Interesting: What if support for Qt development is stopped ?
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An interesting question came up in the hallway @ KDE.IN conf and a speaker pointed out to this:
"http://www.kde.org/community/history/qtissue.php":http://www.kde.org/community/history/qtissue.php
Check out the section with title: The KDE Free Qt Foundation
ummmm ... this should answer many questions that were thrown around in a lot of blogs and forums I guess.
But it won't come to that is my personal belief. -
The existence of this foundation has been mentioned in the discussions on Qt regularly already. The release of the (L)GPL version of Qt on all platforms makes a complete disappearance of Qt even more unlikely. However, if commercial development of Qt were to stop - which I don't think is likely in the medium term - development pace would obviously suffer. You can not expect a semi-unstructured bunch of volunteer developers to reach the same development speeds and direction as what we see now with the number of full time developers working jointly on the code.
Still, it is all speculation and what-if scenarios. You are just pointing an additional insurance policy that has existed for a long time already against a discontinuation of a (free) Qt.
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well I hadn't heard of this insurance policy before this conf
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[quote author="Andre" date="1299749786"]The existence of this foundation has been mentioned in the discussions on Qt regularly already. The release of the (L)GPL version of Qt on all platforms makes a complete disappearance of Qt even more unlikely. However, if commercial development of Qt were to stop - which I don't think is likely in the medium term - development pace would obviously suffer. You can not expect a semi-unstructured bunch of volunteer developers to reach the same development speeds and direction as what we see now with the number of full time developers working jointly on the code.
Still, it is all speculation and what-if scenarios. You are just pointing an additional insurance policy that has existed for a long time already against a discontinuation of a (free) Qt. [/quote]
Commercial Development of Qt has been given to Digia now as per the new deal with Nokia and Digia and Digia is supposed to keep the development of Qt and will sell the commercial license and will also sell the support. So I dont think it is going to stopped any time in future.
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[quote author="Immii" date="1299960388"]
Commercial Development of Qt has been given to Digia now as per the new deal with Nokia and Digia and Digia is supposed to keep the development of Qt and will sell the commercial license and will also sell the support. So I dont think it is going to stopped any time in future.[/quote]This is wrong!
Only the commercial support and licensing has been sold to Digia.
Nokia will continue to develop Qt.
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[quote author="Scylla" date="1299974340"]Yes, that's right but is this a good solution? What is the response time for the support, when there are three parties are involved a.s.o?[/quote]
I don't believe response times will be inferior to that of Nokia. Why should it - as far as the news told us, some of the team will move to Digia, so you will most probably deal with the very same person(s) for support (if you have a contract, of course). They can provide you with patches if needed and they can of course send merge requests for bug fixes to the Nokia team. I seriously doubt, that Nokia will reject bug fixes.
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Yes I agree with Volker. From what I've heard the Digia folks are great in providing a wide array of professional services related to Qt. Why would they screw up their customer relations? They've spent a bit now on buying Qt commercial support and licensing business from Nokia and will work harder to get good returns on this investment. And Nokia can focus on development of Qt and building the next disruptive thing :)
Win win for all !
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hi scylla I think you used the smiley for wink with a dash in between causing it to strike out the loving Qt part, you can edit it to remove the dash, you'll get the smiley right ;)
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[quote author="Scylla" date="1299974340"]Yes, that's right but is this a good solution? What is the response time for the support, when there are three parties are involved a.s.o?[/quote]
I really hope the Open Governance will help to prevent that from happening. If Digia is able to push their own fixes into the Qt source tree just like Nokians can, I think there is an opportunity for improved response times, at least for bug fixes (not that I know about the current times, I don't use commercial support).
Only the future will tell for sure though.
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Sebastian Nyström of Nokia today cleared things in his blog post "Qt and Digia, facts and fiction":http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/14/qt-and-digia-facts-and-fiction/.
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[quote author="Volker" date="1300130419"]Sebastian Nyström of Nokia today cleared things in his blog post "Qt and Digia, facts and fiction":http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/14/qt-and-digia-facts-and-fiction/.[/quote]
What is still unexplained by Nokia, is what the **** they are interested in Qt for. I do believe they have something planned, but as long as there remains doubt outside of Nokia that Qt is still valuable for Nokia, I understand that doubts about the future of Qt remains. Just saying something doesn't make it true, as we have seen all to clearly in the recent future with Nokia and Qt.
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I think that at this point we just have to rely on the ongoing pushes of new updates and technology to be the proof that whatever is, is. If there is a reason for them to keep development going (and I believe there is), then we will continue to see proof from the results of what is coming out of the oven. Until we all know the big picture, that'll have to be sufficient. I, personally, am content with that for the time being.
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bq. I think that at this point we just have to rely on the ongoing pushes of new updates and technology to be the proof that whatever is, is. If there is a reason for them to keep development going (and I believe there is), then we will continue to see proof from the results of what is coming out of the oven. Until we all know the big picture, that’ll have to be sufficient. I, personally, am content with that for the time being.
100% acknowledge