An Open conversation about the future of Qt.
-
@Andre, but Qt is commercial product, and I doesn't see the difference between begin it maintained by a foundation or another company.
Supose that Qt is begin mantained by the KDE foundation, if a company has a commercial interest with Qt, then they will contract fulltime developers to make Qt grow, as well as so far with Nokia.
I see a business and manteinance model similar to the Linux kernel.
Anyways this is supposing the worst case. -
I just wanted to add my 2 cents regarding "You finally came to your senses" remark. I re-read the post and my interpretation is: "You see this from my point of view".
Regarding the scientist who has proposed that when communication is mis-understood it is the sender's fault. One cannot control how a message is perceived through another's emotional state. Scientists fail to take into account we are emotional as well as logical beings.
-
^^ In my area of interests I have stumbled upon renowned scientists that are profoundly stupid and blunt liars. Like for example celebrity physicist Michio Kaku, who claims that quantum teleporation involves the actual teleportation on physical objects, which is fundamentally wrong. How is it even possible for "educational" channels to present him as a physics and especially quantum physics expert, when from what he says it is clear the man hasn't got even basic idea of quantum physics. There is a fine line between science - the intellectual discipline, and scientism - a religion-like belief system that goes against logic and reason to impose politically convenient mindsets on society.
Back on topic - Qt was purchased by Nokia in the dawn of the 2008 financial recession, for an unreasonably high amount of money. If Nokia is to sell Qt today, it will have to be at a significant loss, not only the initial transaction but all the investment, made by Nokia ever since. If a company is to purchase Qt, it would be with the purpose of money making. That means the amount of money, invested in Qt and paid to its developers will always be less than what Qt actually makes.
But why not cut the middle man? Why should there even be a company to make money on the backs of developers and increase the cost of a product just to post profit? Wouldn't it be much better if everything Qt makes goes towards its further development?
I've long had the idea of a framework, entirely developed by a community which directly benefits from its commercial exploitation. The more developers contribute to the framework, the more points they get, the more points they have, the bigger share of the income, generated by the framework they receive. Developers, working entirely for themselves, with no "business men" to drive it into the ground, burn billions and cost hard working people their jobs, like we've seen over and over again. No corporate greed, no corporate interests, instead a direction that is 100% in the best interest of the framework and its developer base. Easy to use high level APIs, with public access to the low level bowels, rich in supported features and platforms. A framework, whose direction is based on the requests of its developer base, instead of being ignored, as it is under Nokia's reign.
-
entirely developed by a community which directly benefits from its commercial exploitation
I am not quite understand your ideal, could this method give
those good programmers enough of money?Who would like to and have the ability to become the leaders?
Do you think Qt could remain high quality without those good
programmers like trolltech work on it fulltime?Even I want to make Qt become better, I am only one of the
average programmer as other.Average programmers like me
could do a lot of things, but it is hard to believe a good library
like Qt could be done just by those average programmers like
me.Without financial support, could you gather enough of "Guru"
to do the jobs of code reviews? -
Well, if a company can make enough on a framework to pay its developers and post profit, if you subtract the money that goes for profit from the total money, made on the framework, then you have even more money left for its developers.
If you for example write a new framework module on your own, or as a part of a team, then you or your team get all the revenue, generated by this module. Of course, your module might make use of already existing modules, created by other developers, in which case the income is split based on for example code ratio, if for example 1/3 of your module code is using another module and your module requires the other module, then the author/s of the base module get 1/3 of the module revenue.
It is similar to freelancing, only you are 100% working for yourself, you aren't making the salary of anyone else.
There isn't a real need of a "leader" - decisions are being made by the community. If there is a feature, being requested, those, who request it are free to add it provided it doesn't break existing functionality, or other developers can agree to implement that feature and get a share of the points of the module/s which include the requested feature. This way the usual policy of forcing certain technologies on developers will finally be broken, which will inevitably make the framework more attractive to other alternatives, where you have to pay to use proprietary, and not always optimal technology. Some people might say this will lead to fragmentation, but the best technology will inevitably establish themselves as dominant, so the line that separates diversity from fragmentation will not be crossed. This will also create internal competition, stimulating developers to write cleaner and easier to use APIs.
