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

[darkcoder]

If this holds true and became the official stand of Qt, the ramifications could be huge. KDE always develop around the latest Qt versions available. Having a year delay could be a big issue.

The other non KDE related issue is what will be the possition of open source contributors. Would they abide to their contributions being provided to paying consumers for a year while they don't get a dime. Or wil be a X11 type case where they ask for their contributions to be removed.

Is sad Qt even think about taking this stance. Years ago when Microsoft tools were only for Windows deploys and there was nothing else on the market, they could try do that move. Now these days Microsoft development tools have been gaining terrain with support for Web, Android, Mac and Linux development. Qt is not that needed anymore. They should learn and follow the RedHat way.

And for KDE, time to think in the future, but please not a fork, enough with the MySQL/MariaDB drama and "drop replacement" statement.

[pal666]

lol@kde

[pal666]

It's their product, they can do whatever they want with it, why are you all so entitled brats?

it's their product which took code from contributors under cla. those less smart contributors who thought they wouldn't be bitten by cla

[Vasant1234]

Seems like it is a good time to converge to one toolkit i.e gtk. Multiple toolkit just hurts the Linux desktop. I use XFCE desktop and have never found the need for QT based applications.

[tildearrow]

At least this news makes some Gnome/Gtk fanboys happy

No. What happens is that the 144Hz crusade wins and takes over the world.
After that we become their slaves and must bow upon the so-called "Great Lord of Desktops" (by the crusade) GNOME.

Yeah, a horrible desktop with breakage and no customization facilities that is only beginning to improve.

[pal666]

It's basically a tactic of pay for 12 month exclusive preview access, any open-source contributions and bug reports will now have a 12 month delay, this is how we think it is best to reward our paying customers.

it's a lie. paying customers already get qt under non-gpl so they could use it in their proprietary products. now evil qt company tries to extort money from free products

[tildearrow]

Some alternative toolkits like http://fox-toolkit.org/ and https://www.fltk.org/ might pick up a little too,

Both are stuck in the '90's.

[pal666]

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

who needs windows support btw? it's microsoft's job to provide wsl

[pal666]

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

it sounds like qt 4.8 fork written in c++(upstream qt is written in some abomination with metaprogramming tech from early nineties), so it's more like rewrite they do every cycle anyway

[useless]

Seems like it is a good time to converge to one toolkit i.e gtk. Multiple toolkit just hurts the Linux desktop. I use XFCE desktop and have never found the need for QT based applications.

You haven't, a lot of us have. There's software which has, essentially, no alternative, like Calibre, GCompris, Dolphin, MKVToolNix and even Subsurface. Some software have alternatives but are sub-par feature/performance wise, like: Krita, Mathematica, QGIS, Scribus and many others. Some of them are multi-platform, which means greater user and developer base; GTK+ usually is a no-go for projects like that. Some of them are proprietary software (I think Valve software uses Qt a lot), with no source code availability: GTK+ isn't an option either.

So, no, multiple toolkits don't hurt the Linux desktop. Some toolkits are better suited for some things, other toolkits scratch other itches.
EDIT: Grammar.