Qt, Open Source and corona

[Johan Ouwerkerk]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 9:04 PM Jens <jens at ohyran.se> wrote:
>
> I can’t make any calls since the work isn’t on my shoulders but if the Qt company are ready to pull this stunt AND then lie about it in the vaguest most awkward way of saying “KDE and Qt Free are lying” they will do this again and forking, even though Qt Company cowered out now, might be better in the long run.
>

I think forking is premature. The existing FOSS releases of Qt are not
going away just yet. Negotiations are still ongoing and have not yet
broken down irretrievably.

While there's plenty of stakeholders we could enumerate (and not just
companies like e.g. Bosch, think government as well), if we really
want use KDE as the "open version of Qt" shop then we should probably
first look at the number of fixes to upstream actually made through
KDE mirrors directly. I.e. count how many people use KDE repos to
develop Qt and then push for upstreaming their work (and encourage
people and other partners to do so as well). Because ultimately the
real work is not a mailing list, hosting or even CI: it is about
keeping the project moving forward with new graphical
stacks/technologies, OSes, form-factors, C++ standards and bindings,
and for that reason alone it is better to know that you can actually
pull it off before creating another Copperspice.

That is not trivial, and even *many* fixes don't compare to a full
time job of keeping the platform relevant and up to date.

Regards,

-Johan