[QGIS-Developer] [Qgis-psc] Position on Qt wrt The QT Company announcements

[Even Rouault]

On jeudi 9 avril 2020 21:30:02 CEST Martin Dobias wrote:
> Hi Vincent
> 
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020, 18:32 Vincent Picavet (ml) <vincent.ml at oslandia.com>
> 
> wrote:
> > Hi all, PSC,
> > 
> > Olaf Schmidt-Wishhöfer from KDE project has made a statement yesterday
> > about a
> > really concerning situation regarding the OpenSource state of Qt.
> > 
> > https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html
> 
> The Qt Company has published a short blog post today saying that those
> discussions do not reflect their views and plans:
> https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-open-source
> 
> So maybe better to wait for some clarifications to make sure we are not
> rushing to spread claims that may not be correct...?

That's true, but it seems The QT Company has been lately testing the open source side of the 
QT community, with this recent event and the announcement in January to keep the LTS 
branches closed for 12 months, to apparently try getting more concessions in the contract 
with the KDE Free Qt foundation.
And even in their above correction post, they remain super vague and don't answer the 
points that would be wrong in Olaf Schmidt-Wishhöfer post

I doubt that the QT company would decide to go for the plan of delaying the open source 
version by 12 months, as the consequence (the last version of QT being potentially released 
as BSD) could actually quite harm their own business by allowing other commercial forks!

But whatever the outcome of the apparently cool discussions within the board of the KDE 
Free Qt foundation between the KDE e.v and QT Company representatives, I don't think a 
statement of support from QGIS.org to the open source side of the QT project would hurt.

As far as which body to officially support, this is a bit difficult. As the board of the KDE Free 
Qt foundation is made of 2 representatives from KDE e.V and 2 from The QT Company, it 
seems difficult to imagine that it would continue to exist as such, or be still relevant, in the 
event The QT company would execute their 12-month-delay plan. And before financially 
supporting the KDE Free Qt foundation or whatever other body would represent best the 
interests of a FOSS QT (I guess a new body gathering together KDE, KDAB and all other 
parties would be more relevant in the event a FOSS QT fork would be needed), we should 
probably have a look at its current finances/budget (from a quick search, couldn't find one 
regarding KDE Free Qt foundation, apart from the 200 000 KRO founding capital mentionned 
in their status [1])

In the discussion thread, I see a message from the KDE e.V vice president ([2]) opening 
discussion lines.

Even

[1] https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/KDEFreeQt_Statutes_091111_final.pdf
[2] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006107.html

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