Does anyone have context for what these discussions are? That's a pretty terse message for those of us not in the loop...
Edit: This article gives a bit more context. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Open-...
Edit: This article gives a bit more context. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Open-...
And here the email to which Qt Comany reacts: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...
LGPL has long been a thorn in the side of Qt Company management. Nokia had bought Qt for $150 million, developed and popularized the platform, and then released everything under LGPL. Digia/The Company then bought the intellectual property from Nokia for just 4 million Euros and have been trying to make money from it ever since. Now, with Corona, the management seems to have had a good opportunity to get rid of its annoying obligations to the open source community.
But I agree with you. They are most likely executing now an old plan under Corona cover.
Linked email from KDE:
> But last week, the company suddenly informed both the KDE e.V. board and the KDE Free QT Foundation that the economic outlook caused by the Corona virus puts more pressure on them to increase short-term revenue. As a result, they are thinking about restricting ALL Qt releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months. They are aware that this would mean the end of contributions via Open Governance in practice.
TFA (the entirety):
> There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company.
> The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model.
So, are they claiming that they never planned to "restrict ALL Qt releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months", or are they saying this plan still counts as "committed to open source"?
Bull.
From January (eg ~2.5 months ago) they've stopped people being able to download the Open Source Windows, macOS, and Linux versions of Qt without first signing up for a "Qt Account".
eg you're now required to be tracked / able to be spammed / (etc) for even the OSS version of Qt.
That's not how companies "committed to Open Source" do things. :(
The crap they're reported as wanting to do now, is right in line with their demonstrated anti-OSS direction.
It's in virtually every Linux distribution as binary and source. You don't need a "Qt Account".
Grab the official Qt installer, and try downloading anything:
http://download.qt.io/official_releases/online_installers/
It will not work unless you sign in with a Qt Account.
Qt being under LGPL, there is nothing that prevents anyone else from redistributing open-source builds of Qt - Debian / Ubuntu through apt, MSYS2 (pacman -S mingw-w64-qt5-whatever), homebrew (brew install qt), conan (conan install qt/5.14.0@bincrafters/stable), vcpkg (vcpkg install qt5)...
On Linux/BSD though, obviously most people use the in-built package managers where the Qt version is recent enough for their purposes.
Have you tried it? Does it ask after the download?
Oh it looks like you obtained that launcher from the old "archives" directory?
http://download.qt.io/archive/online_installers/2.0/
It's unfortunate that only has an old Linux installer. Saw it yesterday, but needed an OSX downloader and was out of luck. :(
http://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/
At least, after disconnecting the internet connection then ignoring the subsequent error (ironic for an "offline" installer!), it doesn't require a Qt account.
For now we (sqlitebrowser.org) will keep with the easy approach of using the official Qt installers.
If Qt does something even further dumb though, we'll likely move to compiling Qt ourselves. And probably then make installers (.msi/.dmg) for anyone else that wants it too. ;)
Hopefully having several offline installs of various versions in parallel doesn't cause problems.
Apparently you don't even read the links you provide.
Qt company can't get rid of the leagal obligations it has to release the software. What it can do is to stop extra cooperation.
Don't worry, I also studied law.
What The Company can or can't from this contract is not granted unless you have supreme court judgments for the points in question. Otherwise the current patent system, which is primarily based on bluff and blackmail, would not work. As long as there are companies that would rather settle than defend themselves in court, The Company will find a way to stay in the game.
Secondly, nt's not about legality of open source license at all.
LGPL or GPL does not burden Qt Company with license obligations since it owns the source code. There is another contract between KDE foundation and QT company that we are talking here.
Thing is, non-commercial and free software projects (KDE is one of the biggest ones, but not just KDE) have a significant contribution, quality-wise, to Qt. Most commercial users are on LTS releases. They rarely report bugs in current versions. With some exceptions (e.g. Wayland), they rarely test new features as they become available. They rarely put too much effort into bug reports for LTS releases, too. That's just how commercial development works. Unless it's a critical bug and you have no choice, your employer won't pay you (or you can't charge your customer) to help another company fix their code.
Qt has a large foothold in FOSS and non-commercial software, and that provides a great deal of real-world exposure to a codebase that's old enough, and complex enough, that real-world exposure is crucial. IMHO, if they lose this, Qt will stop being a useful choice for any kind of development, cross-platform or not, within a few years.
(Edit: to be clear, it's not just that the FOSS community basically provides free beta testing -- even if technically it sort of does. This is an artifact of the way FOSS, and many Linux distributions, too, work today -- e.g. most distros don't ship the LTS version, they ship the latest version, simply because it's easier to fit that into their release schedule. Whether good or bad, it means that a big chunk of Qt app users are on the latest stable version, not on LTS.)
That's all in addition to all the third-party contributions, which are a small, but not insignificant portion of the Qt code.
If The Qt Company discontinued the FOSS version of Qt, the Qt framework would become available under the BSD license, and there would no longer be a contributor licence agreement allowing a company to sell the work of another company.
> in addition to all the third-party contributions, which are a small, but not insignificant portion of the Qt code.
In the last years more than 50% were open source contributions. At Nokia times they were only 10 to 20%.
Oh, okay, that's grown! I was still thinking of Nokia-era figures :).
But the rumors were that the Qt Company planned to do the minimum necessary to satisfy KDE Free Qt Foundation agreement, namely to release the source 12 months after release of the proprietary version. So, then Qt would not become available under the BSD license.
The real value of Qt is not $4m, Trolltech made a decent living out of it. The world has changed a bit since then, but I’m sure there is still plenty of space for Qt in the market.
Trolltech was skimpier but was much more interested in the success of the platform per-se. In many ways the post-Nokia experiences are an attempt at re-discovering the space Trolltech lived into.
> their open source OS based on Qt.
There was never such a thing. They had a Symbian OS skinned with Qt, and a number of Linux incarnations that started with GTK and were later reskinned with Qt. It didn't help that they stroke a high-level agreement to basically adopt Intel's Linux efforts, which were targeting GTK. By the end of these travails, they ended up with something fairly decent but that was just a lame-duck. Nothing was ever "based on Qt" at a fundamental level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo which evolved to http://merproject.org/ and https://sailfishos.org/ after the Nokia era
But indeed, in other areas such as non-Nokia mobile platforms they even blocked progress. It was only after Nokia let go that the Android port really took off and was mainlined for example.
Some people say that qt.io is one of the companies in trouble, and that it's reacting by releasing new versions of qt to customers first, and to opensource users a year later.
I've no idea how much income qt.io actually has lost.
Their employee count has also doubled, which is why they're not making any profits despite the revenue growth.
Edit: Ah, you're pointing out that only 25% of their revenue is commercial licenses, while most of their revenue is consulting. I don't know if that's really such a big deal.