The Qt Project Is Now Live

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Qt Project Is Now Live

Nokia has announced this morning that the Qt Project is now live, which means as of today Qt will be governed as a "true open-source project."..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAwNDA

[Awesomeness]

Work for Nokia and don't get paid

?3.1 [?] Licensor hereby grants [?] to Nokia a [?] license to reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of [?] and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of Nokia?s choosing

Just the same shit as OpenOffice under Oracle and Unity under Canonical: Nokia own all your Qt contributions. Nokia can make proprietary versions without the need to ever give anything back.

Wondering when ?LibreQt? will be announced?

[kraftman]

Wondering when ?LibreQt? will be announced?

Who's planning to do so?

[kraftman]

Phoronix

Sadly I did not realize until now that Qt Developer Days is taking place in the best city in the world, otherwise I would have happily been there...

Blah, blah... it seems you didn't saw much. That stupid "Speichelleckerei" is getting boring.

[Awesomeness]

Who's planning to do so?

Don't know. Depends when contributors get fed up with working unpaid for Nokia. Took OpenOffice contributors several years to recognize that and to form LibreOffice.

[Sidicas]

Hmm. Maybe some people familiar with QT can answer this question I have...

I'm running / compiling KDE apps under Windows.. When running at 1920x1080 resolution, these apps eat up a lot of CPU usage when resizing the window and scrolling.. I checked GPU usage and it sits flatly at 0%.. I compared this to iTunes and it looks like iTunes is using maybe 10-20% of the GPU when doing similar tasks and is also much snappier and less choppy than the KDE equivalent apps under Windows...

So I'm guessing that by default it's using "raster" or "native" as the -graphicssystem which is a QT command/operator (not application specific).. Is -graphicssystem opengl stable under Windows or is it still experimental? If I get a black window (no rendering) when I try to run a QT application with -graphicssystem opengl instead of the default raster/native for Windows.. Is this a QT bug or a bug with the KDE application? Is there anything special a QT application needs to do to support -graphicssystem opengl? And if so, is it platform-specific special things that need to be done? (As I'm pretty sure these same apps run in Linux with opengl acceleration no problem).

The exact same KDE apps under Linux, make use of the GPU and have much much less CPU usage..

Just need to know where to file the bug report.

Bug report for KDE is already filled, but is that where it belongs?

[rohcQaH]

Awesomeness: Copyright assignment has been required to get patches to upstream Qt since.. forever. Remember that it was initially dual-licensed?

Nokia paid a lot of money for the Qt license, they paid a lot of money to fund further development for Qt, they backed out from a lot of income and relinquished control when they decided to release Qt under the LGPL, and now they're completely opening up development, allowing other companies to partake in the decision where Qt development is heading. What they've done for Qt is incredible, and it's waaaay better than the pre-nokia situation.

Of course they don't want to foot the bills, then give everything away for free. They want to retain the copyright to their code, and that can only be retained by either disallowing all community contributions, or by requiring copyright assignment. The latter option is better for everyone involved.

Also, a developer wouldn't be "working for Nokia", they're "working for Qt" with Nokia getting a little extra to protect their investments. If someone needs Qt, doing so is a very sensible choice.


Apparently, neither one of the big companies nor KDE people objected to the clause, so why would you?


Oh, and btw, if you think that copyright assignment was the reason for founding libreoffice: no. It absolutely wasn't.

[Awesomeness]

Awesomeness: Copyright assignment has been required to get patches to upstream Qt since.. forever. Remember that it was initially dual-licensed?

I know that but Trolltech never claimed that Qt is a community project.

Nokia paid a lot of money for the Qt license, they paid a lot of money to fund further development for Qt, they backed out from a lot of income and relinquished control when they decided to release Qt under the LGPL

Red Hat invests way more in FOSS than Nokia ever did. Red Hat bought companies to open up their products? source code and transform them to actual community projects. So did Intel.

now they're completely opening up development

No, they are not. That's a big lie. A completely open project wouldn't require CA to a corporation.

it's waaaay better than the pre-nokia situation.

Yes, it is but better than bad is not necessarily good.

They want to retain the copyright to their code, and that can only be retained by either disallowing all community contributions, or by requiring copyright assignment.

