[Qbs] Future of Qbs

[Richard Weickelt]

Lars or anybody else from The QtCompany,

I would like to follow up on this topic.

> I think this also gives us a chance to do a proper handover to the
> community if we can find some people who are interested in helping with
> maintaining the technology. From The Qt Company’s perspective, we’d be
> glad to help with this transition effort. Let’s try to find out, what’s
> needed to make such a handover a success

Right now the Qt Company holds the ownership of the code base and all
contributions have to pass the obligatory Qt CLA. The Qt Company has also
clearly communicated that they would not support Qbs beyond 2019. That makes
it very difficult to convince other parties to invest in it.

It would be good if the Qbs project would be transferred to a widely
trusted, non-personal, non-profit organization. The Linux foundation for
instance might be a candidate we could try. Such an organization as backup
would help the Qbs project to
- gain trust among (industrial) customers
- find sponsors
- to get structural, organizational and maybe also technical support

Thus, would the Qt Company be willing to:
1. transferring ownership of the code base and the brand Qbs to
   a non-personal non-profit entity? If yes, in which time frame?
2. re-license Qbs under a permissive open source license?
   Is Qbs even subjected to the agreement with the KDE Free Qt Foundation?
3. Sponsor the Qbs project, for instance by continue to pay for the domain
   qbs.io or by allowing Qt engineers to spend (limited) time on keeping
   Qbs working in QtCreator, doing code reviews to some extend in their
   work time?
4. provide technical infrastructure like JIRA, gerrit, hosting,
   at least for a transition period of 2 years even though ownership
   has been transferred?

Thank you for your reply.
Best regards
Richard Weickelt