Concerns Emerge Over Qt Project vs. Digia

[JanC]

What the hell is wrong with open-source dev's. Come on people now you raise concerns over using the same twitter account ? This is pathetic. It's like your are intentionally fabricating reasons to make a fork. I'm getting really sick of this hole " I don't like some tiny detail about you so I'll fork" attitude. It's like getting a divorce because your wife doesn't chew as many times as you would like.

Nobody is going to fork because of something like a message on Twitter alone (especially now that it was explained as an accident). What happened with that message is that it gave the impression that Digia was going to abuse an until now vendor neutral project channel, which of course made other vendors nervous.

BTW: although long-lasting forks seem easier to do in open source, there are a lot more of these forks in closed source software than in open source (that's why Digia wants to be able to sell commercial licenses, after all).

[JanC]

It's not just a commercial ecosystem. You can have that with LGPL software. It's a proprietary, commercial ecosystem. The point of the CLA is to allow Digia to take your code and sell it under a closed source, proprietary license. Which they do.

Yes, Trolltech/Nokia/Digia did and do want to sell commercial licenses for Qt. They wrote and write most of it, after all, and they need to make money. And the LGPL doesn't allow what Digia wants to do, as it would force their customers to release changes to the source code of Qt they use.

OTOH, other companies can and do the same with other open source projects like Apache, X11, BSD, etc., because those licenses allow that without needing something like the CLA, but then those have the disadvantage that others can do the same, and indeed that's not what Digia want...

So what you get is a hybrid proprietary & open source ecosystem, where Digia profits from the proprietary part and others profit from the open source part, and hopefully both profit from each other.

Same as Nokia before it, under no circumstances can Digia be described as a commercial, open source company.

They are a company that happens to release some of their code as open source. And I doubt they want to be described as an "open source company", but hopefully they want to be consider "open source friendly" to some degree.

[Leon55ia]

I suspect they might reconsider their usage of Qt-from-Digia for future projects, which in the end would mean a loss for Digia.

[Katt1078]

Hi all,

A lot of chatter has been happening on the "blurring the lines" post by Stephen from KDAB about Digia and the Qt Project. I must say that this has been blown a bit out of proportion and apologies from my side for not responding to this sooner. We did send in a reply to this post via Lars as commented below. Let me explain:

a. As part of the acquisition, Digia inherited A LOT of channels, log ins, unfinished projects, projects in the works from Nokia, which had not been looked at or worked on by anybody at Nokia for months given the state of uncertainty of Qt during the summer months. It took Digia some time to receive all comms channels log in info and to find the right people (if they hadn't already left Nokia) as well as figure out which channels were what linking to what and how, amongst a million other things.

NOTE: The channels are meant to have info from all Qt community members and their projects. The same as Nokia Qt had - this includes also projects and videos done by Digia and all other companies.

b. The Digia Qt marketing team is 1/4 of the team that was at Nokia, therefore, it has taken a while to filter through all the info that has been adopted from Nokia. As part of the transfer, there were not Web community people coming over to Digia. Another reason for communication delays to the community from Digia.

c. That said in b), we have started a project to look to the community to help us in promoting Qt in the ecosystem - looking for key Qt community members to be contributors and many other things (social media moderators is one). This will be communicated soon as we are still planning. NOTE: Nokia did a great job in promoting Qt and pumped in a lot of money to do so. BUT, Digia does not have the deep pockets Nokia had and what the community got used to. That is why, now, more than ever, Qt needs the help of you, everyone. Digia can't do it alone.

d. Please erase the misconception from your minds that Digia is only looking to push its commercial offering. Indeed, when it was Digia, Qt Commercial, it was Digia's mandate to push commercial licensing. However, now this has changed. We know that and recognize that, otherwise, buying all of Qt and its trademarks as well as investing into the Qt Project to keep it running would have never happened.

We understand the importance of community. Please work with us not against us. We don't want a fork of Qt and I bet you don't want it either.

Give the new era of Qt under Digia and the Qt Project a chance. Don't shoot it down before it has really taken off. We want Qt to succeed as much as you do and we have and will meet bumps along the way as we try to inherit this HUGE project from Nokia into a much smaller team at Digia. We need your encouragement and help to make it succeed.

Thanks,
Katherine

Digia, Qt

[chris2kari]

Well better late than never..
In hindsight Point a) should have been addressed in a press release at the time of aquisition rather than leave the community hanging.. waiting.. until now.
Hopefully things will improve.