Qt on the desktop is almost dead

["BumbleBee"]

What?
Guys..what are you talking about?
Every comment there(on the blog)is that Qt will remain independent or even bought by somebody else...what's the problem?

[tbscope]

Every comment there(on the blog)is that Qt will remain independent or even bought by somebody else...what's the problem?

One big problem is money. Qt got momentum because the license provided the money to hire programmers.
If Nokia doesn't want to invest anymore in Qt but want to keep it within Nokia, we can only hope that the community keeps improving and investing in it.
But this means that a lot of big companies that use Qt today will most likely start looking for other solutions (of course, not immediately as it takes huge resources to rewrite existing software)

The problem is not Qt or the idea behind Qt. That will remain great in years to come.
The big problem is money.

I think there are about 5 ways Qt can evolve:
1. It remains with Nokia and Nokia minimizes investment. In my opinion a bad outlook.
2. It remains with Nokia but Nokia keeps investing. A somewhat good outlook depending on the roadmap.
3. It gets sold to another company (something in the lines of Trolltech), but they close the doors and only sell commercial licenses. A very bad outlook.
4. It gets sold to another company but they do not close the doors but relicense to gpl and introduce a commercial license again. This is in my opinion the best solution. Maybe Nokia can consider this too.
5. It gets released to the public and there's no more money involved. I don't think this is good because now there's no clear direction anymore and more important, there's only a little bit of money available. And no commercial license.

I also personally think that the obsession of some people with not allowing commercial licenses or a gpl license is stupid. It provides a healthy lifeline if managed correctly. Trolltech had a fantastic license model after they relicensed to gpl.

[wysota]

If Qt gets released to the public, it would most probably be licenced as BSD so commercial licencing would not pose a problem. As for a solution with relicencing back to gpl/commercial, I don't see this happening as immediately there would be people saying the company is greedy and reduces the freedom of using Qt. There is also the 'poison pill' solution but the new owner might not want to sign it and I don't know if the related agreement between Nokia and KDE would come into effect at that moment. Lack of commercial licence (or BSD) is indeed one of the most problematic things one can see.

[franz]

The one thing that I keep noticing is that people keep on being annoyed by Nokia not prioritizing desktop platforms, while at the same time the Qt guys are at least trying to achieve some open governance system. Qt is open source, kiddos. If you want something done quickly, do it yourself.

[high_flyer]

Qt is open source, kiddos. If you want something done quickly, do it yourself.

That is very naive to say.
If I take what you say to the extreme (to make my point) then we wouldn't need the trolls for making Qt in the first place, since we could have just implement Qt ourselves - which is of course nonsense.
Yes, we can implement some small features and changes, but its not like any of us is able to maintain a source base as Qt is - and when the problem is not being a top notch developer, then for the simple reason of not having the time, since we actually are working on implementing the applications we do - and we use Qt because it has implemented so much stuff for us, so we can focus on the application logic, and not about the low lever mechanics under it.
Qt got to be the quality tool it is, because a large number of paid excellent developers have worked on it in the last 15 years.
I don't think this can be expected from any non paid community.
Not having a serious company with commercial interest behind Qt will not kill it, but it will sure pull the breaks on its further development.