[Development] The place of QML

[Atlant Schmidt]

d3fault:

> Trolltech may have been in the red, but that doesn't mean it
> would have stayed in the red. And if would never have seen a
> profit, then why would Nokia have it?

  Nokia bought Trolltech for one simple reason: Development
  on Symbian/S60/Averell/Avkon was too arcane/too weird and
  too difficult. You needed to read several very thick books
  to know enough to program an app. The C++-like language
  that Symbian is programmed in was always just different
  enough from real C++ to be very-off-putting to new developers.
  "What do you mean 'clean-up stack'?" "What do you mean
  'descriptors'?" "Where are the signals?"

  Nokia had never been getting a lot of folks to develop apps
  and in a world that suddenly contained iOS and then Android,
  they were suddenly getting (essentially) no new apps; even
  Nokia's own in-house development was falling woefully far
  behind the competition.

  Qt offered a way to change that and the change could be
  had for relatively little money out of Nokia's pocket.

  Suddenly, with Qt, Nokia phones could be programmed in a way
  that anyone could understand without needing to know anything
  about Avkon arcana. And given that Qt was now captive, the
  developers could be targeted towards adding mobile features
  and as mobile features were integrated into Qt, all those
  cool iPhone and Android apps could (at least theoretically)
  be ported to Nokia as well. Not only that, but everything
  gained for Symbian would also be gained for Maemo/MeeGo.

  At the time, it seemed like a clearly-winning deal.

  (This all changed, of course, when Elop stupidly torched
  Nokia's existing platforms but that's a whole other
  discussion.)

                                Atlant

-----Original Message-----
From: development-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org [mailto:development-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of d3fault
Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2012 19:29
To: development at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Development] The place of QML

On 5/12/12, Robin Burchell <robin+qt at viroteck.net> wrote:
> Let me try explain: as you should already know, some of the work on Qt
> is being funded by commercial licensees (via digia) to work on what
> those commercial licensees want them to work on - already - _as a part
> of the project you're proposing to abandon_. This has nothing to do
> with Nokia.
>
> Now, if they're already here, it clearly doesn't need a fork to enable
> that to happen, as it's happening already. If someone (you, digia,
> Paul McCartney for all I care) have work they want in Qt, then they're
> free to push that forward - nobody will stop it, unless there is a
> solid technical grounds for that.

Relevance? Qt... the Qt Project/Trademark... Nokia... encourage you to
contribute. They want to resell your contributions :). They will also
give it back to you and to everyone for free (monetary + libre) under
the LGPL.

> A fork doesn't really gain you anything tangible you don't already
> have,

It regains creative control over the use of revenues generated through
the support of the product (qt, renamed). Trolltech may have been in
the red, but that doesn't mean it would have stayed in the red. And if
would never have seen a profit, then why would Nokia have it?

> other than some 200-300 fewer people working on your fork,
> meaning you don't have any of their years of Qt expertise in reviewing
> your changes, plus the pains of having to run infrastructure (VCS
> hosting, website, mailing lists, autotest infrastructure to prevent
> regressions - across three major platforms at a minimum), make
> releases, merge changes back in, develop and market new branding, etc.

Yea, that does kind of suck. But it isn't a total loss. The fork would
still be able to regularly pull from Qt-Nokia and benefit from all the
money thrown at that. The opposite does not hold true: Qt-Nokia could
not pull from contributions applied directly to the fork.

> You're correct that this is how business works: Nokia's business is
> selling mobile devices (and services) - Digia's is in selling
> consultancy. Digia has customers who pay them to work on features and
> bugs that their customers need, Nokia does not.

It is worth noting that Digia's interest is ONLY in selling
consultancy. There is no R&D department at Digia. They do client work
and also perform support for Qt through bugfixes etc.

Nokia's R&D department is off busy trying to solve Nokia's problem:
Their bottom line. Mobile. They do this by producing QML: The Toy
Programming Language... in hopes that Trivial Farting Apps don't die
off soon (they won't)


On 5/12/12, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> On sábado, 12 de maio de 2012 21.57.17, Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
>> On 05/12/2012 08:28 PM, d3fault wrote:
>> > whereas the point I'm trying to make is that the Qt Project generates
>> > *enough* money based purely on Commercial Sales (which mostly just
>> > boil down to support anyways -- the LGPL is good enough for *most*
>> > Commercial uses) to drive it's own development.
>>
>> Are you kidding here?
>
> Doesn't matter whether he intended to be kidding or was being intentionally
>
> wrong.

I was unintentionally wrong, but it doesn't matter. A small team
working on Qt for a company (whose core customer is Qt users:
developers) in the red is better than a large team working on Qt for a
bigger company (whose core customer is NOT Qt users: it's mobile phone
sales), also in the red (and probably redder!!).


