Qt 4.8 Draws In Platform Abstraction, New WebKit

[funkSTAR]

For the fucking tenth time; it is not.

Despite whatever reason you have to diminish my claims it does not change the facts.

Digia is adding "extra value" and their marketing department sure do advertize it. It os not a mater of little or much, it is a matter of "do" or "dont do". Right now Digia does!

OPEN CORE! Get over your state of denial and accept the facts.

[Teho]

Get over your state of denial and accept the facts.

Facts are based on evidence and as long as you aren't capable of providing they are "facts" only in your head. I think that I have explained quite clearly why none of your arguments hold any credibility and if you feel that that there's a problem in my logic feel free to correct. What you shouldn't do is simply repeat the same "argument" over and over and over again and expect someone to take you seriously; no one does. I somewhat hope that you are intentionally trolling but even if you are not you kinda look like one.

[Nobu]

I think it comes down to this: If I wanted to buy a product like "Qt Commercial" because it gets improvements before the open source "core", then I could pay a lot less to have someone else make the improvements for me than I would have to pay Digia(?). But that's not what Digia is selling...they're selling support and consultation services:

Commercial Services Offering:

• Requirement Workshop
• Application Development Services
• Porting and Optimization Services
• User Experience and Design Services
• Onsite Consulting Services
• Premium Support Services
• Extended Life Support Services

That is what businesses and individuals who purchase "Qt Commercial" are expecting to get, not extra stuff that's not (yet) in "Qt Core". And that (plus the quote from the mailing list) is why it is not an "Open Core Business", imho.

[TheBlackCat]

Digia is adding "extra value"

It is only added value in that you save ten minutes adding the patches in yourself. open-core businesses offer things that are not available at all for the open-source version. That is not the case here. The patches are available under the same open-source licenses as the rest of Qt. You can add them in yourself without violating any licenses. Digia just saved their customers a few minutes of time. Claiming that this makes Qt an enemy of the entire open-source world is, frankly, insane. Linux distributions backport upstream patches all the time. Any distro that wants to can ship a version of Qt that is line-for-line identical to digia's version.

On the other hand a distro cannot ship a version of wine that is line-for-line identical to the crossover office (and I can't help but notice you aren't complaining about wine). The difference is that the "value-added" parts of digia's version are still open-source, while the value-added parts of crossover are not. Therefore, for Qt, the entire thing is open, not just the core. They don't have to be shipped together to be open-source.

[DaemonFC]

It is only added value in that you save ten minutes adding the patches in yourself. open-core businesses offer things that are not available at all for the open-source version. That is not the case here. The patches are available under the same open-source licenses as the rest of Qt. You can add them in yourself without violating any licenses. Digia just saved their customers a few minutes of time. Claiming that this makes Qt an enemy of the entire open-source world is, frankly, insane. Linux distributions backport upstream patches all the time. Any distro that wants to can ship a version of Qt that is line-for-line identical to digia's version.

On the other hand a distro cannot ship a version of wine that is line-for-line identical to the crossover office (and I can't help but notice you aren't complaining about wine). The difference is that the "value-added" parts of digia's version are still open-source, while the value-added parts of crossover are not. Therefore, for Qt, the entire thing is open, not just the core. They don't have to be shipped together to be open-source.

I don't get what his problem is. Digia isn't doing anything unethical. I've been saying the same thing you just did. They're not keeping anything to themselves. Any user of Qt can go and apply those patches under the same terms as the rest of the free and open source Qt toolkit. The point in selling commercial licenses is so that companies that want to make proprietary software and link to Qt without becoming a derived work of the toolkit (thus forcing them to release under the GPL or LGPL) can do so. GPL exceptions to Qt aren't anything new or recent. Opera used to buy GPL exceptions when they used Qt.

It's not, nor was it _ever_ intended to make a proprietary fork of Qt.

