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KDE Open Source Technology

Nokia Announces Qt Open Governance Model 39

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the software-wants-to-be-free dept.
chill writes "Over the past year the Qt Developers have been working to sort out how they can make development of Qt even more inclusive and open. After exploring various options, they are now almost ready to go live with the new solution. It's taken a little longer than expected, but they are now very close to moving hosting of Qt to a new domain: qt-project.org [domain not yet live when posted]. The domain will be owned by a non-profit foundation whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project. More details of the changes are available at the Qt Open Governance Model wiki."
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Nokia Announces Qt Open Governance Model More

Nokia Announces Qt Open Governance Model

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  • I love their adherence to lazy consensus. You see here everyone, it's very important to be lazy!

    FTA:

    Lazy consensus is a very important concept within the Project. It is this process that allows a large group of people to efficiently reach consensus, as someone with no objections to a proposal need not spend time stating their position, and others need not spend time reading such mails.

    • I love their adherence to lazy consensus.

      I agree

  • One foot in? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday September 14, 2011 @11:59AM (#37400468) Homepage Journal

    This is a pleasant surprise. I had understood that Nokia had become entirely dependent on Windows Phone and was setting itself up to be acquired as Microsoft's mobile unit, but then why would they need Qt when MFC/.NET is readily available?

    It sounds like somebody decided that they need to keep their options open, which is smart:

    At the end of June 2011, Marco Argenti, SVP, Nokia Developer Experience, confirmed that Nokia will âoemake Qt core to bringing applications to the next billion,â and he reassured developers that investments made in Qt today will live on in the future with Nokia. Adding the information about the 9M+ downloads per day on the Ovi Store, already today, provides a hint about the opportunity developers have with Nokia.

    To mince the fine points with the submitter:

    foundation whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project

    There seems to be at least two things going on. The above statement is true:

    I want to make it very clear that the foundation will not steer the project in any way. The foundation is in place only to cover the costs of hosting and run the infrastructure.

    But this is also different:

    All technical decisions, as well as decisions about the project direction, will be taken by the community of Contributors, Approvers and Maintainers. For example this means that people in Nokia working on Qt will start working with Qt as an upstream project. Everyone will be using the same infrastructure, including mailing lists and IRC ... but it may surprise you that that around 15% of the initial Maintainers do not work for Nokia. We also have quite a few Approvers from companies and the community. ...

    The Qt governance, roadmap and releases will be driven openly by the Qt Project â" open to all the stakeholders willing to contribute. It will have an open governance model [nokia.com] based on equal access to all discussions and tools, an open contribution process and meritocratic assignment of roles. We want Qt to excel by all measurements as a transparent, merit-based and participative open source community project. We believe this is the key to speeding up development and increasing the adoption of Qt.

    Yet, they recognize the elephant in the room and are open about it:

    As a last point I wanted to talk about one thing that is fixed for the project and not going to go away. To contribute to Qt, you will have to sign a Contribution License Agreement with Nokia. We have put a lot of effort keeping the Qt codebase legally clear and clean, and this attention to detail will continue under the Qt Project. We have been over the last months reviewed the CLA extensively with many stakeholders and believe we have a solution that is as inclusive as possible for all companies and individuals that want to contribute to Qt. The CLA also enables the commercial ecosystem around Qt to continue to thrive and contribute to the project. Further, there are a number of legal obligations from Trolltech and Nokia that have to be taken into account.

    This license [nokia.com] has a few problems any contributing entity is going to feel leery about. Just a few that jump out:

    For the avoidance of doubt, Nokia has the right and no obligation whatsoever to utilize any Contribution and Nokia shall have the right, at its exclusive discretion, to include, suspend and/or exclude any Contribution from any release of Nokia Software Products.

    I can see why Nokia wants to not imply they'll maintain a useless patchset forever, but they also have a potential strategic weapon against competitors here.

    The seat, or legal place, of arbitration shall be Helsinki, Finland.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Supposedly, the new licence agreement is going to be better than the one you linked to.

      http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/#comment-27802

    • why would they need Qt when MFC/.NET is readily available?

