Free Software Faces a Test With Qt 177
An anonymous reader writes with an article in TechRadar. From the article: "Thanks to Nokia's jump to Windows Phone 7, from the frying pan into the fire, its Free Software darling, the Qt toolkit, has been left living on vague promises and shell-shocked, hollow enthusiasm. Nokia has pledged some continued investment, bonuses for developers who stick with the platform and even a phone or two that might use it. But the truth is that Qt is deprecated, the project has stalled, and its future is uncertain."
In completely unrelated news (Score:2, Informative)
Re:In completely unrelated news (Score:5, Insightful)
Hilarious. Translated: March faster to oblivion.
What fool would buy a Nokia smartphone after all the jerking around of customers and developers? The sad thing is Nokia had the best actual phone technology in the business (i.e., actually making calls with good voice quality).
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I'm actually severely tempted to get another N900 as a backup. Seriously. It's that fucking good. The only reason I haven't is that, going by my previous rate of phone replacement, *something* as open as the N900, with much better hardware, will be out by the time I'm looking to replace my current one. Here's hopin'.
DOES ANY ONE HERE REMEMBER? (Score:2)
This was the sort of license/ownership issue forseen by Miguel and the crew back 'round '97.
That's when the GNOME project was initiated, as a hedge against Qt forking up - despite the stated good intentions of TrollTech.
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They made gtk back when QT had crappy licensing conditions, since QT 1.4 (around 1998) then these conditions have been remedied and qt is distributed by gpl (or commercial if you feel like paying).
Is it possible less developers will use it? sure, but that isn't a problem with licensing, qt is gpl and lgpl licensed (with commercial available if you pay). I fail to see the issue as this was resolved well over a decade ago.
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The entire issue exposed a sickening lack of maturity upon the part of Miguel and others that have since left gnome to people that can actually writ
Re:In completely unrelated news (Score:4, Funny)
A WP7 product is an upside?
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I can already add my Hotmail account on my Android devices if I wanted, likewise I can use eBuddy for Live Messenger.
Don't really see the point in Xbox integration with my phone either, what would I use that for? I can't think of anything that I'd actually find useful, unless it actually did something cool like let you stream movies/music from the Xbox network (and they also took the prices down - they're pretty ridiculous right now). I used to have a desktop Widget that showed the last 3 games I'd played o
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On the upside there is increasing confidence they'll be able to ship at least one WP7 product before the end of the year.
Now that is promising... we're just in June. Not even halfway the year. And "before the end of the year" they hope to have a single model on WP7. That's a complete generation away in the mobile phone world! And then aiming for just a single model? I thought Nokia got large in part because they had so many different models to choose from, low-end to high-end. Now it seems in the lower end they're still strong, Nokia phones are all over the place, and WP7 is high-end work.
So they're going to be completely ou
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It's clear you have never done development. How do you know how hard it will be to marry WP7 to one of Nokia's platform? The second worst thing Nokia could do is ship a WP7 phone with bugs. The worst thing they could do is ship a WP7 phone.
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Well no I haven't done development.
Yet I count on Nokia to not be stupid. By going for a certain piece of software (WP7) while you have a working alternative (Symbian) and a perfectly capable and very popular free alternative (Android) I would expect no less than that they can quickly release a phone with it.
Many many handset makers opt for Android - and are capable of bringing phones to the market one after another. New makers stand up all the time - no way they can spend a year or longer on development
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I don't know about you, but I don't care how old my phone's OS is, as long as it runs the apps I want and is designed from the ground up for touch integration. If you're always desperate for updates to your OS, that's an indicator that your OS sucks. I'm not saying updates aren't nice, but what has actually changed in this last year that WP7 needs to keep up with? Most of the changes in iOS and Android have been focused on making them work better for tablets.
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If only Slashdot's supposedly nerdy user base were capable of understanding the anchor tag [w3schools.com]. Would be a great business idea, probably.
FTFY
er... (Score:3)
... hasn't QT been LGPL'd? I don't see the problem.
Re:er... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that development is funded by the people who pay for non-free licences. If that income dries up, the KDE project would have to put their own development team together with volunteers or donation/grant funded developers.
That's not a huge problem... (Score:3)
KDE is already involved in the changes it wants for QT that are KDE-specific, aren't they? It's not like that would stop development cold. Hell, it might even make it easier for them to get the changes they want put in. Whether that adversely effects the rest of the developers who use QT for other things... well, I can't speak to that.
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They do that with the rest of QT, what's so hard about supporting a widget kit at this point?
