As many will know, Digital has bought from Nokia everything related with Qt, so this company will be the one who decides what the future of this multiplatform Framework will be like, something that may concern more than one.
Among the most restless, of course, are users of KDE, a Desktop Environment developed on libraries QtTherefore Digital issued a Open letter to their Community, which they have translated into Very linux and with your permission I bring it here:
Dear KDE community,
As you may have heard, Digia announced that it plans to acquire Nokia's Qt technology. This operation ensures the future of Qt as the best multiplatform development framework. It also brings in a part of Nokia's Qt team, which together with Digia's Qt R&D team, will be able to take Qt's development further.
With this acquisition Digia will be the main company responsible for Qt, not only for the business of commercial licenses. We believe in the power of Qt's dual license. It is a great value for Qt that it can be used under commercial and open source licenses. We want to continue the symbiosis with the KDE community and the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
Digia will carry out the operation of the Qt Project, including the organization of key systems through the Qt Project Foundation. It is very important for us to have an increasing number of contributions from the different members of the Qt community. We want to work with the entire Qt ecosystem through the Qt Project to ensure that Qt will be nurtured under both commercial and open source licenses.
Continuing to develop Qt is both a challenge and an opportunity. It will be in the hands of the community and Digia to ensure the future of Qt as the best multiplatform development framework, a challenge that we are willing to take on. The KDE community is a key player and contributor to Qt and therefore we would like to further develop our relationship with it, through even stronger dialogue and future cooperation.
We are going to continue the work originally established by Trolltech for more than 15 years to develop a framework that allows to write the code once and develop it everywhere. We will carry out Qt enhancement so that both our customers and open source users can rely on Digia's continued investment to provide a framework that will make their projects successful. We look forward to working with KDE to consolidate and expand the global reach of Qt.
In about a month, the legality of the acquisition will be complete. Before that, we want to plan things together with you (the KDE community) and with other key players in the Qt community. We want to discuss and agree on the future of Qt, so that we can all work together effectively once the transaction is complete.
Tuukka turunen
Director, R&D
Hopefully everything is like Tuukka turunen says, since otherwise, the future of KDE you could be in danger if the time came, they couldn't switch bookstores. Also, it would be almost catastrophic to have to start everything from scratch 🙁
as long as everything is to improve KDE welcome to Digia
Hopefully it's not like Oracle.
Do not be catastrophic, that is how rumors begin to spread, and tomorrow we will have the Internet saying "Qt is dead !!!" or something similar. And it's not fun.
First, there is no reason why Digia is going to take less care of Qt than Nokia did. It is for your own interest.
Second, if you decide to do an «oracle maneuver», the Open Governance was done for something, and later, the Qt Project. And for something Qt is FREE.
It is that I find it tremendous that the article ends with "Besides, it would be almost catastrophic to have to start everything from scratch." Right from the start? I don't think you understand much about how free software works. Libreoffice, anyone ??
As they load to Qt, they get in tremendous trouble with KDE users and many devs ...
Gtk is not maintained by the community? if something happens with qt could not do the same?
Nope. I think Gtk is not maintained by the Community.
mmmm that I know the authors are these commits http://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/log/ They are part of the community, so the answer is yes, and as for the second question, the answer is also affirmative. KDE coexists with GTK + applications, it would only have to clean the plasma window manager a bit, adapt it, although that would take some time as conveniently as possible. It would be that instead of going to GTK +, it would go to EFL there too, many widgets are used, such as in plasma or they will use a window manager and rewrite the panel in GTK +, in short, there are many options so in both of your questions they are yes: D.
Greetings.
There is an entry on the KDE SC site where they talk about how the development of Qt is going to be from now on and the relationship of KDE SC with Digia and the Qt ecosystem.
I don't know what you think, but KDE SC 4.9 is a great candidate for the best desktop for GNU / Linux - with Xfce on 2nd. place.
I'm still waiting to see where they go with the Cinnamon project that promises a lot but has not released new releases for a long time.
I have not tried KDE 4.9, but they say it has a lot of news .. The bad thing is that at this point, I doubt very much that it will Debian Testing.
Debian using KDE should consider switching to Kubuntu (Netrunner, Linux Mint) or, more purely, aptosid or Siduction.
For what reason? 😕
A clarification, elav: in the case of major problems, it would be very negative for KDE due to the loss of Qt developers, but we should not start from scratch. Trolltech was already in charge of securing this issue when Nokia bought it, licensing Qt as GPL 3. In the worst case scenario, the community would resume the development of Qt from the last published version, which would already be Qt 5.
But I don't think it will. KDE and Qt have collaborated closely for many years, and what better field of development is Qt going to find than the KDE community (Digia seems to think the same way for now).
A greeting!
You are very right. I had forgotten the licensing issue .. Thank you MetalByte.
As KDE users, what was announced by DIGIA to the KDE community gave me a lot of peace of mind ^ __ ^
The GPL license is a masterpiece, very well armored, QT users have nothing to worry about.
What a good definition, "a masterpiece, very well armored."
"LPG is a masterpiece, very well armored" very good phrase.