Daniel Kihlberg made a blog announcement about "Qt Project":
Lars Knoll, on his blog, adds:
I'm not convinced. I posted my reasons here, to a comment which stated:
Nokia has, for all practical purposes, abandon Qt. Qt will not be installed in whole or in part on any of their future smartphone hardware. That location is tied up by Microsoft's WinPhone7 and future releases. Nokia makes no other products that could feature or even use Qt. Nokia has sold out Symbian and MeeGo and has laid off most of their software development crews, including most of their Qt developers.
So, what is Nokia doing with Qt, and why this "Qt Project"? It is a gilded cage. Nokia was forced, when they purchased Qt from Trolltech, to honor and sustain their pledge to the Qt Free Foundation by releasing a GPL version of Qt within a year after the latest significant changes of the proprietary version, and to let no more than 12 months elapse between significant changes. In other words, they have to continue to develop Qt and not let it stagnate, or the Qt Free Foundation can take (what was then) the GPL code and fork it, or the Nokia board can release the code under the BSD license. Microsoft does NOT want Qt under the BSD code. A framework as powerful as Qt and under a BSD license would be attractive to many firms which make developer tools for the Windows platform. It would wipe out Microsoft's software tools over night. Nokia can compile proprietary binaries of Qt because they own the proprietary version of the code. By moving the GPL version of the Qt code to LGPL they can turn the maintenance of the Qt code over to volunteers, yet still control the development of Qt by creating significant additions or enhancements as proprietary libraries, to which LGPL Qt source can only hook into, not modify and pass on, as the GPL allows. Thus, Qt is chained by proprietary forces and prevented from reaching its true significance as the most powerful C++ framework yet created.
An organization like KDE.org should fork the last GPL version of Qt4 and pin KDE to it, instead of the LGPL version that Nokia (Microsoft) wants to control. On January 14, 2009, Qt version 4.5 was released under the LGPL v2.1. This may mean reverting KDE back to the Qt4.4 framework which, if I read release notices properly, was the last which was released under the GPL, unless the KDE developers have not used hooks to any proprietary libraries in KDE.
We are extremely happy to announce that the Qt Project, the outcome of the open governance work, will go live on October 17th, 2011. This is a week before Qt Developer Days in Munich, and you can be sure to hear more about it there!
Since the Open Governance Model discussions started in July 2010, we have worked closely with the community to restructure the code base, design the governance structure, prepare the tooling, and define a contribution model for individuals and companies. And, we are excited to have a system in place that will be rolled out just five weeks from now.
Since the Open Governance Model discussions started in July 2010, we have worked closely with the community to restructure the code base, design the governance structure, prepare the tooling, and define a contribution model for individuals and companies. And, we are excited to have a system in place that will be rolled out just five weeks from now.
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. 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.
That's a very nice way of saying "Nokia abandons Qt".
So, what is Nokia doing with Qt, and why this "Qt Project"? It is a gilded cage. Nokia was forced, when they purchased Qt from Trolltech, to honor and sustain their pledge to the Qt Free Foundation by releasing a GPL version of Qt within a year after the latest significant changes of the proprietary version, and to let no more than 12 months elapse between significant changes. In other words, they have to continue to develop Qt and not let it stagnate, or the Qt Free Foundation can take (what was then) the GPL code and fork it, or the Nokia board can release the code under the BSD license. Microsoft does NOT want Qt under the BSD code. A framework as powerful as Qt and under a BSD license would be attractive to many firms which make developer tools for the Windows platform. It would wipe out Microsoft's software tools over night. Nokia can compile proprietary binaries of Qt because they own the proprietary version of the code. By moving the GPL version of the Qt code to LGPL they can turn the maintenance of the Qt code over to volunteers, yet still control the development of Qt by creating significant additions or enhancements as proprietary libraries, to which LGPL Qt source can only hook into, not modify and pass on, as the GPL allows. Thus, Qt is chained by proprietary forces and prevented from reaching its true significance as the most powerful C++ framework yet created.
An organization like KDE.org should fork the last GPL version of Qt4 and pin KDE to it, instead of the LGPL version that Nokia (Microsoft) wants to control. On January 14, 2009, Qt version 4.5 was released under the LGPL v2.1. This may mean reverting KDE back to the Qt4.4 framework which, if I read release notices properly, was the last which was released under the GPL, unless the KDE developers have not used hooks to any proprietary libraries in KDE.
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