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Autodesk Maya
The Foundry's Nuke
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isn't Google Earth written in Qt too?
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It is a strength of OSS. If it was a commercial project and Nokia abandoned it, we would be in a much worse position. That doesn't mean it is guaranteed to survive. Look for example at ReiserFS after Hans Reiser was jailed. I don't think QT will be anything like as bad as that as there are a lot more developers who have an interest in keeping it going and the ability to do so.
Re:er... (Score:5, Informative)
It has. Also, anyone bothering to check facts, such as the public git repository, can see that it's still actively developed.
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... hasn't QT been LGPL'd? I don't see the problem.
Some feel that Qt's superiority stems from its corporate sponsorship, and that being "demoted" to a sponsorless open-source project like GTK will result in a loss in quality. Others (like me) think that a lot of the quality is in the product design itself and that while development may slow down post-Nokia, it will still provide a superior open source toolkit for the forseeable future.
Re:er... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was GPL/commercial dual licence for ages, and more recently LGPL'd.
Development is continuing, this is a complete FUD non-story. Qt isn't going to disappear even if Nokia did.
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Absolutely correct. Unfortunately to many reporters, even tech reporters, lack of money means technology dies. With (L)GPL and similar licenses, it's lack of use that really kills a project. As long as something is used widely, someone will develop it, or at least keep it running as new hardware comes out. Money helps, certainly, but it is not everything. For instance, Torvalds certainly is no billionare who pays others to make all of his software. Though, that is another option [microsoft.com] for creating software.
No (Score:2, Informative)
It hasn't.
First comment on referenced article (Score:5, Informative)
From the first comment on the linked article:
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, and have not been following the Qt project's development lately.
Development is steaming ahead, releases are coming out, and they are hard working on Qt 5. They are also putting Qt into open governance, so even "outside" people may take "ownership" of certain parts of the project, and be more involved in the development of the project.
Qt is, in other words, no way near its end of life. (Also, KDE wouldn't *need* to fork, if Qt did come to its End of Life. Obviously you haven't heard of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which was set up very early on between KDE and then Trolltech (and updated when Nokia bought Trolltech). Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3 licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.)
So please, stop spreading FUD.
This is a lot more accurate than the article or the Slashdot post. Seriously, folks, Qt existed a long time before Nokia. KDE never needed Nokia's support, and Nokia didn't use KDE. Keep calm and carry on.
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I can only agree. Just take a look at all the (FOSS/non-FOSS) projects that currently use Qt (from wikipedia [wikimedia.org]):
Qt is most notably used in Autodesk Maya, Dassault DraftSight, Google Earth, KDE, Adobe Photoshop Album, the European Space Agency, OPIE, Siemens, Volvo, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Skype, VLC media player, Samsung, Philips, Panasonic, VirtualBox and Mathematica.
Maybe it will be developed by other people, but it's probably safe to say that it won't die so soon.
PS: Skype uses Qt? Could be interesting to see what Microsoft will do about that...
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And just look
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Opera's actually removed its Qt dependency [opera.com] since 10.50:
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But things aren't going to go back to the way things were. Qt is LGPL'd, they'd have an extremely hard time going back to a dual GPL/commercial license which is what funded Qt before Nokia bought them. Is "the community" going to pick that up with just as many full time developers to replace them? And with my experience with Qt (excellent) vs KDE (very mixed), do you want KDE teams taking over? And isn't their developer resources spread pretty thin as it is?
Face it, Nokia is going tight with Microsoft. I do
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I guess it depends a great deal if your priority is other QT apps or KDE + KDE applications. I'm the latter. I love having a standard C++ widget kit that's really really good. But I think KDE is more important by a long measure. I think having QT become a component of KDE fully would be to open source's general advantage; while willing to acknowledge there are plusses and minuses.
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1. no need to do a different licence. RedHat and Canonical make enough money with the current 'free as in beer' licences.
2. The small apps model is the best anyway, because they are easily maintainable. You argue against yourself here as this approach is exactly what the big commercial apps need anyway! And besides, little apps is what lives on mobile phones so expect to see much more of them in the near future.
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blah blah windows 98 blah blue screen blah
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Troll? (Score:3, Informative)
Sometimes I get the feeling that all you need to do in order get on Slashdots front page is to post an inflammatory article about open source.with no real basis.
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It doesn't even need to be about open source, remember the "is science a matter of faith?" article?
Maybe the Slashdot editors are trying to get rid of the trolls by giving Slashdot a reputation as a target with no challenge.
...so? (Score:3)
Re:...so? (Score:5, Insightful)
3) Stop believing in crap opinion pieces by random know-nothings on the web.