There is no limitation that the developer community MUST be comprised of ONLY AVERAGE developers. Average developers are the portion of the developer base that uses a framework, while anyone, advanced enough to contribute by a significant amount will naturally be a high end professional programmer, who will pretty much make a living on it. The only difference - there will be no employer to feed, so the framework can be more affordable while at the same time more rewarding to its developers.
-
Well, this may clear the discussion a bit: http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/19443/
-
An hour ago, I got an email notification of a post to this thread. It was a blathering note, complaining without much of a point. Thankfully someone was wise enough take it down.
It did however, get me thinking about a reply, It's was someone angry that Digia was making too much money, and this person was angry at the change in license.
Many of you know me, and know that as the CEO of www.ics.com I make my living off of Qt, and have a complex relationship with Digia.
I hope I speak for the bulk of the community, when I say,
I want Digia to make money on Qt! Sadly they aren't.Digia continues to invest in Qt to help in grow, and for that I am thankful.
But that investment is coming from their stockholders pockets, and that's not sustainable.The dual license strategy is very complex, with perils and trade-offs for every move. The switch to the LGPL v3 will likely grow the slice that is commercial, while pushing a few embedded projects away from Qt. I don't know how it will net out. Time will tell.
I applaud their efforts to seek ways to generate the income they need to keep Qt growing, and allowing the open source community to benefit form their efforts.
Thank you Digia.
Peter Winston
-
[quote author="PeterWinston" date="1409448581"]Thankfully someone was wise enough take it down.[/quote]
It's a spamming troll we (moderators) have been battling since several months. Sorry you were exposed to his outburst. We are usually quick to react and ban him, but obviously the email notification about a post contains the full poster's message.
Going back to the subject: while I'm not entirely happy with the Digia way, they are indeed doing a pretty good job in general and I sincerely hope they manage to balance the finances enough to sustain and expand the product and keep all the great Qt developers employed there.
-
And again.
Yes, some individual who has taken to posting senseless rants. It's not even proper trolling.
I feel sorry that the individual is so bitter and hope he/she tries to get on with his/her life. As pointed out previously to the bitter person in question, the ranting isn't getting him/her anywhere.
And thank you Peter for the encouragement, let's make Qt bigger together!
-
If you are calling deleting the same senseless, usually off-topic rant that somebody keeps on posting here "censoring", then yes, I am one of those censors. I don't mind an open discussion here, but I do mind finding the same, unfounded, yelling rant over and over again in various completely unrelated topics.
-
Please note that your freedom of speech does not imply the obligation for others to offer a platform for such speech. Also, except in very special circumstances, I think that excising that right anonymously is a rather coward act.
You call what you do protesting, I call it vandalism. To me, it is not censoring, but removing graffiti.
And no, I did not watch (or even look for) that episode. I do have other things to do with my life...
-
The anonymity is my alternative to your censorship, which also could indicate that you want the hide the facts I’m posting. When it started I had posted only one thread.
Do you want my full name? I don’t have a problem in giving it. What are you going to do with it?
Do you call vandalism to distribute some pamphlets in the streets too? Are you offended that you have to click a few extra buttons every day? I’m neither damaging a thing, so I’m not a vandal nor doing graffiti. Do you see any paint around here?I call Digia contracts an abortion of epic proportions for the continuation of exploitation of human resources; do you have a problem with that too?
By the way, the cosmos is not obligated to grant your wishes either, be you a developer, or an economist, CEO, or thief or whatever.
So yeah, please go on, back to your dark cave.
-
I do not want to hide the fact that you are posting. Am I removing your posts here in this topic? The posts that I (and other) remove, are those that don't belong in the conversations you're posting them in, or are double-posted.
Do I need your full name? No. But it would be nice to have at the very least a stable name, so it is clear who is having a conversation with whom. Every post from another user is confusing, IMO. On the other hand: if you put forward such serious acquisitions against Digia and it's staff, then yes, I do think that doing that with an open visor instead of as an anonymous coward.
I don't call handing out pamphlets to willing receivers in the streets vandalism, though I do expect them to clean up the pamphlets that have been disgarded in the street afterwards or I call it littering. However, that's not what you are doing. What you are doing is like interrupting random conversations on completely different topics, yelling your acquisitions against Digia, and running off again. Or, it is like sticking your pamphlets all over the works and walls of a museum because you think your message is more important than whatever is there already.
