

FOSS made it fashionable to want to be paid for work, while refusing to pay for the work of others, and in the process using clunky tools.

Naturally upstream cannot pay bills from PR and eventually moves on.

elproxy2• 7 years ago

https://www.qt.io/licensing/ Commercial, GPL or LGPLv3 are available, which means they are going after embedded customers who typically don't want to open up their hardware (TVs, Cars, etc). Anybody else is free to reap the benefits, even for developing a commercial app on desktop (granted, that's a tough enough market to crack already these days).

detaro• 7 years ago

As the parent explicitly stated, not all components are available under LGPL.

dev-il6• 7 years ago

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt:

Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)…

… unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly traded as QT-COM on Nasdaq Helsinki) sees Qt as a direct revenue source to monetize to the maximum and developers as milk cows to maximally squeeze out as long as possible. And unlike Nokia, Digia's "Qt Company" does so in a quite unsustainable way. They enormously increased the prices of commercial licenses to a level that can only be qualified as extortion, and they do whatever possible to force developers out of LGPL and into Pay-to-Play:

they switched Qt's open source edition from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3… and they switched from LGPL to GPL or commercial only for most new modules, including QtQuick 3D.

The bottom line is: it's really going down the drain, and lots of developers of Qt-based programs and apps are drawn away and looking for something new. The need for a new modern and more liberally licensed cross-platform UI lib is bigger than ever.

Also, many devs are even switching out of Qt-based cross-platform development and back to separate codebases for OS-dependent native UI toolkits… which is kinda sad, though partly alleviated by some other factors (such as the similarities between Swift and Kotlin)

pjmlp8• 7 years ago

FOSS developers leeching Qt developers will be the death of Qt.

It is hard to sustain a business out of donations and patreons, not everyone enjoys counting pennies every month.

Also Qt is doing pretty well, thanks to enterprises, which still seem to value paying for developer tooling.

Rochus11• 7 years ago

Working for the Company?

Nokinside5• 7 years ago

Digia does not own Qt Company. Digia was clenly split in 2016. Digia owners received QTCOM stock. see: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xhel/qtcom/ownership

Btw. Your claim that developers are switching is not true either. Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.

dev-il6• 7 years ago

Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.

As if that was of any relevance to the question whether many Qt developers are switching. Given that commercial licenses are only used by a very small minority of the professional developers using Qt (most using open source Qt), themselves only a subset of all developers using Qt… the fact that that small minority is currently increasing while remaining a small minority… doesn't say anything about the proportion of still Qt using developers switching away.

Besides, the sustainability of a temporary increase of that minority is highly questionable. Of course QTCOM's pressure towards Pay-to-Play temporarily forces some of those who are still tied by all of their still-Qt-based code to buy Qt licenses as long as they haven't finished switching to a better alternative… but on the long term most of them quit too. Precisely because of that.

We'll see how that strategy of maximal monetization and maximally squeezing developers works out for QTCOM in the long term

Rochus11• 7 years ago

Yes, exactly. You have my vote and my support in case the Qt framework will be forked based on the LGPL 2 versions and continued from there independently of the Qt Company.

Here some figures: Nokia bought Trolltech and thus the intellectual property of Qt 4 for around 100 million Euros, and then released it to the public under LGPL. Nokia also payed for the development of Qt 4.4 to 5.0, and then "sold" everything to Digia for a piece of bread (about 4 Mio Euros). The contribution rate of Nokia was ~80% according to commit logs; the contribution rate of The Qt Company is at ~40% - and it's mostly on stuff important to them (i.e. which they can sell). So at least 50% are open source contributions by others. This information is all publicly available; you can read it yourself. So the Qt Company massively profited from this and should stop complaining and turning crooked things.

And they have to stop their u-boats, which act anonymously and make opinion.

Kelteseth6• 7 years ago

Glad to hear that. How about we change the name to QueTee so that we still can everything starting with a Q and people finally pronouncing the name right? :D

de_watcher• 7 years ago

Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL?

Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.

Kelteseth6• 7 years ago

No QtQuick3d [1] was from the beginning GPLv3 only (It is not even released yet, but Qt 5.14 release is tommorow). It is a bit awkward because now there are competing 3d engines inside one toolkit.

[1] https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html

dev-il6• 7 years ago

What I did write was that they switched their licensing default for most new modules from LGPL to GPL. So unlike Qt Quick (the original 2D Qt Quick) which was started under Nokia and licensed LGPL (or commercial)… the new Qt Quick 3D (*) was never licensed under LGPL but is licensed only under GPLv3 (or commercial).

https://github.com/qt/qtquick3d

elproxy2• 7 years ago

Arguably, licensing revenue was a drop in the bucket for Nokia and they had a lot more to lose with the liability that came from commercial customers. It was a hard move to (at least partially) undo for the Qt Company.

A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

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