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What, and stop reading slahsdot?
Re:...so? (Score:5, Insightful)
I said stop believing, not stop reading. If you stopped reading Slashdot, then how would you know whom to flame?
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Ditch Qt, use any of the dozen other free/libre toolkits out there.
The problem with this option is that Qt is vastly superior to any other FOSS toolkit. In fact, I dare say that it's better than most UI toolkits, regardless of the license.
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Qt finally starts conforming to the C++ standard instead of hiding where they don't want to conform to the C++ standard...
Can you give some examples?
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This is my only reply to this topic: Anything the MOC (QT metacompiler) understands is a good example of something that doesn't conform to the C++ standard in my view
The only pertinent question at hand is whether the output of MOC conforms to the C++ standard. As far as tools go, it's not fundamentally different from any other code generator, such as e.g. re2c, or lex/yacc, or proxy/stub generators for various RPC stacks such as CORBA or ICE.
Another one of those cases... (Score:5, Insightful)
... where a reputable news source would have checked its sources for accuracy first. stagnated and stalled? Hmm... Just two weeks ago we had very different news [slashdot.org].
In reality, even if Qt stopped dead in the water with no development from anyone, it'd still be one of the best documented GUI libraries out there. I've never been a fanboy of any particular software suite, but the more and more I've dove into Qt in the last year the more I'm truly impressed with the design and documentation of the toolkit. Somehow I don't think it's going away.
The future of everything is uncertain; thats life (Score:2)
They can spin Trolltech back out, if as a product it is worth the money. Or, all the fans/supporters can pick up the GPLed portions of QT and keep the ball rolling (if there is indeed a groundswell of community support). It's not like Nokia is holding the only copy of the QT source code, and is dangling it over a bottomless pit...
This happens to projects and products all the time. The article, for it's good intentions, makes it sound like no software ever died on the vine before. Yeah, right.
Re:The future of everything is uncertain; thats li (Score:5, Informative)
Qt is actually LGPL now. Furthermore, if Nokia decides to stop developing Qt, the KDE Free Qt Foundation [kde.org] can vote to release Qt under a BSD license.
Wow, how can you be so far off the mark? (Score:5, Informative)
Since the windows 7 announcement the following things happend in Qt land: The Qt SDK had mayor update, Qt Creator had a new release, Qt had some minor updates, the open governance program is in full swing, Qt 5 was announced with open planning, there is a Contributor Summit coming up to discuss all these changes with non-Nokia developers...
Yeap, Qt has all the hallmarks of a dead project!
Re:Wow, how can you be so far off the mark? (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly, just a quick look at the dev blog [nokia.com] shows the following updates with respect to new features (some stable releases, some tech preview):
This is only during May. If anything, I see Qt more alive than ever.
There is also the misconception that only the Qt developers do interesting research and add features. That's very wrong. Lots of KDE ideas were implemented in Qt at one point or another. Also note that companies like Digia or ICS (and several others) are now way more involved in Qt than ever, and will be more once the open governance transition finishes.
Report of Qt's death... (Score:2)
Quicktime is dying? (Score:5, Funny)
ITS ABOUT DAMN TIME!
You Can Just Use It As It Is (Score:2)
Regardless of what the Qt developers do, the toolkit is very good and available. You can just use it to build your software and let the rest of the world jump in a lake. The worst that can happen is that Qt development will be slow and steady.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:An alternative to reliance on a single toolkit (Score:4, Insightful)
So I took all the core features and wrote a unified wrapper around all of the major toolkit APIs: pure Win32, GTK+ and Qt.
It sounds like you reinvented wxWidgets?
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Oh yes, I know how "just for fun" works in this case. I wrote my own UI toolkit ages ago as well, though that was actually for (and in) my own programming language.
Anyway, if you follow the thread where the original poster replied, he actually has a rational argument aside from just having fun - his wrapper is thin enough that the output is much less bloated than even wxWidgets.
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I am interested though, what was your own language like?
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I've used wxWidgets before, and it's ok, but awkward. It's based on MFC, which is archaic and difficult.
It's not really based on MFC - it's a clean source base - but its design is definitely ... MFCish ... mostly due to the use of macro-driven message dispatch maps.
I am interested though, what was your own language like
A concise description would be "BASIC with classes".
