Is Qt holding KDE back?

[redstrate]

@Schlaefer

After understanding the concept the original sentence is clear as day, but before that it is mostly gibberish. It’s fabulously succinct for people in the know, but fails hard teaching, esp. if you’re not familiar with the vernacular of the trade (like union).

That’s fair, documentation is really hard to write and the Qt documentation could be pretty terse.

@Duha

Kinda disagree with this. I don’t want to argue how to define casual user but imo there are definitely casual(ish) “programmers”.

Yes I’m probably getting semantics mixed up, but you’re right there’s definitely a class of “casual programmers”.

@medin

I wish for the day where a true free and open source KDE Qt framework becomes available for public usage.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, the Qt framework is free and open source in every way that matters. It just has the option to dual license to their own commercial license, and some modules that are only licensed under that. It’s stuff that really only businesses care about (like Qt for Automotive). This is what the Qt company has chosen to do, unfortunately.

@medin

but you will be restricted to contribute to only open source projects.

This is simply not true, there is the possibility of developing commercial software in Qt without paying a dime. Most of the modules are possible to use via LGPL, and you must ship Qt externally to abide by the license. See this page on Qt’s website: Qt - Obligations of the GPL and LGPL.

@jinliu

Plasmashell produces tons of “Binding loop detected” warnings, which sugguests that KDE developers don’t care very much, either.

This is a pretty baseless accusation to make, we almost certainly do care. Some developers are trying to bring down the amount of runtime errors in Plasma 6