Qt offering changes - 2020

[engdham]

Hello,

I did search the forum for a similar subject, but maybe it was already discussed somewhere I couldn't find...

Anyway: I found by accident about a Qt change for future releases:
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020

I'm no developer and can't say how this may affect FreeCAD releases in the future.

Actually, I'd like to ask that to the developers, if would be the case to plan future releases with a different base (GTK, Kivy, WxWidgets...?) or if this changes won't cause trouble to FreeCAD.

I'm guessing that Qt it's used only for creation of the program interface...

[kkremitzki]

This doesn't really affect us. For example, developers will just clone the Qt sources with git. End-users will have Qt provided by, for example, their Linux distribution.

Edit: An example of who this would affect are people who release products which rely on the LTS version, but we don't since we have to be able to use what's provided by the distro. Or, if we were making a product that required the Qt binaries, and as part of that product we shipped a script to download them from the Qt Company, effectively using them as a content distribution provider without paying them. That is what is no longer possible.

[vocx]

I did search the forum for a similar subject, but maybe it was already discussed somewhere I couldn't find...

Anyway: I found by accident about a Qt change for future releases:
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020
...

This was discussed at the beginning of this year, which is when this post came out.

It is unfortunate that Qt is taking a few decisions that seem to be unfair to the open source community. At that time some Qt developers floated the idea of forking Qt 5.14, and avoiding Qt 6 altogether.

Qt may "only" be used for the graphical interface of FreeCAD, but it is a massive code base; it is not trivial to just replace it completely with Gtk+, it would be a titanic task; there aren't enough active programmers to carry that endeavour. If Qt 6 would become bad for the open source community, probably we would just follow what the major Linux distributions do, and probably stick to a certain Qt 5.x version until a solution is found.

[looo]

good to know. so qt5 will be the default for some years. In my eyes this is not the worst scenario.

[yorik]

Also Qt is used in hundreds of large open-source projects, I think the biggest of all being KDE... Probably it's now too late for them to try to "close" things if they wanted so. The very first thing that would happen is an immediate fork, and the whole KDE community (and us ) would migrate to it instantly.

But Qt also caters to commercial clients, who specifically want a closed license (they don't want to be forced to respect FOSS license terms). I suppose they regularly need to put things straight between the two sides...

[Kunda1]

Boudewijn Rempt over at Krita has been pretty outspoken about all these Qt shenanigans over at his blog:
https://valdyas.org/fading/software/abo ... nges-2020/
https://valdyas.org/fading/hacking/krit ... gl-and-qt/

[triplus]

We likely don't have to worry about it in the near future, but for sure this is something we need to keep an eye on. On how things will evolve in the future. In general hopefully Qt will support Qt Widgets in foreseeable future and if we move to QML, to not be limited by FOSS offering.

[yorik]

I didn't know about that KDE agreement, that forces Qt to release with a free license... That's really good

[tanderson69]

FYI: Qt was forked about 6 years ago. It seems legit and I plan on trying it out on a pet project someday.
https://www.copperspice.com/

[vocx]

I didn't know about that KDE agreement, that forces Qt to release with a free license... That's really good

Yes, and no. If you read further, it seems the Qt company is doing the very minimum to comply with that agreement, but it's not being very pro-active about it. For example, I think one of the new clauses that they have is that long term support (LTS) versions will be for commercial customers only, thus leaving the open source community to use only "unstable" versions. They can release the latest code after a year, but they won't support it like a proper LTS version. There are a few quirks, and that is what is getting the Qt community upset.