[Qt-interest] Qt for the iPad?

[Frank Mertens]

Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Em Terça-feira 13. Abril 2010, às 14.05.57, Christian Dähn escreveu:
>> Sorry for my off topic statement here - but Qt "support" isn't what I've
>> been used to for years (working with Qt since year 2000).
>>
>> Currently I only get support via the buggy and customer-unfriendly
>> "Customer portal", where it's not possible to set issues as "solved" or to
>> reply issues, further the issue messages are limited in size and thus
>> leads to support answers cutted away (nearly all support guys reply in the
>> bottom of the quoted message).
> 
> I can't comment on the quality, as I have no first-hand experience with this.
> 
> As for the website, it's salesforce.com. Maybe email would be easier for you, 
> but not for the engineers who need to deal with a good quantity of cases, plus 
> search them all as a knowledge base.
> 
>> Further I've to take care that I don't ask too many questions, because more
>> than 10 in a year have to be paid to additionally. And even if I found
>> real bugs, a bug request can take weeks until anybody takes care of it -
>> just saying: it could maybe fixed within some future release...
> 
> Commercial support is not incident-based. It's unlimited.
> 
> As for fixing bugs, that's about priorities: yours and ours will not always 
> match. The team has a lot to do and fixing the P0s and P1s as well as getting 
> the releases out are very important. (Where P1 means "will stop the release 
> from happening" and P0 means "stops Qt development itself so stop whatever 
> you're doing and do this NOW")
>

And if you are in the P2 category...

Maybe then you better pay for a legal advice than for no support.
I'm not a lawyer. But the UrhG in Germany is quite strong in protecting the
rights of software developers (and maybe elsewhere too?).
AFAIK if you contract somebody to fix Qt the copyrights on the patches belong
to your contractor and there is no easy way to transfer them to your party,
nor to Nokia (assuming it's more than a single line patch).
Of course it means going down the path of dynamic linking, stripping down Qt
for distribution and facing the legal issues of LGPL.
But thinking about the possibility of fixing Qt myself (and gaining some
copyright share) and/or paying others to do so, the LGPL path looks much more
friendly to me than the prospect of paying Nokia to improve their mobile
gimmicks.

As a small hint to the Nokia side, I must say, lately I felt much more
attracted to wxWidgets, not just do they show much more active commitment in
supporting OS/X, but also their license is more permissive allowing static
linking as an exception on top of the LGPL and imho without ripping off
contributor's copyright.

--

Best regards,
Frank.