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0 pointseznzt5y ago0 comments

With Electron (MIT licence) the writing has been on the wall for Qt for years now. They are on borrowed time.

I am not saying I like Electron better. I prefer Qt, even though I don't consider it to be native either. But Qt would not have died had they relicenced earlier. It's evident they will have to do it eventually. Why wait until there's no more lunch to be eaten?

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3 comments · 3 top-level

detaro5y ago

"They" (Qt Company) are a commercial enterprise that mostly makes its money from license sales. Relicensing as MIT would be terrible for them. From their product policy you can clearly tell that even LGPL isn't working as they would like, but they can't get rid of that, so they focus in fields that don't like LGPL either. That's of course annoying for those of us who don't optimize for "what makes them money", but for "how can we build software best"...

johannes12343215y ago

How do you know it would have died? - Mind that their business is in embedded stuff, an area where Electron is no competition (putting a bit more hardware in and embedding android might be competition, but Qt runs on quite small systems) https://www.qt.io/product/develop-software-microcontrollers-...

As an outsider it seems like the "Desktop" side seems to be a marketing vehicle, but not their bet for business (see also push for QML over QWidgets - less integration with desktop and less "native" looks, but working on cheaper hardware)

empyrical5y ago

> Electron (MIT licence)

It's not 100% MIT. Chromium's Blink renderer has LGPLv2.1 code going back to the KDE KHTML days, such as some of the code for the DOM:

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/third_party...

Very rough way of going about it, but searching for files with copyright headers crediting KDE shows 832 files

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/search?l=C%2B%2B&q=kde....

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