There used to be a project called Rapid-Q [phatcode.net] which was basically that - it was a bytecode interpreter written in Delphi that, effectively, exposed large parts of VCL to its interpreted code. It also attached the bytecode to the interpreter binary, so you ended up with fairly small (~300kb) programs,
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But you don't have to dynamically link to wxWidgets - use static linking and full-program link-time optimization, so that any unused code gets discarded. I bet you could get at the same 300Kb figure in the end, so long as you use a similarly restricted feature set.
I see your point about being easy to port, but how often is this, realistically, a requirement for most typical projects? Win/X11/Mac is usually good enough.
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It can get that small? My attempts at statically linking Qt with a six-line-long --no-bla configure line, -Os build flag and upx --ultra-best could only get my executables down to an added 4MB or so. I will admit, that's very respectable indeed.
Qt is a very different case because it handles all widgets itself - it uses the OS APIs to get theming information so that it can make them look native, but actual rendering and behavior is fully implemented by the framework. wxWidgets, like your framework, is a true wrapper around native widgets, and a relatively thin one at that.
That said, I didn't actually try, so I wouldn't quite stand by 300kb figure... just that it doesn't sound unlikely. I wrote commercial apps (in-house line-of-business) in wx a lon
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I don't mean to impose, but if you do this, could let me know your results?
Well, I must admit that I'm rather disappointed by the figures that I see. This all was done using VS2010 SP1, and wxWidgets 2.9.1 (the most recent available), building release versions which link statically against wx, but dynamically against C++ runtime. I compiled a bunch of samples that came with wx itself.
I started with a basic console application (samples\console) that parses command line parameters and prints out some help text. This doesn't use any of the "meat" of the library - only string processi
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I actually remembered one other UI toolkit that, while little known, is also very frugal. Like wxWidgets, it also wraps native widgets, though it seems to do a far better job at it (see below - I figured I'd check it out as well). It also has a distinction of being the only portable ANSI C toolkit wrapping native widgets that I know of.
The toolkit in question is IUP [puc-rio.br]. Note that, even though they talk about Lua a lot, and it is designed to be used rather conveniently in conjunction with Lua, the library itsel
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One of the reasons I don't use wxWidgets is that, in 2011, it supports neither 64 bit nor Unicode. Does your toolkit? I didn't see this mentioned on the web page.
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Windows 64-bit was the other major reason I wanted to move off of Qt. You can pull it off in Qt, but it takes some source hackery and is unofficial, last I checked anyway (4.6.x)
That has been fixed for some time now, no special settings needed. IIRC for 4.6.2 all I had to do was copy a file to and edit it slightly to make the qt build system recognize Visual Studio 2008.
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You nailed it with callbacks that allow using lambdas, but you failed at memory management (Phoenix expects to delete everything on exit) and on containers (why do you define your own?).
The other option (Score:2, Interesting)
As opposed to GTK+, where the project is healthy, the toolkit project is changing rapidly, and GNOME's future is uncertain because there's a giant user backlash over the changes.
You didn't describe it accurately (Score:2)
I'll fix it for you:
"As opposed to GTK+, where the project is healthy, the toolkit project is changing rapidly, and GNOME's future is uncertain because the Gnome developers lost their goddam minds and shat out a turd called Gnome3."
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That's not the whole story. Don't forget that Ubuntu has shat out a turd called Ubiquity, too.
With GNOME 3.0, Ubiquity, and the uncertainty around QT/KDE, I haven't been this scared for my Linux desktop in years.
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Yes; the despicable horror that is Unity was the only reason I even gave one hour to checking out Gnome3 (much against my better judgement). No more than that. That's an hour of my life I will never get back.
I am disturbed about some trends recently in the linux kernel itself, but as much as the wanton destruction of the perfectly good Gnome2 desktop angers me, I don't really despair for the linux desktop. Xfce only requires a bit more polish to be a good alternative, and there is LXDE if you don't deman
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No. Some changes cause more backlash than others.
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No. Some changes cause more backlash than others.
The entire KDE 4 switch was one giant cluster of pain. It's nearing 4.7 and it's still not as rock solid as the last 3.x branch.
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To be fair, the 3.x branch had quate a big time to reach such stability. I still don't use KDE 4 at my desktops, because they break nfs server I'm using, and I'm not liking it at my laptop because it keeps accessing the disk and battery life goes away. The problem at the desktops is probably a bug at the server, and at the laptop is probably some configuration setting that I don't know about. Except for those, it seems quite stable.
Meanwhile..... (Score:5, Informative)
...QT continues developing announcing cool features, like the QML scene graph [nokia.com] (post from today)
"the truth is that Qt is deprecated" (Score:5, Insightful)
The only truth here is that the article was written by a completely ignorant asshat.
