The Qt Company Is Tomorrow Moving Qt 5.15 To Its Commercial-Only LTS Phase

[stiiixy]

My decision to move to window managers like fluxbox and dwm is looking more brilliant by the day. I really impress myself with how much smarter I am than the rest of you filthy peasants.

Fuck you, dirt's good for my digestion! Even though I've known about the relicensing for ages, I'gone in deeper with poor ol KDE rather than jump ship.

On a slight aside, could KDE potentially migrate to this Copper Spice in a reasonable (2 years) time frame?

[ElectricPrism]

The Copper Must Flow!

[vsteel]

Seems like they could come to an agreement that if you have a company that is helping and contributing to the project they could get a "free" license for the LTS. Some kind of contribution versus value.

[cl333r]

Open Source can't exist without some group of commercial companies funding these "successful, free and open" products (like with Linux/LibreOffice/Blender/etc).
Money rules everything at all times and once the stream of money ends these projects either die or become proprietary like Qt and all their blabbering about freedom turns out to be naive fairy tales as anyone with common sense already knew.

[JackLilhammers]

CommunityMember
Assuming that said companies want to ditch Qt, which is unlikely, given the lack of industrial grade alternatives.

quaz0r
It may be cleaner from a design point of view and of course for the compliance to more modern C++ standards, but it's way uglier. A class with many slots in CopperSpice is mostly boilerplate code. But that's just my taste.

However, the point is that Qt is kind of an ecosystem. It's not just the moc, in fact the moc is not really that interesting to the user.
It's the tooling, the documentation, the examples.
I may very well be wrong, but to my knowledge the alternatives are not even close on these things

[andyprough]

My decision to move to window managers like fluxbox and dwm is looking more brilliant by the day. I really impress myself with how much smarter I am than the rest of you filthy peasants.

[piorunz]

One thing I know for certain, I won't be paying for it, I am using KDE, and I am willing to donate to KDE team, but not to greedy Qt Framework business. I hope FOSS community will fork and develop Qt without Qt Company. Just like community forked out OpenOffice, Java, and many other projects in the past.

[acobar]

Things would not work so well to undermine a fine open source project even if it was a thoroughly and thoughtfully elaborated EEE plan by Microsoft. What a spectacular way to shot themselves on all foot.

Dang, I really like Qt, shame on whoever chose this chain of actions.

[quaz0r]

time to get behind copper spice. qt has already been forked to qt-libre, its called copper spice. no, its not qt4. saying its based on qt4 is like saying qt5 is based on qt4. getting rid of moc doesnt make for worse code, it makes for better code. getting rid of moc is a pretty sweet evolution they were able to achieve by converting qt to modern c++. this also allowed them to create a more efficient implementation of some things like signals/slots. really, the stuff you are likely to want and hope for out of qt is already being done with copper spice. its kind of a shame it doesnt get more attention.

[CommunityMember]

Gtk is not really comparable to Qt. To be clear, Gtk is a perfectly fine gui toolkit, but Qt is not just a gui toolkit.

Exactly. Qt exists at least partially because C++ did not have the necessary level of platform libraries/extensions and abstractions that companies needed. C++ has come a long way, and at least *some* of the Qt extensions are now part of of the C++ standard (there has been, as mentioned elsewhere, companies that have leveraged those C++ capablities to no longer need some of the Qt-isms). However, as Qt has been an attractive nuisance since forever, lots of companies/projects have lots of Qt-ism in the code base, and it can take a long time to migrate away even if there is a will to do so (and since the C++ "equivalents" are not always one-for-one replacements some breakage will likely occur during shipment). Qt itself is migrating to the C++ standard capabilities (sometimes with a minor syntactic wrapper for compatibility) where it is trivial to accomplish, but they, too, have built their own world inside Qt.

If you want to use a real life equivalency, it took Amazon, a very large company with essentially unlimited resources and expertice, at least half a decade to eliminate all the pieces of the Oracle Database from their core systems, so even those companies and projects who may choose to exit the Qt ecosystem will likely end up taking quite some time to do it, and that presumes it is a priority over new features/functionality/revenue.