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A comment on Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Free Software in Jeopardy. Parent comment

Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by Nokinside on Monday June 01, 2020 @06:17AM (#23376974)
Established companies rarely fall for the "We can't pay you but you get exposure". I don't think paying customers care about KDE or open source. If you can give concrete examples showing something else, it would be interesting.

The way to make money in open source is to sell service attached to software, software development as QT does it where services is small component is just not generating enough money. That's why RedHat is owned by IBM and Canonical Ltd. has revenue only 2x of Qt despite large number of users.

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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by thePunisher on Monday June 01, 2020 @10:59AM (#23379175)
If Qt hadn't been taken up by KDE some other UI framework (such as wxWidgets) could've had much larger user base thereby rendering Qt much less attractive to developers and undermining their business model.

I personally prefer wxWigets over Qt, but I'm a user of both.

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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by pjmlp on Monday June 01, 2020 @04:24PM (#23383327)
Does wxWidgets still feel like a 90's clone of MFC?
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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by thePunisher on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @03:37AM (#23388630)
I developed MFC applications and wxWidgets is FAR better than MFC. Much easier to use too. Plus multi-platform.
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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by pjmlp on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @04:24AM (#23388895)
Might be, I haven't look at it since late 90's.

So maybe it is worth another look.

However even OWL and VCL were better than MFC. :)

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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by sudosysgen on Monday June 01, 2020 @12:58PM (#23380700)
Qt is not being paid in exposure by KDE. Qt was in large part built by KDE, and if the KDE folks decide they want to fork it and get an organized response they might quite literally kill the Qt foundation by outcompeting them at every turn.
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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by pjmlp on Monday June 01, 2020 @04:23PM (#23383322)
Trolltech was doing quite alright before KDE was even an idea and they have gotten more money from Blackberry, Nokia, Jolla and Ubuntu failed attempts than from KDE.

They are the only viable alternative to WPF/Win32 on medical devices, automotive infotainment systems, factory automation dashboards, MCUs displays, ticketing machines,...

I bet that whatever KDE decides to do it will hardly affect Qt's profits.

First they have to make KDevelop match QtCreator, 3D Studio and Design Studio, then we'll see.

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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by sudosysgen on Monday June 01, 2020 @04:37PM (#23383494)
Sure, but the threat right now is a fork of Qt that would encompass commercial features and be developed by the KDE community, the free software community as well as companies such as Bosch, Autodesk and so on.

That is a big threat to the bottom line of Trolltech.

While Blackberry, Nokia and so on contributed a lot of money, KDE contributed a lot of the product and to the technical system. That poses a unique threat of replacement.

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Re:Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Fr... by pjmlp on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @12:51AM (#23387584)
Open source contributions back to upstream Qt, which includes KDE, have been between 10% and 40% throughout the years, and they have always been on core libraries.

To think that such tiny contributions would scale up to replace what Qt offers today, including supporting devices that require NDAs is utopian.

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