So no, I don't have a problem with you having a problem with however Digia operates its business. I do have a problem with calling everybody who choses to be involved in the Qt project because they see things in a different way all kinds of names, and suggesting they are idiots that best "go back to [their] dark cave".
-
It’s time for an Open conversation about the future of Qt.
There have been a lot of private conversations going on and I wanted to create a forum to talk about them publicly. To be clear, I am not in the loop with anything going on within Nokia and have no information beyond what is in the press.
I have great respect for the people who work on Qt, and I am grateful for all of the things that Nokia has done to build Qt and the Qt community. Yet, today we are at a point where Nokia’s corporate interest is diverging from that of the staff, and the community as a whole.
I have no doubt that there are people at Nokia who understand the community issues, and who want to do the right thing, as I’m sure there are others who are motivated by reducing expense and liability.
For Qt to thrive in the future, there are many issues which need to be resolved, including people, legal rights and finances.
I am but one small voice. I don’t claim to speak for the community. But I think if you want to be Open, you need to discuss the important things Openly. I understand that Nokia has owns IP and they have the right to dispose of them the way that they choose. But the staff and the community have a stake in the outcome and we each has our own choices to make.
I could go on for many pages on “What I would do if I were King of Qt,” and I will try to write it and post it. But for now, I want to get the conversation going in public. What do you think are the best and worst case outcomes? What are the obstacles that need to be overcome? Where do we go from here?
Peter Winston
ICS CEO@PeterWinston My personal critique falls on the licensing and legality grey area, new developers don't know whats ok and whats not ok to do such as I, i am still not 100% sure what i am doing is legal, I hope it is though. If I could make one change to Qt it would be a change in the way licensing works. I would love to see students get free restricted licenses which would allow for finished software to be sold or at least a cheaper license. This isn't just good for people in my position, but also for Qt. I have been using a program called "Autodesk 3D inventor" in my school and plenty of us love the software, and for the few of us who will continue in these technological fields being taught to use the program was priceless, plus the license for a student is free for 3 years, and those who use up their license tend to go and buy their own commercial license since thats what they are used to. If students could do the same with Qt, learn to use it and make money with it then it is likely they will buy a full license with their profits and continue using Qt, not to mention the programmers will probably help Qt move on as well. I think all of us have hit a bug in Qt eventually, and maybe we could help in fixing those issues instead of some people switching SDK's. It's not very motivational to try and create new innovative software and have to worry about how we are going to afford the license. I hope it doesn't sound as if I am advocating for broke developers, and ignoring the need to pay the Qt developers because that is not my intention, it just falls had on the end user, who now has to be charged enough to maintain the dev's license.
-
@PeterWinston My personal critique falls on the licensing and legality grey area, new developers don't know whats ok and whats not ok to do such as I, i am still not 100% sure what i am doing is legal, I hope it is though. If I could make one change to Qt it would be a change in the way licensing works. I would love to see students get free restricted licenses which would allow for finished software to be sold or at least a cheaper license. This isn't just good for people in my position, but also for Qt. I have been using a program called "Autodesk 3D inventor" in my school and plenty of us love the software, and for the few of us who will continue in these technological fields being taught to use the program was priceless, plus the license for a student is free for 3 years, and those who use up their license tend to go and buy their own commercial license since thats what they are used to. If students could do the same with Qt, learn to use it and make money with it then it is likely they will buy a full license with their profits and continue using Qt, not to mention the programmers will probably help Qt move on as well. I think all of us have hit a bug in Qt eventually, and maybe we could help in fixing those issues instead of some people switching SDK's. It's not very motivational to try and create new innovative software and have to worry about how we are going to afford the license. I hope it doesn't sound as if I am advocating for broke developers, and ignoring the need to pay the Qt developers because that is not my intention, it just falls had on the end user, who now has to be charged enough to maintain the dev's license.
@RobertoDuran
Hi, you might not catch Peter Winston here easily, he hasn't been around for a while.However on the licensing, currently our thinking is that students can get the open source package for free and start learning and coding. We are thinking of some form of university/school licensing, but that will take a while to get off the ground.
We are also looking at low cost options to private/small developers. The last time we had that option it really did not sell well, so it was pulled back for now. We know there is demand for a low cost option, but we need to figure out how to provide that option so that it would get sensible sales numbers.
In general we really like it when people contribute back to Qt, be it patches or license payments. Naturally we want to make it easier for people to contribute, so different licensing options are something we continuously look for.
