Digia: Committed To Qt, Will Take "Extremely Active Role"

In an email to Phoronix, Digia has clarified their Qt Commercial releases and further affirmed their commitment to the public Qt Project.

Katherine Barrios, the head of global marketing at Digia, fired off an email to Phoronix on Monday. She sought to clarify Digia's Qt Commercial releases and to make it known to Phoronix readers that they are committed the community project built around the LGPL version of the Qt tool-kit.

Some readers have been a bit disgruntled that recent Qt releases have offered more than 100 improvements/fixes than what's found in the matching LGPL version of Qt. Even the release a few days ago had a large patch delta to what's found in the LGPL Qt Git repository. Digia isn't interested in doing this, but it's a matter of Nokia and the Qt Project interacting with them to pull in the changes.

Below is important part of Katherine's email that she sent over.

Digia is not in any way carrying a delta on purpose. In actuality, what happens during our release cycle and our patch releases is that we work very closely with Nokia on all releases. Digia focuses, naturally, on all desktop and embedded bugs and additional features while Nokia focuses only on Symbian and mobile-related features. For the LGPL version, it is Nokia that decides what fixes/patches go into the LGPL version, and naturally, they choose bugs/fixes that are for Symbian and mobile. They decide to leave out many desktop and embedded big fixes as their target and focus is on mobile and they need to prioritize those. In turn because Digia’s charter is to service desktop and embedded Qt customers, we need to take in the desktop and embedded fixes/patches that Nokia leaves out because they are crucial for our customers. Digia has no control as to what goes into the LGPL at time of release, only what goes into the Commercial version.

Digia is committed to the Qt community and all the fixes/patches that we work on for desktop and embedded are available for Nokia to take into the main branch. However, it is Nokia to decide what and when they take them in. Digia is in no way looking to fork and in fact are very committed to the Qt Project and will take an extremely active role in the project moving forward.

I am very open to discussing this further with you and would welcome an interview with myself or with our Director of R&D. We value the Phoronix readers's opinions as the entire OS community.

So they say they are very committed to the Qt Project and will be looking to take an extremely active role in the project moving forward; hopefully this will reduce their patch delta. Katherine Barrios says she will take Phoronix questions, so if any readers have any questions for Digia, please post them in the forums. If there's enough interest, I'll try to arrange a formal Q&A with them. Otherwise hopefully they will begin to respond to questions within the forums where they are already active.