Comment by dev-il | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dev-il | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt:

Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)…

… unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly traded as QT-COM on Nasdaq Helsinki) sees Qt as a direct revenue source to monetize to the maximum and developers as milk cows to maximally squeeze out as long as possible. And unlike Nokia, Digia's "Qt Company" does so in a quite unsustainable way. They enormously increased the prices of commercial licenses to a level that can only be qualified as extortion, and they do whatever possible to force developers out of LGPL and into Pay-to-Play:

they switched Qt's open source edition from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3… and they switched from LGPL to GPL or commercial only for most new modules, including QtQuick 3D.

The bottom line is: it's really going down the drain, and lots of developers of Qt-based programs and apps are drawn away and looking for something new. The need for a new modern and more liberally licensed cross-platform UI lib is bigger than ever.

Also, many devs are even switching out of Qt-based cross-platform development and back to separate codebases for OS-dependent native UI toolkits… which is kinda sad, though partly alleviated by some other factors (such as the similarities between Swift and Kotlin)

FOSS developers leeching Qt developers will be the death of Qt.

It is hard to sustain a business out of donations and patreons, not everyone enjoys counting pennies every month.

Also Qt is doing pretty well, thanks to enterprises, which still seem to value paying for developer tooling.

Working for the Company?

No, working for the man, former FOSS zealot let down by what means selling tools to developers.

Got to learn that only enterprises or cloud walls work out.

Digia does not own Qt Company. Digia was clenly split in 2016. Digia owners received QTCOM stock. see: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xhel/qtcom/ownership

Btw. Your claim that developers are switching is not true either. Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.

> Qt use is increasing and it shows in the number of buying customers.

As if that was of any relevance to the question whether many Qt developers are switching. Given that commercial licenses are only used by a very small minority of the professional developers using Qt (most using open source Qt), themselves only a subset of all developers using Qt… the fact that that small minority is currently increasing while remaining a small minority… doesn't say anything about the proportion of still Qt using developers switching away.

Besides, the sustainability of a temporary increase of that minority is highly questionable. Of course QTCOM's pressure towards Pay-to-Play temporarily forces some of those who are still tied by all of their still-Qt-based code to buy Qt licenses as long as they haven't finished switching to a better alternative… but on the long term most of them quit too. Precisely because of that.

We'll see how that strategy of maximal monetization and maximally squeezing developers works out for QTCOM in the long term

I hope the BSD case happens soon before these people scare all the developers away.

Your QT losing users is still unsubstantiated.

Developers stop using Qt for good technical reasons in projects that don't require the unique features of Qt. Qt's strength is being multiplatform. It works in embedded and realtime operating systems. It's not even useful for scrape by contract workers who do better with free web framework/UI stuff. Your TV, car, Television, have Qt in them. Its in medical devices and industry automation.

Qt may lose market share for Adobe PhoneGap, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin but that's because those target restrictive subset of what Qt is good for. Again, it's for good technical reasons. Nothing to do with licenses or Qt being evil company.

It just so happens that the biggest part of my work is in embedded. And while it's obvious that QTCOM is trying to establish itself in that domain… this here is merely wishful thinking:

> Your TV, car, Television, have Qt in them

no, actually neither has. And let's face it: while QTCOM does have clients in those domains… it doesn't have any huge share in either. Most use simpler lower-level graphical libs. Apart from that, you'll notice that those are Domains that account for a small minority of embedded… and a very unrepresentative one in that TVs, cars and TVs, unlike most of the embedded market, are stuff that are built by big corporations. So yeah, QTCOM seems to just focus on those big fish only now, as opposed to Nokia's strategy. As for industrial automation: don't make me laugh. Qt is totally irrelevant there.

And yes, licensing problems ARE a good reason which is a sore point, ESPECIALLY in embedded (where in most use cases you can't just dynamically link for LGPLv3 like on a desktop but have the whole mess of the build chain and update management if you are to let the user replace the Qt version).

You realize that Qt is dual licensed?

If you work in embedded like me, you already know that we make actual money. Nobody cares about license cost of Qt. It's quite low compared to everything else. We don't use LGPLv3 in Qt. We buy commercial license.

> You realize that Qt is dual licensed

what part of the thread did you not read? We've covered that already: the other option is the closed commercial license which since the switch from Nokia to QTCOM has become exorbitantly expensive

> Nobody cares about license cost of Qt (…) We don't use LGPLv3 in Qt. We buy commercial license.

You sound like you work in Qt Marketing, not in embedded.

> It's quite low compared to everything else

That's rather ridiculous. Most alternatives cost zero.

Yes, exactly. You have my vote and my support in case the Qt framework will be forked based on the LGPL 2 versions and continued from there independently of the Qt Company.