      To allow development of an application that runs on both Microsoft platforms and non-Microsoft platforms whose official developer tools don't include an implementation of CLR and Silverlight. If a single application can target both non-Microsoft platforms and Microsoft platforms, that'll let people switch to a Microsoft platform without having to give up applications. This is an advantage for Microsoft in a market where Microsoft is still like Shoeshine: an underdog. Now the core problem is that unmanaged p

    • This is a good way to scare off potential small contributors. I'm not going to agree to perhaps need to travel to Finland so I can submit a fifty line bugfix, how 'bout you?

      It's about a 15 minute bus drive to Nokia HQ from where I live, so...

    • MFC is shit and .NET requires a VM. Qt is a much better choice when all you need is a barebones GUI application executable programmed quickly.

  • Isn't this what they tried to do with Symbian?

    Let's hope they've learned some lessons and can apply them here. QT is one of the nicest C++ frameworks I've come across and it would be sad to see it's future mis-managed.

    • QT is one of the nicest C++ frameworks I've come across and it would be sad to see it's future mis-managed.

      Seconded. The QT language itself is very mature, well-rounded, and includes things that C++ has sorely needed (decent string support, of all things, not to mention native threading...hell, even Java has built-in threading whereas plain C++ does not) The new QT Creator IDE is very nice as well. (the only drawback is that it's not in my distro's repositories so I have to manually install it) QT actual

      • When I said "QT language", I meant "QT framework".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by spitzak ( 4019 )

        I would like to see them drop all the STL and boost duplication and switch to standards as much as possible.

        They don't have to drop MOC but it would be nice if they tried to figure out an equivalent that uses C++0x and macros.

        The strings are not byte strings and therefore useless. This makes handling of UTF-8 and thus modern Unicode impossible because (like it or not) UTF-8 can contain invalid sequences and it is impossible to losslessly translate these to "wchar" or whatever crap they are using. It also ma

    • I was jsut about to post about this. Nokia commits to a lot of things and generally they fail to pan out. I think we'll be revisiting this story in a year or so.

      • As I understand it, the leadership behind Qt is not the same as the leadership behind much of Nokia or even Symbian. They definitely have a better understanding of how to work with communities and do things in the open than Nokia does.

  • Sad apathy. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2011 @01:40PM (#37401872)

    The sad apathy and silence around this move, and the Qt project, shows how far Slashdot's reader base has fallen from being interested in FOSS and open development models.

    It's all about being treated as second-rate by Google these days, white knighting for Apple, or reading shit articles posted by samzenpus/kdawson/timothy.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Jerry ( 6400 )

      ...shows how far Slashdot's reader base has fallen from being interested in FOSS and open development models.

      I've noticed that too. That and the tendency of comments to veer off into discussions unrelated to the article, only to degenerate into exchanges of insults. /. was reported in a story a week ago as being among the dying websites. It's easy to see why.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I've noticed that too. That and the tendency of comments to veer off into discussions unrelated to the article, only to degenerate into exchanges of insults. /. was reported in a story a week ago as being among the dying websites. It's easy to see why.

        Maybe because you've provided two of the most clueless comments on this article, taking it very much off track with a zany conspiracy theory? You're not exactly pulling the average up, you know. But I guess that counts like an insult.

    • I might be showing my age by saying that I've noticed that too.

    • I think a lot of people may have written off QT for dead. With Nokia becoming a glorified Microsoft lacky, most of the excitement that a Nokia product would have once generated has been replaced by resignation. For many QT fans and developers, the question is not a matter of if Nokia will shutter QT, but of when.

      • I think a lot of people may have written off QT for dead. With Nokia becoming a glorified Microsoft lacky, most of the excitement that a Nokia product would have once generated has been replaced by resignation. For many QT fans and developers, the question is not a matter of if Nokia will shutter QT, but of when.

        Except that Nokia insists that they have big plans for Qt. Apparently, they are moving it down to their lower-end featurephones which is kind of a big deal seeing that they sell a gazillion of them each year. They may be pushing Windows phone nowadays, but high-end smartphones are just one (rapidly shrinking) part of their overall business. The rumour is they are planning to launch a launch bunch of Qt enabled featurephones at NokiaWorld next month. There are millions of Africans, Indians and Chinese liter

  • It's all a trap! What Nokia really wants is Open Source developers develop the new Nokia platform for free! Then they will come and pick the best. Now, how do you get developers in? Easy, taunt them with throwing Nokia in Microsoft's arms. Clever clever...

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