Digia Spinning Off Qt Division Into New Company 59
An anonymous reader writes with news that, after a six year journey, Qt will once again be maintained by a standalone company. From the Digia weblog:
... Even though the open source project and the commercial side of Qt are highly dependent upon each other, they have over the last years drifted apart. ... Because of the separation between the open source and commercial offerings, we often end up competing against ourselves instead of competing against other technologies. ... We are now starting a conscious effort to overcome these problems. As you might have read, Digia has decided to move the Qt business into a company of its own. Thus we will soon have a company (owned by Digia), that will focus 100% on Qt. At the same time we would like to take the opportunity and retire qt.digia.com and merge it with the content from qt-project.org into a new unified web presence. The unified web page will give a broad overview of the Qt technology, both enterprise and open-source, from a technical, business and messaging perspective.
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I think I heard something like this 15 years ago when I first started using KDE. That's a pretty slow death, don't you think?
Re:Can't beat the Micro$oft Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
Qt is far easier to use and more elegant than .NET and other Microsoft solutions. The number of Windows-only apps leverage Qt is amazing. Your choice of desktop OS does not limit your choice of application development frameworks.
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There are a number of language bindings so that you can build Qt applications without writing a single line of C++. I've built medium sized desktop applications with Python and the pyside module. And it is pretty easy to do so. It is one of the best toolkits available for Python.
Another example, TortoiseHG, uses PyQt.
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Developers use lots of things. I still use C, some use C++, some Python, some Java, even a few still use C#. Certainly it may make sense as a hiring manager to look for people who only know the currently fashionable trends in languages, but that shouldn't drive a technology choice.
And besides, Qt has started moving away from fast and smooth compiled languages to a markup-style QML. There are bindings to many different languages.
The problem with . NET is that it is Windows only. Mono is just a partially
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This is probably subjective; I found the barrier of entry for Qt pretty significant, while mastering .NET seems almost trivial. Or maybe I'm just broken inside; all possibilities must be considered.
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What I liked Qt for is that before the mobile craze, Metro and all the other things happening recently was that it was a fairly simple way to create a functional UI on all the traditional desktops (Win/Mac/Linux) - all the platforms that mattered - and that looked native (where Java went horribly wrong) and did its best to follow platform conventions like button ordering and such. And it is a "standard" library that matches other modern platforms, you can get very far with only Qt. It wasn't very fancy but
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And while that's a significant platform, it's still just a fraction of platforms that developers use. In fact Windows is probably in the minority of target platforms that are out there, it's overwhelmed by the number of embedded and mobile devices. .NET may be ok on Windows but it's nearly useless for designing a cross platform application that can also work on MacOS and Linux (and mono doesn't solve that problem either).
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No, they haven't been called Trolltech for a while...
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The GP is probably an astroturfer rather than a troll. OTOH, there really *are* idiots who believe that kind of garbage, even after being shafted by MS a couple of times.
Re:Can't beat the Micro$oft Machine (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know one single person who uses QT for a serious, money making program.
Off hand, I can think of at least three S&P 500 companies who disagree with you: Autodesk uses it for Maya. Altera uses it for Quartus. And Microsoft (according to you, they "won") use it for Skype. However, there are countless other companies out there who use it. They don't all advertise it, though, so you're probably running programs that use Qt without realizing it. Companies that purchase the commercial license aren't required to announce prominently that they use Qt, and Qt by default uses native widgets wherever possible, so it's not always obvious whether you're using Qt or not.
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Blizzard uses it for their integrated launcher application, just to name one that's probably extremely common.
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Off hand, I can think of at least three S&P 500 companies who disagree with you
CadSoft also use it for EAGLE.
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I believe it imitates the look of native widgets but doesn't actually use them. This should allow for consistent behaviour on all platforms (unlike, say, WxWidgets).
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I can name some more: Halliburton, Shell, and Pixar.* One application I worked on made over $1 million a week last I heard.
For anyone doing serious 3D scientific computing on Linux, Qt is the de facto standard. Motif is simply awful and Gnome doesn't solve portability.