On 5/12/12, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> On sábado, 12 de maio de 2012 14.28.49, d3fault wrote:
>> Again and again it is mentioned "if you want it done, code it
>> yourself". But my response to you is that we are the majority (of Qt
>> users (developers who use Qt)) and you have an obligation to code it
>
> No, you're not.
>
> Developers like you might be the numerical majority, but when it comes to
> number of products developed and shipped to customers, I'm pretty sure that
> no
> one will come close to "next billion".

The "next billion" toy mobile app market apps
Coded by beginners who like QML/JS and see it as superior to Qt/C++
because it's "easier"

The core Qt user (developers) prefer a C++ GUI API... but Nokia pushes
QML instead.

> Not to mention that I know of a few proven cases of companies shipping "a
> few
> million" that are very happy with QML.

I'm very glad there were 'a few' companies that are happy with QML. I
know even more that are happy with C++.

> I also resent "Nokia still owns Qt". No, it does not. Many people, including
>
> me, worked really hard to create the Qt Project. It's no more Nokia's than
> anyone else in that sense.

The Open Source releasing* of the Qt libraries by the Qt Project
and/or Nokia (Qt SDK) doesn't change the fact that you're giving Nokia
an irrevocable license to sell/sub-license your contributions. It just
so happens that when they give you (distribute-with-qt) your
contributions back to you, they are now under the LGPL license. When
you give contributions to The Qt Trademark/Project, you are not doing
so under the terms of the LGPL... you are doing so under a much more
permissive (to Nokia) Qt Contributor's Agreement. If you only had to
commit via LGPL without signing a contributors agreement... then yes,
it would be "no more Nokia's than anyone else". But that simply isn't
true. Take the following clause from the Contributor's Agreement:

>Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Licensor (signing contributor) hereby
>grants,[...] to Nokia a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive,
>royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to reproduce, adapt,
>translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform,
>sublicense, make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works
>thereof under license terms of Nokia's choosing including any Open Source Software
>license.

Right there you've lost all your rights that releasing under the LGPL
buys you. The part that ruins everything is right here:
>under license terms of Nokia's choosing including any Open Source Software license

Including... but not required. Nokia can release your content under
any license it chooses (or makes up). Basically Nokia gives back to
you your own contributions (as well as theirs + everyone's) with less
rights than when you gave it to them.

> The only thing that Nokia has is that it retains the right to continue
> commercialising under different terms. And they do that by selling to
> Digia.

The "Qt Trademark", which Nokia owns, is what the Qt Project needs to
own. Profit-generating support, which is being outsourced to Digia,
uses the trademark to provide "Official Qt Support" and can also
sub-license your contributions under any terms that Nokia can.

> Digia collects
> the money and reinvests in its own activities. A certain amount may flow
> back
> to Nokia for paying for the right to do that.
> Do you REALLY think that this amount that Digia pays back to Nokia is worth [...]

We aren't solely talking about the money that Digia pays back to
Nokia. We also include the money that Digia "reinvests in its own
activities" (retirement funds count. Digia has no interest in actively
developing Qt because "that's Nokia's job"... they just provide
support (which luckily includes bug-fixes... and for that I am
grateful)).

> [...] 200 full-time top-notch developers? I really want you to tell me with a
> straight face that you can do the math and say it does.

-_- hello 200 full-time top-notch developers working for Nokia's
bottom line (Mobile XYZ... not Qt Development)

I'd rather have 20 full-time top notch developer working on a C++ GUI
API paid for by a traditional support company (whose 'core' customer
is 'developers who _use_ Qt') at a loss than 200 full-time top notch
developers working on QML paid for by Nokia (whose 'core' customer is
Joe Billy Spongebob playing the next Angry Birds incarnation rewritten
in QML on an n9) also at a loss -- just a bigger one.

On 5/12/12, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> On sábado, 12 de maio de 2012 17.07.40, Stephen Chu wrote:
>> On 5/12/12 5:01 PM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> > Correcting myself. There is one who has already:
>> >    http://www.videolan.org/vlc/stats/downloads.html
>>
>> Are they switching over to QML? jk... :)
>
> I don't know. But that's the interesting question: what is the VLC team's
> take
> on the direction of Qt and in this thread in particular?

We should get Stallman in on the action too... but really, I just want
to watch him stroke his beard.


on another note
Nokia: Use Our Product, Qt!
us: Ok wow this C++ toolkit is pretty nifty
Nokia: LoL C++ GUI now "done" here's this QML experiment/hybrid thing
we've been working on
us: Ok interesting but how about an upgraded/comparable C++ API plox?
Nokia: LoL Nope. You want that make it yourself. We will accept your
contributions and sell them tho ;-)
us: Super Neato Thanks Nokia!

except really Nokia's first line is: "Use Our Product: Windows Mobile
Enabled Smart Phone!"

d3fault
-didn't find Qt through advertising


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