If you're still confused about selling GPL exceptions, even Richard Stallman has said it is acceptable. See; http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

I think we've all tolerated enough of this silliness already about "ZOMGPROPRIETARYQT!!!!! OH NOEZ!!!!".

I don't really feel like explaining what's going on again and again and again to a person (funkSTAR) who insists on being stupid.

There is no indication that Qt is on the verge of becoming open core or that there will be a proprietary fork with features that are not in the free/open source version. There's a _binding_ agreement that is in effect that says that unless the entire toolkit is developed under the GPL or LGPL, that KDE has the right to fork it and produce Qt under a BSD-style license, or the GPL or LGPL.

See; http://www.kde.org/community/whatisk...foundation.php

The last time there was a problem with Qt was roughly 10 years ago, it has been fully free and open source for a very long time now and even Richard Stallman dropped his objections to it.

On the other hand, GNOME has threatened to leave the GNU project on a few occasions, recently due to the fact that Richard Stallman pointed out the problems of relying on a patent encumbered Microsoft .Net runtime called Mono, which the GNOME developers don't seem to have any problem recommending. Ironic turn of events since GNOME was started due to the Qt licensing problem that existed in the late 90s only to turn around and recommend using software that is covered by patents from a company that called Linux and the GPL a "cancer that attaches itself to everything it touches".

I don't recommend GNOME because GNOME is recommending dangerous patent encumbered software and their developers seem to be more in the open source camp, whereas KDE's usually talk about free software.

Though if you want to use GNOME, you'd be wise to use a distribution that doesn't depend on a Microsoft .NET runtime. Fedora won't include Mono in the default install because they know it is a legal problem.

[cochise]

"While doing these, we have made close to 200 contributions in the past few months, but unfortunately not all these have yet been merged in to Qt."
http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermai...er/000908.html

The link for the annoucment is in the lost, so?

"Digia is 100% Committed to Qt"
http://www.digia.com/en/Qt/Digia-is-Committed-to-Qt/

The link for digia is in the footer of annoucement.

Is not like thete 108 fixes never come to Qt. Probably they are in reviewboard.

[DaemonFC]

"While doing these, we have made close to 200 contributions in the past few months, but unfortunately not all these have yet been merged in to Qt."
http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermai...er/000908.html

The link for the annoucment is in the lost, so?

"Digia is 100% Committed to Qt"
http://www.digia.com/en/Qt/Digia-is-Committed-to-Qt/

The link for digia is in the footer of annoucement.

Is not like thete 108 fixes never come to Qt. Probably they are in reviewboard.

It would make no sense to have their own fork of Qt. If for no other reason, the nature of trying to manage a fork. You get so far out and then your fork is not even compatible with the source you forked from. Fixes that go into the original no longer apply cleanly. And so on....

The only reason open core works for companies like Oracle is because they fully control what goes into both editions. Qt doesn't work like that.

[tuukka.turunen]

Hi There,

Just came across this thread, and wanted to comment on it.

I think this is a good discussion with many good arguments. It is also a discussion that is welcome to be done inside Qt Project as well.

While it is true that there is a delta between commercial and lgpl releases of Qt 4.8.0, it is also true that this is not the intended way to differentiate. Digia wants to differentiate Qt Commercial with combination of licensing, technical support, services, as well as add-on modules created based on the needs of commercial licensees. For the error corrections and modifications to essential parts of Qt, we will always contribute. Both open-source and commercial users get the fixes. Additional value for commercial users comes through selecting the bugs that are especially important for them to be fixed.

At Digia we are working together with the Qt Project in order to improve Qt, and to keep the commercial and lgpl releases better aligned on content. Reason to what happened with 4.8.0 is the fact that the contributions tools for Qt 4.8 were under work when 4.8.0 was done. For what is worth, I would like to point out that the changes were available as merge requests in the old tool, they were just not merged in to 4.8.0.

Going forward the delta will be smaller, as we now have also 4.8 fully under open governance.

Yours,

Tuukka Turunen
Director, R&D
Digia, Qt Commercial