That's bull. Nokia can still take its own code and release it under whatever license it wants.
What Nokia wants, however, is to take other people's code which those people can only reuse with Qt under LGPL and don't respect the LGPL at all.

The latter option is better for everyone involved.

No, definitely not. OpenOffice had almost no community involvement at all under Sun and Oracle. Users didn't notice because Sun/Oracle had many of its own employees working on it. But as soon as Oracle pulled personnel away, OO stagnated.

Community contribution to OpenOffice have long been not to Oracle OO but to Novell?s Go-OO project that later became LibreOffice.

Apparently, neither one of the big companies nor KDE people objected to the clause, so why would you?

Which big companies except Nokia? Even when MeeGo was still going, Intel never contributed to Qt itself.
Most KDE developers also do not contribute to Qt. They created kdelibs (now KDE Framworks) as extension to Qt to avoid to hand over their copyright to Trolltech/Nokia. If KDE devs had no problem with that clause, as you claim, the call to merge kdelibs with Qt from several months ago would have been unanimously accepted. But it wasn't.

Oh, and btw, if you think that copyright assignment was the reason for founding libreoffice: no. It absolutely wasn't.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

[Teho]

Sorry, but you're wrong.

What a nice way to end an comment filled with nothing but false information. Just to point out a few:
1. Removing CLA isn't exactly simple. Trolltech/Nokia has for long offered an commercial and closed source versio of Qt to those who are willing to pay. Nokia sold this business to Digia not long ago. Trolltech/Nokia has also many times said that they can't remove the CLA for legal reasons - most likely refering to the agreements that have been made in the past.
2, OpenOffice wasn't forked only because of the CLA but rather because participating in developements was made too difficult and many useful patches were rejected. It was overall unfriendly environment for the open source community. Of course the CLA was one of the problems but not the reason itself.
3. For one Nokia has nothing to do with Red Hat but even so don't you see how ridiculous point you make? Nokia bought Trolltech, opened up Qt and now transformed it to a community project (there has been progress on open governance for over a year now)
4. Qt's CLA is about the commercial Qt offering that Nokia has no intrest in and that's why they sold it to Digia.
5. Merging kdelibs and Qt was more of brainstorming that serious intent. It's not something that people would "unanimously accepted" either - we are talking both Qt and KDE communities here and merging two huge codebases isn't an easy task nor something that is unanimously desired . Now that Qt is more open for the community some parts of kdelibs will be merged with Qt, it goes nice along with developement of Qt5 and KF5.

Maybe next time you could check if any of your information is actually correct? Someone might be mistaken to think that you know something when you start "correcting" posts made by other people.

[Awesomeness]

1. Removing CLA isn't exactly simple. Trolltech/Nokia has for long offered an commercial and closed source versio of Qt to those who are willing to pay. Nokia sold this business to Digia not long ago. Trolltech/Nokia has also many times said that they can't remove the CLA for legal reasons - most likely refering to the agreements that have been made in the past.

If you've actually at some point read the terms for the commercial version, you would know that the promise to support closed source versions only cover one major version. This means that with Qt 5 that contractual promise is fulfilled for Qt 4.x and Nokia could do whatever it wants with Qt ? including to not require a CLA.

Even if the terms with major versions didn't exist: Nokia could just as well release Qt under Apache License or any other BSD-like license for everybody. That way closed source versions could be made without giving a single enterprise the sole right to do so.

Nokia was faced with a choice: Strengthening Qt development or clinging to Qt as financial asset.
Nokia chose the latter and sacrificed the former. And you know what? I even understand Nokia?s reasoning. In times of decreased revenue Nokia wants assets it can sell if it has to.
However calling that ?open governance? even though the ?governing body? is disallowed to actually decide about the licensing in an open way, makes this whole thing a huge lie.
In times Nokia bet its future on Windows Phone anyway, it may only be a matter of time when Qt is forked into an actual community project. If the Meltemi rumour turns out to be false, that day may even come earlier than one might think.

Maybe next time you could check if any of your information is actually correct? Someone might be mistaken to think that you know something when you start "correcting" posts made by other people.

Too bad, you just made a fool of yourself.
Next time inform yourself about contractual obligations only covering one major version and BSD licenses as alternative option to allow proprietary versions.