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

[Vincent Picavet (ml)]

Hi,

On 09/04/2020 22:39, Even Rouault wrote:
[..]
> 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.

+1 to this too

> 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])

Thanks for raising this point, this would indeed be something to look at
carefully. I agree in case of a fork, the governance model would be transformed,
and I hope the new organization and related awaited transparency would make the
financing choice easy to do.

But we are not there yet.

I also agree with Nyall that technically, impacts on QGIS would not necessarily
be big. Having a more open Qt project, with easier contributions and bugfixing
could help QGIS though.
But generally speaking QGIS, as a big and successful opensource project, now
also has the responsibility to voice opinions and defend Opensource / libre
software models of organization whenever they are at stake in its ecosystem.

It seems like this is a good time to do it.

Best regards,

Vincent