Time for a GTK wrapper (Score:2)
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A wrapper is going to be not much different that GTK. Everything is open source its not worth the effort to re-implement GTK and keep it current, it ain't gonna happen.
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Dear Submitter, (Score:2)
When you overuse commas, it has the effect, of making your writing, read as though it were being read, by William Shatner.
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It's not just about KDE (Score:2)
There seems to be a lot of talk about whether KDE might (eventually) need to fork Qt, but this misses an important point - Qt is not just a "KDE widget toolkit". It's the best cross-platform UI (and many other things, actually) framework at the moment. If Nokia drops future development and KDE takes over, will they have desire and resources to maintain Windows and OS X ports? what about embedded?
It would be a damn shame to see Qt relegated to KDE backend, with future development being restricted to X11 vers
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Yes, but right now they can do so because they have a huge chunk of that porting effort done for them for "free" by people who develop Qt. I'm not so sure if all those projects would have manpower to maintain - much less further develop - the Qt/Windows and Qt/Mac ports on their own; at least without detrimental effect on their own release schedules.
Cash in (Score:2)
As soon as Nokia's stock price drops another 8 percent, I'm buying a bunch to hold.
As soon as the Nokia Windows phones start coming out, I'm going to be out of Nokia like a prom dress.
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WP7 when it was released it was already behind iOS and even Android.
WP7 was released in November 2010, with a major update expected late 2011. When it was released it was considered by reviewers to be on par with older generations of iOS and Android, not even the then-current Android 2.2 and iOS 4.1. Since then I can find only minor updates, mostly bugfixes and security fixes.
A month later Android released 2.3, since then it has released 3.0 and expects another major version before the end of this year.
A
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Of course you're right. That doesn't mean there isn't an opportunity for a little short term profit by a careful (?) investor.
Dear Nokia.... (Score:2)
Dont be Douches...
LGPL the whole thing. free it to the world completely. If you want to make a difference do this.
If you want to be jerks... kill it and keep it in a safe forever to rot away.
Because you either can gain great credit and renown, or become that company that squirreled away something you though had value, but was made value-less by the OSS version that will be created within moments of you doing the jerk move.
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They did that years ago. And it was GPLed before that. And there's an option to release it under other licenses if they drop it in their contracts with the KDE foundation (or somebody similar).
Qt is the furure of software development (Score:3)
Here's why.
Qt5 will have the maturity needed to accomplish the following:
Whole client-side programs written in Javascript (QML) that use OpenCL/GL and web resources. (Better than Flash)
LGPL (Better than Flash)
Client and server apps (Better than Flash)
One platform for Web, Phone and desktop (same as AIR)
Qt went 4.8-rc-1 recently with all these features, but when Qt5 comes out it'll have the maturity it needs. SceneGraph went into mainline today.
Awesome is coming.
Graham Morrison...ah, that explains it. (Score:2)
Isn't the author here one of the hardcore "WE HATE KDE!"/"Choice is confusing!"/"Why can't Linux just be a version of Mac OSX that we don't have to pay for?" people on the "TuxRadar" podcast?
That would explain the apparent overexcitement about the imagined doom of Qt. Premature Schadenfreud.
(Try thinking about baseball next time, ...uh, or cricket, I guess.)
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People just don't get how vicious the company is and what they'll do to stop a competitor.Qt should be forked or the poison pill dropped so the license can be taken from MS-Nokia ASAP.
LoB
Re:Nokia PR and Qt development are different (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for the tasty FUD!
Some comments here claim Qt is not dying because Nokia made some announcement and the Qt blog is hyperactive.
But look at the facts:
-the IRC channel they used: #qt-labs, has almost no activity since February
Looks like there's quite a bit of activity from just the last week [netsplit.de]
-the brand new Qt Developer Network has been deserted by the trolls
It'd be great if things were deserted by the trolls, I guess... Anyway, it doesn't seem deserted by the users [nokia.com]
-the blog posts on Qt labs are just about future project, never anything concrete for the current library
Of the five posts on the front page [nokia.com], two are about merges of experimental features (the QML scenegraph and Lighthouse), two about conferences and summits, and one's about the release of QtWebkit 2.1.1. Not current enough for you?
-the plans for Qt 5 announced recently are ridiculous, no troll was involved in those
I'm not even going to reply to that one!
-the development on qt.gitorious.org stalled since February
If there is not quickly a fork of Qt, we will discover in 2 years that Qt is outdated and there is no longer any professional GUI library for Linux.
Latest commit [gitorious.org] is dated Jun 1 2011
Now, WTF are you talking about again?