Here some figures: Nokia bought Trolltech and thus the intellectual property of Qt 4 for around 100 million Euros, and then released it to the public under LGPL. Nokia also payed for the development of Qt 4.4 to 5.0, and then "sold" everything to Digia for a piece of bread (about 4 Mio Euros). The contribution rate of Nokia was ~80% according to commit logs; the contribution rate of The Qt Company is at ~40% - and it's mostly on stuff important to them (i.e. which they can sell). So at least 50% are open source contributions by others. This information is all publicly available; you can read it yourself. So the Qt Company massively profited from this and should stop complaining and turning crooked things.

And they have to stop their u-boats, which act anonymously and make opinion.

Glad to hear that. How about we change the name to QueTee so that we still can everything starting with a Q and people finally pronouncing the name right? :D

I would rather recommend to stay with the name but add a prefix such as "Free Qt" to demonstrate that it is still and will remain a robust Qt branch doing without incompatible changes and focussing on the essentials. I wouldn't even mind to start with 4.8.6, but also 5.6 is OK (the last LGPL 2.1 version). Work should concentrate on stability, compatibility with relevant platforms and finer grained modularity using a standard build system (such as modern cmake). Rewriting everything just to worship the "modern C++ god" is a no-goal from my point of view.

Nope as a QML developer 5.14 is bare minimum because of the many changes like proper 4k scaling support, Splitview, Table support, way better Android build, usable Qt3d and many quality of life improvements.

Are you aware of Dart and Flutter? I also used Qt on Android and iOS once. Won't do it again. A lot of linking, deployment and licensing issues to use something where by the end of the day I have to take care myself that it meets the platform look and feel. QML/Qt Quick was a nice idea when Nokia and others wanted to establish a common mobile platform based on the Qt framework. Today for scripting/mobile UX focussed developers there are much better options.

Yes I am aware of the alternatives. Still having used a ton of UI libraries (Unity/Unreal/Godot/C#/QtWidgets/Flutter and web development) I would still choose QML by a landslide. My project ScreenPlay [1] (Cross plattform animated wallpaper and desktop widgets) is written 100% in QML and C++. I use the build in Material Design on desktop which works really nice with fancy animations. At work I develop a cross platform Qt app for desktop and Android tablets. With QtCreator 4.11 they unified the apk creation for all arch and arm versions.

[1] https://gitlab.com/kelteseth/ScreenPlay

Interesting. How did you solve the LGPL licencing issue? Did you have to pay a commercial licence and pay royalties to The Company?

EDIT: ok I see, your project is AGPL. But that just moves the issues to your clients; how do they solve the issue?

When distributing qt on android you can simply write an guide on how to decompile the apk, replace the qt .so and compile it again. I haven't done it yet so I'm not 100% sure about this. Also you could simply install ministro for this. https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-deploying-android.html

I had so many linking issues because of the Qt so on Android that I finally had to statically compile the run some tests at all, and in consequence to replace Qt with something else to avoid royalties. The problem of "DLL hell" (i.e. symbol conflicts between library versions) is well known on Android.

We're working on a cross platform mobile app rn and we're using QT because "everyone else in the company is using it". It might be good for desktop, but I've found it to be nothing less than frustrating, it reinvents the wheel for mobile, and doesn't do it very well. It's still missing many features, we still have to keep going back to native views to implement things because QT just can't do certain things. We've lost developers because they want to work with mobile technologies and QT seems like 10 steps back. Swift and Kotlin address many issues of cpp, we don't have access to the wide amount of mobile libraries. We replace things with cpp libraries never compiled for ARM that ends up with incredible amounts of code that would take a few lines in native. Every library we add brings more headaches. And then we have desktop developers diving in and designing everything like it's desktop, button and menus too small, scaling the view to fit different device sizes. ugh

Arguably, licensing revenue was a drop in the bucket for Nokia and they had a lot more to lose with the liability that came from commercial customers. It was a hard move to (at least partially) undo for the Qt Company.

Switched QtQuick 3D from LGPL to GPL?

Is that the regular license FUD or what? I don't see which 3D module you're talking about.

No QtQuick3d [1] was from the beginning GPLv3 only (It is not even released yet, but Qt 5.14 release is tommorow). It is a bit awkward because now there are competing 3d engines inside one toolkit.

[1] https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.14/qtquick3d-index.html

What I did write was that they switched their licensing default for most new modules from LGPL to GPL. So unlike Qt Quick (the original 2D Qt Quick) which was started under Nokia and licensed LGPL (or commercial)… the new Qt Quick 3D (*) was never licensed under LGPL but is licensed only under GPLv3 (or commercial).

https://github.com/qt/qtquick3d

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