Qt 4.8 Draws In Platform Abstraction, New WebKit

[Rallos Zek]

Will you rewrite KDE in GTK+? I don't like I have to wait for Qt 4.8.1 to be on pair with commercial version, but I was surprised why someone blames entire Open Source, because of this.

Oh god of disease, please no. GTK+ whilst a okay toolkit is nowhere in the league of QT. GTK+ is not even as good as motif lol.

[Awesomeness]

Such crying won't help anyone. Maybe you expect they'll send you pizza, too? Switch to commercial version if you like. I'll rather wait for 4.8.1.

You're missing the point.
While I truly believe Digia that they wish their modifications to be merged (after all it's less maintenance work), that mail highlights the problem with Qt licensing:
If Qt was under LGPL for everybody – as it would be fair for all contributors –, closed source modifications (intentional or not) would simply be illegal.

[timofonic]

You people are such morons. Maybe writing it again helps:

So now there is total of 108 improvements and bug fixes available in Qt Commercial 4.8.0 that are not part of the LGPL release. I want to underline that this is not the intended way of differentiating our offering. Going forward I hope that we can be more aligned. I would like to see most of the current delta integrated to Qt by the time of 4.8.1, if it is possible.

That's your way of making your thinking better, insulting the rest of people not agreeing with you instead a proper argument. I love it

I just see a crappy bad excuse to not offering the same source, just like Apple does with CUPS and probably LLVM too. They don't follow a true FOSS development model, yet they want FOSS project follow them.

I don't trust Digia at all, simple as that. They are not showing a proper leadership of the project and I'm in doubt they can do it in the way other corporate sponsored projects like WebKit get developed.

They need to change it or Qt will be forked...

[DaemonFC]

"there's 108 improvements and bug fixes available in Qt Commercial 4.8.0 that are not part of the LGPL release."

Open source at its best.

It's probably marketing Nazi speak for "We cherry picked the post-4.8 trunk patches so we could claim it's better than 4.8"

What do you expect from Nokia? They are Microsoft partners now.

It's a good thing that the open source Qt development is becoming more distant from the Vista Phone 7 promoters.

[bobwya]

Oh god of disease, please no. GTK+ whilst a okay toolkit is nowhere in the league of QT. GTK+ is not even as good as motif lol.

^this

The Qt development libraries are enormous and feature rich. By contrast the GTK+ libraries are much more limited and also require C programming "hacks" or they'll spew out obscure stack error messages (perhaps buying greater speed and efficiency for the end-user no doubt)...

Qt development ftw!

[RealNC]

Qt might be better than Gtk as a dev platform, but having different source code for commercial vs open source releases sure isn't helping their image. They need to get that shit sorted out, or else it will look like the open source users are treated as some kind of second-class citizens.

[Teho]

They don't follow a true FOSS development model, yet they want FOSS project follow them.

I don't trust Digia at all, simple as that. They are not showing a proper leadership of the project and I'm in doubt they can do it in the way other corporate sponsored projects like WebKit get developed.

They need to change it or Qt will be forked...

Digia handles the Qt Commercial licensing not the Qt developement or leadership (that's on Qt Project and Nokia/Trolltech). I think you are highly underestimating the work needed to fork an entire application framework if you really believe that people are going to do it if one company can't provide few patches in time.

[Timo Jyrinki]

What do you expect from Nokia? They are Microsoft partners now.

That was Digia, not Nokia.

I don't trust Digia at all, simple as that. They are not showing a proper leadership of the project and I'm in doubt they can do it in the way other corporate sponsored projects like WebKit get developed.

As pointed out, they are not supposed to lead Qt project, (the new) Qt project is an independent meritocratic free software project. Also, Digia is not asking anyone to follow them (nor has anyone any need to "follow" them).

What Digia does is sell the non-free version to those hundreds of customers who for some reason or another do not want to use the LGPL version. That's why they obtained the business from Nokia, since it's profitable.

[funkSTAR]

I just see a crappy bad excuse to not offering the same source, just like Apple does with CUPS and probably LLVM too. They don't follow a true FOSS development model, yet they want FOSS project follow them.

Yeah. Digia is offering closed "extra value" and thereby screwing the open source spirit. Well nobody would expect this to end in a different way. Nokia and Microsoft are married now and the offspring Digia is getting all the commercial business for Qt.

And how did Qt become such a crappy anti-freedom lure? Copyright assignment. Count in the numerous patent aggressions from Nokia against linux phone producers you have yourself a nice product to either boycott or fork.

Qt is not an asset. It is a liability. Leave it or fork it. Considering KDE is a segfaulting piece of c... it might as well just be easier to do a new KDEish desktop without Qt.

[NoEffex]

Yeah. Digia is offering closed "extra value" and thereby screwing the open source spirit. Well nobody would expect this to end in a different way. Nokia and Microsoft are married now and the offspring Digia is getting all the commercial business for Qt.

And how did Qt become such a crappy anti-freedom lure? Copyright assignment. Count in the numerous patent aggressions from Nokia against linux phone producers you have yourself a nice product to either boycott or fork.

Qt is not an asset. It is a liability. Leave it or fork it. Considering KDE is a segfaulting piece of c... it might as well just be easier to do a new KDEish desktop without Qt.

I think you're underestimating the time and effort required to do anything as feature rich as KDE let alone Qt. Qt is IMO one of the best things to ever happen to the FOSS scene not for the ideas behind it but what it's able to do that makes writing applications for Linux far easier and thus more likely to happen.

What I'm pretty sure happened was that Digia sells a commercial version of Qt that is reliant upon Qt and not the other way around. It's similar to how CrossOver is reliant on Wine yet Wine is not reliant on CrossOver. The only difference is that the names aren't shared. It's not even close to being a big deal.

p.s. I've never had KDE segfault on me nor is that related to Qt.