More Open-Source Participants Are Backing A Possible Fork Of Qt

[phoronix]

Phoronix: More Open-Source Participants Are Backing A Possible Fork Of Qt

This week's bombshell that future Qt releases might be restricted to paying customers for a period of twelve months has many open-source users and developers rightfully upset. Qt so far only provided a brief, generic statement but several individuals and projects are already expressing interest in a Qt fork should it come to it...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=More-Interest-Possible-Qt-Fork

[TemplarGR]

It's happening folks.... Qt will be forked.

[Baguy]

I personally hope it's forked. While it may miss out in some regards such as the browser components... I think it will benefit in other areas. Hopefully Qutebrowser and Falkon can figure something out if it's forked.

[Awesomeness]

Hopefully Qt Company will come to their senses and release LTS updates again as FOSS as well.

[Nth_man]

> bombshell that future Qt releases might

A "might" is a bombshell?

Talking about sensationalism...

[Nth_man]

And about something that was already debunked (https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-open-source).

But that way, people lose their time discussing, while ads are served.

[SemperIdem]

So the Qt Company is pulling an Oracle...
I suggest we come up with a nickname for them that includes Oracle reference, so they'd get ashamed and disgusted by themselves, and they change their mind.
Maybe "The Qracle Company"?

[Awesomeness]

While it may miss out in some regards such as the browser components... I think it will benefit in other areas. Hopefully Qutebrowser and Falkon can figure something out if it's forked.

The obvious choice would be to wrap QtWebEngine around a CEF core. I've always been deeply puzzled why Qt and KDE never wrote a Phonon-like wrapper for web engines and instead chose to do full forks for each new release. QtWebKit was not based on Apple's LTS (=Safari) branch and KHTML was not transformed into a wrapper, as such applications first had to do a full port from KHTML to QtWebKit and then a full port from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine.

KDE media players never had that problem. They've used Phonon when Phonon's default back-end was still Xine and today they still use Phonon and users can decide on VLC, GStreamer, and MPV back-ends – whatever works best.

[Awesomeness]

And about something that was already debunked (https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-open-source).

"The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model." – I don't see how that would not mean delayed releases, esp. the LTS announcement was before the company could point to Corona as a scapegoat.

Some Qt fork may still be required, even it it's just as a hub for LTS distributions to share their bugfix patches over the course of the LTS distributions' lifetime.

[jf33]

If they really fork Qt, they should take the opportunity and throw out all bloat that nobody uses anyway.