The KDE Free Qt Foundation: 25 Years of Celebration
qt.io
qt.io
That said, Dolphin just got a bug where it crashes during thumbnail generation, and I'm seeing artifacts in Wayland with fractional scaling, but the KDE bug system is very visible and easy to navigate, so that I'm pretty confident these will be fixed soon. (I did know what I was getting into when I left Apple for the Wild West.)
It is totally insane that this is a thing for a user to think about.
As soon as the "designers" got more funding than the coding contributors, the whole gnome org went down the drain. They often trhow away complete systems and replace them with something that are unusable "to drive coding contributors". They are completely disconnected from the community. Ubuntu tries to work around all that (by making their own shell, settings apps, etc) so it is not too obvious, but if you use debian, you probably spend several months without basic desktop funcionality every time they pushed something. Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics.
So, no gnome is not closer to macOS. but gnome is broken by using copying macOS as an excuse by the designer teams.
The easiest way to make things clear and consistent is to have less things, the idea is you have a clean base then figure out how to add the things people are still wanting the most. If you had whole development teams working on these things then that would work (see macOS) but without that people implement the simplest parts and avoid the rest due to it not being fun, not having an agreed design for them, the design being too contentious, or just a lack of time.
then gnome was coopted and took a nosedive and OEM went back to using microsoft for everything. and ubuntu had to write their own shell to survive because gnome tought it would be smart to ship a broken 2.x version with no settings app
Could you clarify what you mean by this?
Like they wanted CSD and they decreed that everyone, even non-GNOME apps like old games that nobody works on should implement CSD because they are not going to be backwards compatible.
Same with notifications, old apps, third party apps should implement the GNOME way, they do not care for supporting non-GNOME stuff.
But more power for them, they self select a niche user, a "GNOME user" that either is compatible with the GNOME way or they will contort themselves into it.
And about this designers forcing their shit on users, I hit lately a issue with GTK apps where the windows of the app and popups are hard coded and you can't resize them. Because of my bad eyes I use a giant font size and this apps are unusable (I need to research if is possible to trick this windows at runtiem that they are allowed to resize)
I was surprised to see how a free software organization made a much better software than a trillion dollar corpo.
I just wish they had enough resources. KDE is the hope for the future of free software. I hope Valve can help them become mainstream. Just waiting for the day a big corpo will appear and make Linux compete with macOS and Apple's hardware directly.
The surprise wears off as you start using more and more open source software that's either on-par with or significantly better than paid software.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...
If you statically link against an LGPLed library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.Apple's mergeable libraries are basically dynamic libraries, but I expect on Apple platforms you'd have to provide the library source anyway since it won't be included in the OS. Of course I've never figured out how to download the LGPL source code from an iOS app - presumably there is a way other than just searching for it via google or github?
The loophole you're referring to involves creating a generic plugin interface that allows the program to use any library as long as it meets the requirements of the plugin system. If the program can function even when no plugins are present, the program cannot be said to be derivative of any plugin; it's the plugins that depend on the program, not vice versa. Therefore, you could for example develop an open source plugin that extends the functionality of your program and depends on GPL'd components and distribute that plugin binary and its source code with your closed source application.
No software at all is worth buying if you can't have the source code.
Apart from when they deliberately withhold features from the Open Source releases.
https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i...
The terrible part is where if you pay for a commercial license to use it in a proprietary application, you can't stand within 50 feet of the LGPL version.
https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/:
“Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt, or use Licensed Software for creation of any such software.
So you can't use KDE to write a program that links against the proprietary QT libraries.
The way I read it that's fine, it's the other way around that's forbidden - you're not allowed to use the commercial-licensed version to work on KDE.
To repeat myself, “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt.
make it fully truly open source, charge premium for those who need your professional service to make profits, then it will fly to the sky.
I agree though that some licensing changes would really help them grow. I think they've hurt long term adoption in exchange for short term revenue. I don't blame them, baby needs new shoes after all, but as a huge fan of Qt I would love to see them become a standard. The product is good enough that they deserve it, but the license can be a bit scary for people who aren't already familiar with it.
LGPL isn't really that onerous though..
However, new modules in Qt 6 and any rewrites of modules Qt 5-> 6are now GPL, which is rather copy-left and will spread to the rest of your code.
That's very surprising, it would make upgrading from Qt 5 to Qt 6 a no-no for the small companies who use Qt LGPL. I'm sure they want to keep developer mindshare. Which LGPL Qt 5 modules became GPL in Qt 6?
How exactly does that work? Why would the company invest a lot in the library if they can just offer professional services without it? For example, KDAB already offer professional services around Qt and do not need to spend much in R&D.
Konqueror took it a bit further though by supporting other schemes like FTP, SFTP, and anything else that had a KIO[1] implementation.
I think Konqueror also supported man:// URLs, and those man pages were always nicely formatted.
But it was a long time ago, and I might be mistaken.
I submitted it to HN but it didn't get any traction at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430030 /
For example, in Safari>Help>Acknowledgments there's lots of licensing information, including a lengthy LGPL section of fine print, but they really don't make it obvious how to get the LGPL source code. (It does seem to be on github, but there is no mention of that in the text.)
And I really have no idea how to download the GPL/LGPL source code from a random iOS app.
Shouldn't there be a download button or something for each GPL or LGPL component? (Maybe from the internet archive or gnu.org or something that is expected to persist longer than the average github/gitlab/bitbucket/sourceforge/etc. repo?)
1. Product manual must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL
2. Graphical software (desktop or terminal) must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL. Usually this goes in Help -> About/Acknowledgements.
3. If the customer requests the source code, you must provide it on request. They can contact you and you mail them a USB flash drive or download link. Most companies seem to pre-emptively place the source on their website and include a link to it.
4. You must allow the user to rebuild/replace the Qt libraries your program uses, including instructions on how to do this if it's not trivial.
So in your case, simply email the developer and request the LGPL source code and instructions on how to build/replace the product's LGPL libraries.
How would I find out their email address if it's not listed?
Occasionally I've tried contacting the developer via the "app support" link in the app store. Much of the time it's broken. Other times no contact information is provided. And of the times that there was actually a way to contact the developer, I've only rarely been able to get a response.
Now it’s all donkeys and elephants, trolls and partisans.
The discussion GPL vs the corps. The corps wanted to use linux for free and make money. they won when linus gave up and added "tainted" message. now everyone just skin the reference implementation and ship a vulnerable modem or iot and we like that.
Google and samsung ships billions of android devices *with no source code for most of the system* and we think that is fine and that android is open source and that linux is healthy when all it does is host a bunch of binary blobs for every piece of the hardware.
then we had discussions on hosted GPL vs the corps. Where the corps won again when we all gave up and came up with the agpl compromise. aws business model is "bigger Cpanel, with more OSS software we get for free". They sold RH business model to everyone who thought RHEL was too expensive, by charging even more. genius.
yea.. well.. gpl/etc fight was lost. On the upside, we can take a look at wider benefit to society at whole. Through usage of gpl software, even in non-compliant way, were created a whole lot of companies (and jobs) and products that are widely used. Without it we might have had 1% of current selection and it would have been based on vxworks and totally locked down.
you win some, you loose some