New Qt Releases Might Now Be Restricted To Paying Customers For 12 Months

[discordian]

I guess KDE folks will just fork QT and backport any meaningful additions in twelve months then.

They should just spent the effort on copperspice, that supports C++ style template style programming unlike QT (which feels more like Java, including the users which mostly are utterly incapable of using any common C/C++ library).

[kiffmet]

discordian wouldn't that mean a rewrite of KDE from the ground up and throwing away years of work and polishing?

[gojul]

A likely outcome would be in that case to take the latest beta-RC-whatever under the correct license terms, fork it and that's it. Which would turn into a complete disaster for QT since they cannot modify the license terms for a past release at their will.

This is exactly how XFree86 was destroyed.

[zoomblab]

Did they got it backwards? I would charge for maintaining a release AFTER a grace period of lets say couple of months. Those who need the support are justified to pay for it.

With their way the paying customers are going to become the alpha and beta testers and then the free users are going to get the bug fixed versions. Ok with a lag of a year.

[mdedetrich]

GTKs cross-platform (mainly Windows) support has never been fantastic though.

That would be an understatement, I would say that GTK support for Windows is outright terrible compared to the competition

[CommunityMember]

Qt has been unable to find a sustainable funding model ever since being set free. Blaming COVID-19 is a cop-out, but the Qt Company may not be long for this world if they cannot find a way forward. The only choices may be bad ones, and which bad choice has the highest probability of success?

[berolinux]

I doubt they will go through with this. It would be the company's suicide and unless they're braindead, they know it.

The obvious result will be a community fork of Qt and everything moving to that.

GTK is not an alternative and anyone who has ever tried writing a little application with both toolkits knows. There's good reasons why just about everyone but gnome is jumping off GTK, and it's not that GTK's API is so wonderful.

If they don't reconsider (and I still think they will), a fork of Qt is the only real option. Some alternative toolkits like http://fox-toolkit.org/ and https://www.fltk.org/ might pick up a little too, but they're probably too far behind in available libraries working with them etc.

[zexelon]

Having done some development work in both GTK & QT, I would pick QT any day. That said the "bait and switch" approach being floated here under the disguise of "COVID-19" is pretty reprehensible.

I have found that the Linux community as a whole tends to be a lot of sound and fury over OSS but they get over it pretty quickly... unless you mess with something that actually affects their lives (I refer you to the SCO fiasco). If a company does that and actually mobilizes the Linux community against them in a real way the effects can be very negative for those companies.

Nvidia is another famous example of a company flirting with this line. If QT does this and it crosses that invisible line then I think the community as a whole will fight back fairly drastically.

[discordian]

discordian wouldn't that mean a rewrite of KDE from the ground up and throwing away years of work and polishing?

copperspice has some tools to convert QT-code, it is close enough to QT to make that possible. So no, not from ground up, but its certainly a substantial amount of work.
Still seems less of a dead-end than QT or a fresh QT-fork for me.

you could say the same about Wayland btw.

[remenic]

gojul That would require you exceed the critical mass. LibreOffice pulled that on the CLAed OpenOffice. That was a long fight.

Who’s going to stand up against Qt? So far KDE has only proven incapable of acknowledging the problem. How do you expect them to fix it? They haven’t done any low level programming widely used or accepted by others. Look at PIM. Look at Akonadi/Baloo. Look at Phonon. Look at Kwin. Look at DWD. Look at KF.

Please let me bite! KHTML/WebKit/Blink!