Qt 4.8 Draws In Platform Abstraction, New WebKit

[AnonymousCoward]

That was Digia, not Nokia.



As pointed out, they are not supposed to lead Qt project, (the new) Qt project is an independent meritocratic free software project.

An independent project that requires contributors to sign an agreement that grants:

to Nokia a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of Nokia?s choosing.

Thanks, but no thanks.

[funkSTAR]

An independent project that requires contributors to sign an agreement that grants:



Thanks, but no thanks.

Chill mate! Within a year they will change it. New wording: "...to Microsoft a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of Microsofts choosing."

Elops best pull of sofar: Talk about qt-project and ripe the copyright while you can! Then screw the contributors all over. It will be the biggest farce of open source in 2012. Naive Nerds contributing to commercialization for Microsoft. You might as well ask the Naive Nerds to dig their own graves.

[Teho]

You might as well ask the Naive Nerds to dig their own graves.

The slight possibility of Microsoft buying Nokia in no way justifies the cost of forking project like Qt. Even if Microsoft were to buy Nokia; Qt would probably still remain under the same license and therfor there would be no reason to fork it. A cause might come up in the future but as it currently stands Qt is more open than ever and no sane person would wish it to be forked.

[TheBlackCat]

The slight possibility of Microsoft buying Nokia in no way justifies the cost of forking project like Qt. Even if Microsoft were to buy Nokia; Qt would probably still remain under the same license and therfor there would be no reason to fork it. A cause might come up in the future but as it currently stands Qt is more open than ever and no sane person would wish it to be forked.

They cannot restrict the license, if they try it automatically gets release under an even more permissive BSD license.

[Teho]

They cannot restrict the license, if they try it automatically gets release under an even more permissive BSD license.

Just in case this is new to someone:

The Foundation has a license agreement with Nokia. This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.

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

[liam]

I thought the licensing issues were far behind qt. That this differentiation of features came up at all is not a good sign no matter how you apologise for it.

BTW, what's the difference in needing C for gtk vs. needing c++ in qt (for non-trivial applications)?

[TheBlackCat]

I thought the licensing issues were far behind qt. That this differentiation of features came up at all is not a good sign no matter how you apologise for it.

to be pedantic, they are not features, they are bug fixes.

BTW, what's the difference in needing C for gtk vs. needing c++ in qt (for non-trivial applications)?

c++ is an object-oriented programming language. c is not. Both KDE and Qt make extensive use of object-oriented features, making porting to c essentially impossible.

[liam]

to be pedantic, they are not features, they are bug fixes.

That might be worse for actual production use, then, but then that's the point of the licensing scheme, right?

[QUOTE=TheBlackCat;242328
c++ is an object-oriented programming language. c is not. Both KDE and Qt make extensive use of object-oriented features, making porting to c essentially impossible.[/QUOTE]

So, there's not really a difference (rather one of preference).
As for OO, GIR works pretty well (certainly pygobject and js work well) but for things not yet autogenerated you have to dig into C. This is similar to the issues with QML, from what qt friends have said, but I don't have any first hand knowledge of this.

[Luke_Wolf]

That might be worse for actual production use, then, but then that's the point of the licensing scheme, right?

nope, the point of the licensing scheme is so that businesses or other entities that want to make proprietary changes to Qt for use in their software can, LGPL is for everyone else.

edit: I'd link you the licensing page where it says this but it's been moved over to digia which is currently giving a 404

[Nobu]

... it might as well just be easier to do a new KDEish desktop without Qt.

Check this s... out. Haven't tested it yet and it's not complete, but I think it's promising. Oh, you wanted one without Qt? Err...umm...enlightenment?