Digia Spins Off Qt As Subsidiary

DeviceGuru writes: Following through on an announcement from August, Digia has spun off a subsidiary called The Qt Company to unify Qt's commercial and open source efforts, and debuted a low-cost plan for mobile developers. The Linux-oriented Qt cross-platform development framework has had a tumultuous career, having been passed around Scandinavia over the years from Trolltech to Nokia and then from Nokia to Digia. Yet, Qt keeps rolling along in both commercial and open source community versions, continually adding support for new platforms and technologies, and gaining extensive support from mobile developers. Now Qt is its own company, or at least a wholly owned subsidiary under Digia. Finland-based Digia has largely been involved with the commercial versions of Qt since it acquired the platform from Nokia in 2012, but it has also sponsored the community Qt Project as a relatively separate project. Now, both efforts are being unified under one roof at The Qt Company and the new QT.io website, says Digia. Meanwhile, Digia will focus on its larger enterprise software business.

Linux-oriented?

[mattack2]

Since it is by definition a cross-platform framework (and first showed up on Windows and X windows), how is it "Linux-oriented"?

Re:

[Jane_Dozey]

I'm guessing (and it really is just a guess), that it's because neither Windows or Mac have ever used it as their primary desktop toolkit, while Linux has.

Re:

[mattack2]

OK, but I've run into plenty of third party apps using it.

Re:

[donscarletti]

Linux has uses it as a primary desktop toolkit

Don't get me wrong, it is extremely well used, but nothing close to universal.

Now that it's been LGPL for a while, possibly if it ditched moc and used standard C++ templates for signals and introspection it could be the primary desktop toolkit. Though to be honest plenty of Linux developers have no love for C++ either.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the problem with QList fromStdList ( const std::list & list ) and related functions?

Qt does not use standard STL containers for convenience (the Qt containers are easier to use for people with a Java background) and because STL containers do not have a defined ABI.

If you do not like qmake (What I can fully understand) then you could either try qbs, or just use cmake like most people. Personally I hope qbs matures and gets some more traction soon, because I think it is really good.

Re:

[TemporalBeing]

Linux has uses it as a primary desktop toolkit

Don't get me wrong, it is extremely well used, but nothing close to universal.

Now that it's been LGPL for a while, possibly if it ditched moc and used standard C++ templates for signals and introspection it could be the primary desktop toolkit. Though to be honest plenty of Linux developers have no love for C++ either.

You do realize that there are more and more parts of the Linux Desktop using Qt directly, even outside of KDE?

For example, LightDM uses Qt and Qt5's QML.

Re:

[tepples]

or are fucking stupid writing software to run on a desktop that noone uses

Peter Noone [wikipedia.org] uses Linux? :p

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

Noone is stronger than Chuck Norris.

Re:

[JoeMerchant]

Feed Qt.io, not the trolls.

Don't feed the Trolltech

[tepples]

Except The Qt Company is Trolltech reborn. Or was this part of your joke?

Re:

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Because the majority of their users are running Linux systems?

I think that was just added by DeviceGuru to make the story Linux related to the reader. By all accounts, this is probably correct.

Re:

[laffer1]

Have you tried to compile qt 5 on *BSD? I'd say it's at best a big 3 OS system now and at worst turning into linux only.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It also works on Android, iOS and for that matter Windows Phone.

Sink or Swim time.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I like Qt, but being spun off as its own subsidiary makes it easier to shut it down without affecting the parent company's stock.

So I wish them more luck than usual. May Qt not only be a boon for the open source community but also prove that this can not only be self-sustaining but profitable too.

Re:

[KiloByte]

It's so needed after GTK went to the crapper.

KDE will fork

[tepples]

If the Qt project goes under, the KDE Free Qt Foundation [kde.org] has authority to distribute it under a BSD license.

KDE will fork

[matthekc83]

That may be true but the community would lose paid developers... probably slowing down QT development.

Re:

[Kjella]

And? Part of being a cross-platform toolkit is that you must keep up with the underlying platforms, if you start failing to look native or behave native or integrate nicely or lack interfaces to new functionality you'll quickly cease to be useful for that. It'll still function as a toolkit for building KDE though since they define their own native, but then it will gravitate back towards being a Linux-only thing.

P.S. Despite Qt being cross-platform, most KDE SC applications don't seem to be. There's been an

Finland is not Scandinavia

[orzetto]

[...] having been passed around Scandinavia [...]

For the record, Finland is not part of Scandinavia [wikipedia.org], since they speak a completely unrelated language. Scandinavia plus Finland and others are correctly referred to as The Nordic Countries" [wikipedia.org].

Focus, focus

[descubes]

This move increases the focus of the Qt team. Most developers know what Qt is, but who can tell off the top of their head what Digia does, and why Qt is strategically important to them?

Re:

[TemporalBeing]

True - I had to look up Digia at first. But simply put - Digia is one of 3 main Qt commercial contractors (KDAB, and ICS being the others). That is to say, their bread & butter is implementing Qt software for companies.