[Interest] Nokia SDK vs. Qt Commercial SDK

[André Pönitz]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 12:33:02PM -0700, David Ching wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> A couple days ago Turunen Tuukka from Digia responded to my question
> here about getting an SDK with Qt 4.8.2 in it by saying
> 
> > There is no Qt Project SDK for 4.8 - just the Nokia SDK and Qt
> > Commercial SDK.
> 
> Does this mean there are two official SDK's now, and the commercial
> one is different (i.e. with more bug fixes)?  Where is this discussed,
> where do I learn about and get both?  I must say, the state of what is
> available with Qt is as obscure as it was when Trolltech sold licenses
> to it and everyone had a different license price!  I must be missing
> where such fundamental info is discussed.
>
> I admit I have been lost about the state and direction of Qt ever
> since I heard the term "Open Governance."  Could someone summarize
> what to expect?

You are missing that the baseline is free access to _the source code_
_and_ a well-defined, provably working, reasonably fast way to get
_your_ changes in, and influence the direction the whole thing goes
with _your_ ideas.

Points two and three are _quite_ different from what we had at Trolltech
and "early" Nokia times.

Packaging of binaries on top of sources is "nice to have". "Really nice
to have" actually, and a real differentiator when it comes to lowering
the barrier of entrance, but by no means _essential_ in the process.
Distributions will build from source, even most commercial customers
re-build from source in a configuration _they_ need, instead of using
the ones coming pre-compiled with (any of) the SDK(s).

The Qt Project infrastructure is still being set up. I personally expect
it to be able to build "stock" SDK packages at some point of time, and
at the same time I expect Digia to continue building and supporting
slightly different SDK packages as well. The SDK framework is
intentionally modular to serve different combinations of individual
components to adapt to different use cases.

Andre'