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The Qt Company Provides A Brief Comment On Open-Source

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  • The Qt Company Provides A Brief Comment On Open-Source

    Phoronix: The Qt Company Provides A Brief Comment On Open-Source

    Yesterday a KDE developer who serves on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation commented that The Qt Company is evaluating restricting new releases to paying customers for 12 months. That was said to be under consideration due to COVID19 / coronavirus impacting their finances and needing to boost short-term revenues. The Qt Company has now come out with an incredibly brief statement on the matter...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    ahahah

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    • #3
      Next project : GDE.

      That would use KDE's vision on desktop but with true free Libre software.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by DebianLinuxero View Post
        Next project : GDE.

        That would use KDE's vision on desktop but with true free Libre software.
        It could still be KDE as current Qt releases use a free software license (free as in beer)

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        • #5
          I played with a fork of Qt a while back: https://github.com/woboq/verdigris.
          (This particular fork was quite cool, it was basically Qt without MOC so I could use standard C++ without additional build system complexities.)

          So basically a fork can be done and maintained. Most of the features we would miss out on that I can see is support for crap like tablets and phones. As well as the weird Qt scripting stuff that is virtually useless (QtQuick? cannot even seem to find it now).

          So they don't seem to be providing anything other than "commercial guarantee" which only companies seem to fall for. For open-source projects, we are used to no commercial support so who cares. I am a little bit surprised that Qt hasn't been forked a while back around the time Trolltech / Nokia were passing it around.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by DebianLinuxero View Post
            Next project : GDE.

            That would use KDE's vision on desktop but with true free Libre software.
            Why would a complete rewrite on GTK3/4 be a more feasible option than forking the last known LGPL3 Qt and maintaining that as the new Qt base for KDE et al? Far less disruptive and a Qt fork gives the FOSS stakeholders the option to gut/rework/augment Qt into something that suits their needs instead of the needs of the Qt Company.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by 144Hz View Post
              r_a_trip If the end goal is a functional wayland desktop then it would be faster to pick GTK and mutter. A new KDE-shell and new KDE apps is not that hard to prototype.
              Not exactly. Most of the work is done on KDE side for Wayland and actually this is now more a debugging issue than anything else. If you have a free GPU driver this works smoothly, granted.

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              • #8
                The good news is that this is the ideal moment for a fork if KDE decides to follow that route. Qt 5.15 is about to be released and will be the last 5.x version. Next is Qt6, and KDE 6 would need to transition to that. Now KDE can keep improving Plasma 5.xx instead of spending resources on the transition, and fork Qt 5.15 and maintain it themselves when upstream stops point releases.

                That way, they can polish KDE 5, improve Wayland support, and when they are ready they can just develop their own successor to Qt 5, or just eventually replace it with native KDE libs. They don't need to follow Qt 6. But this would be a bold move and i don't know if they are willing to commit to something like this.

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                • #9
                  Well that was a non-statement. Funnily, it reminds me of Donald Trump when he talks about how great everything is. I'll fill in the blanks.

                  There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. Wrong. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company.

                  The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model. And it is a great model. It's the greatest governance model there is.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by 144Hz View Post
                    r_a_trip If the end goal is a functional wayland desktop then it would be faster to pick GTK and mutter. A new KDE-shell and new KDE apps is not that hard to prototype.
                    Exactly. KDE does not deserve to live unless it conforms to GNOME's vision. KWin should die. In fact, KDE should just be a GNOME extension. I mean, it might break on every GNOME release, but that's their problem.

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