(*I wrote code that shipped for 2/3 the three companies.)
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Confirmed. Much of the Oil and Gas industry software now runs on QT. Except for the old legacy cruft. And there's plenty of that. Here's looking at you Z-map.
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Qt by default uses native widgets wherever possible
Not true. Qt widgets appear to be native, but in fact they are not (but your post is proof that they made quite a good job with the appearance). This is a bit of problem on macos where Qt has some issues with appearance (or at least used to have).
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We use it for GUI interface in industrial controllers.
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I know quote a lot of big companies using Qt. I wonder who these people are who think nothing happens in the world unless it's on .NET. Are they sheltered inside of IT caves or something? Many of those companies use a variety of platforms and toolkits, so the same company that might be .NET in one area might be using Qt elsewhere. There are some very big companies that just about everyone in the world has heard of that uses Qt (including a company that dwarfs Microsoft).
Most computers can use QT, can't use .NET (Score:2)
Most hardware sold last year can run QT, and does not run Microsoft.net. "already been fought, and won, by Microsoft". How exactly is having a minority (and falling) market share "won"?
Here's a copy of QT that will run on most of the hardware sold last year:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5... [qt-project.org]
Where's the .Net that will run on more than a small portion of currently sold hardware?
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Seriously, anyone who invests in this technology is an imbecile. This war has already been fought, and won, by Microsoft. I don't know one single person who uses QT for a serious, money making program. As a hobby, or educational exercise, it's fine. To put food on the table and my kids through college - give me .NET.
Well, there's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] And I can assure you, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Every company I've worked for in the last 10 years have used Qt for some product or another.
Doing it wrong (Score:1)
we often end up competing against ourselves instead of competing against other technologies
You don't compete against technologies, you compete against other businesses.
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we often end up competing against ourselves instead of competing against other technologies
You don't compete against technologies, you compete against other businesses.
Ideally, no. If you have to compete against other businesses, you need to set your prices to match the competition. When you compete against other technologies, you can set the price according to what the market can bear. Consider Apple, they have their own technology, which competes against for example Microsoft and Linux related technologies. Now they can set their price according to what those who want their technology are willing pay, and rake in big profits. While in (for example) Windows PC/laptop or
New name needed then? (Score:2)
Trolltech 2.0
Qtrolls
CloudQ(t)
aQt Synergies
Re:Qt
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I like Trolltech, but it's probably already owned by someone.
Hire some of the folks fired by MS! (Score:3)
Retiring a domain (Score:2)
Hope someone big in open source buy the company (Score:2)
I usually heard how nice is to develop using Qt. How it's easy, community friendly, last surprise, etc. But I never saw the big guys interest in the Qt owner.
Just wondering if a better future would be in the landscape if some big company with good open source compromise (in theory) like Intel buy Qt.
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Now just fix the commercial license model! (Score:2)
No more... "you tell us what you're doing and we'll decide how much we want to charge you" bullshit. I want clean and clear commercial licensing costs written down, up front. Otherwise I'm not even going to consider the technology for the project.
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Fits right in with the trend (Score:1)
But even though the open source project and the commercial side of Qt are highly dependent upon each other, they have over the last years drifted apart.
Perhaps because major new functionality is only in the commercial edition?
Digia has made a -lot- of new functionality commercial-only. Charting, graphing, UI widgets, core updates to Creator, the Qt Quick compiler, the UI profiler, in-app purchasing... It's enough that the Free Qt Foundation should be asking "If all new major features of Qt are commercial-only, at what point is it abandoned and subject to the default BSD license clause?"
Fits right in with the trend (Score:1)
Charting, graphing, UI widgets, core updates to Creator, the Qt Quick compiler, the UI profiler, in-app purchasing...
Charting and graphing are one component that is commercial only. There are a couple of UI widgets in Qt Enterprise components that are also commercial only, but all the usual ones are part of the open source Qt Quick Components. Creator is all open source at this point, which the exception of a plugin to check and manage licenses -- not really interesting to the Open source community at all.