Sand irritates the pearl causing it to grow larger & more beautiful. We KDE users need to bee more like sand. This board seems to languish too often. Not much 'fire' in the 'Discussion & Opinions' forum. So I'll just get started...

For starters, Digia buys the right to develop Qt for 4 million Euro? That is shocking! In 2008 Nokia paid 101 million Euro for Qt. That's a loss of 97 million Euro in just 4 years. (http://nokiagadgets.com/2012/08/10/digia-reveals-the-price-it-bought-qt-off-from-nokia/)

1. Developers here talk about how much effort Nokia put into developing Qt, and they did... Yet sold it for a mountain of a loss... Let's not kid ourselves here. Nokia -as a for profit company just stinks, period. Who is minding the store over there?

2. When interviewed for internet publications during moments of perceived instability regarding the Qt/KDE relationship KDE developers tout the strong infrastructure, and solidity of the for profit companies who own the Qt code-base... yet each time it changes form or changes hands it seems to go for less and less perceived value. I postulate that this is because those who are attempting to 'run' Qt have no idea really how to make money off of it.

3. DON'T get me wrong. I'm a capitalist through and through. I love that mismanagement has corrected the market value of Qt. I hope that Digia understands this and actually interviews the progressive businesses who are actually risking capital on KDE/Qt, and listens to what they have to say about how Qt could realistically make money. Digia needs to tell all the know it all's in this KDE Community to go take a long nap... or go back to their cave where they can develop their little project which no one cares about in total peace and obscurity.

4. So how can they realistically make money? I have not a clue... and neither do you really. Be honest. There is NOTHING out there that is lined up waiting to use the Qt stack for profit. Yes I said it... PROFIT. Only profit will fund further consistent quality Qt/KDE development. Your free time won't do it... and neither will mine. They need to employ (more) professional developers whose sole focus is the Qt product. Nokia did this... and they lost 97 million euro. What does this tell us?
4.a (edit) here is a quote from the official Digia announcement:

Qt has been used by over 450,000 developers and thousands of leading companies worldwide in over 70 industries to power the most innovative, mission-critical and renowned applications and UIs. Qt Commercial is a leader in a number key market segments including automotive, medical, advanced visualization & animation, industrial automation and aerospace & defense. In the future, Digia expects that Qt will have a key role bringing world-class user experience and user interfaces to embedded systems and consumer electronics.

.... I don't believe that this is true much at all. I think it's wishful thinking company hype.

5. There is no real market right now for commercial Qt. Good luck to Digia in creating one from scratch. Qt is software and it runs on hardware.... which if you have looked around is not exactly friendly to the linux or Qt community. Just ask Aaron Seigo.

6. Here's a real 'elephant in the room,' Aaron Seigo is missing in action. He's a brilliant visionary, but he's full of nonsense in trying to sell a tablet that is hopelessly overpriced (and we all know it, yet want to 'want' to buy it anyway, myself included) but we'll never see more than a thousand or so of them made/sold. The long wait in getting a hardware vendor to put something together has made his Vivaldi tablet outdated before it ever hits eBay. Google's promise of a Nexus tablet based on android and priced below $200 has seen to that.

7. And finally, let's just be intellectually honest... The only thing KDE users care about is continuing to get it for free. Plain and simple. If you and I were required to pay Digia a royalty for using a KDE desktop which is based on Qt? Well, it would take about 1 month until someone ported the entire KDE structure to run on top of GTK or something like it. ..... But hey, if this happened at least we users would see a KDE development community which is a beehive of activity again. I miss those old days. So many KDE dev's jumped ship and nobody even sent them a 'we miss you' post card.

8. With yet another round of KDE/Qt uncertainty maybe it's finally time to talk seriously about building KDE on a non-commercial development code-base? Just a little bit of rant from a dedicated KDE user since before 1.0; I hope you don't mind and I look forward to reading some responses!

Ha! But who are we kidding... I logged onto both kde.org & the forums. Neither is formatted for or has an option for mobile viewing... Not very serious about it I suppose...

35 views and not one comment? Wow. Sad for KDE. Some of what I wrote should have generated at least some commentary back in the pre 4.0 days. Incredible. Either ever viewer agrees with me, or the few who bother to read the forums don't think it worth commenting?

I'm not trolling here. I love KDE... but what has happened to the "community?"
Installed latest version of Kontact recently and I have to say Great Job to those devs! Configuration is really coming along!

Just a few comments:

1) Nokia is effectively becoming a MS Phone vendor, and do recall that the commerical licensing business was already sold to Digia earlier, so that must be taken into account as well.

2) Qt has only been sold twice to my knowledge: once when Nokia bought Trolltech, and now with Digia buying Qt off Nokia (two parts). Please take into account the above comment.

4) From what I recall, the Qt Commerical business is still very profitable, as for a variety of reasons, companies prefer proprietary licenses - also, there is support and other matters which are involved.

5) The majority of Qt Commercial work is on the desktop. I do not know which applications are Qt applications in particular - but the examples cited by Digia are real from what I know (otherwise they would not have bought Qt in the first place).

7/8) The community may be less active in terms of blog posts, etc. but traffic in terms of emails/month sent out by KDE mailing lists does indicate a stable community. Commit statistics are difficult to come by, as the development models of svn/git differ, resulting in different numbers of commits being made.

Well it is pretty clear that Nokia made the wrong move in throwing away their investment and jumping on Microsoft's platform. I think it's sad considering how popular their last non-windows phone turned out to be. Qt will live on though.

So how can they realistically make money? I have not a clue... and neither do you really. Be honest. There is NOTHING out there that is lined up waiting to use the Qt stack for profit. Yes I said it... PROFIT. Only profit will fund further consistent quality Qt/KDE development.

I don't think that commercial Qt needs to be profitable for adequate funding to be available, not if some big player like Google decided to depend on it and invest money in order to continue improving it. Whether another large company like Nokia would be willing to take on that role remains to be seen.

And finally, let's just be intellectually honest... The only thing KDE users care about is continuing to get it for free. Plain and simple. If you and I were required to pay Digia a royalty for using a KDE desktop which is based on Qt?

I wouldn't be happy about it not being freely available to those who want it but personally I would pay money for a desktop this awesome. Nothing else compares when you add up the speed, reliability, and tight system integration. (and I say that as someone who likes Unity/Xfce and Gnome 3 to a lesser extent)

I agree in all to the points you have mention mshelby .

one point I want to stress is : Qt Commercial Applications under the commercial lineces are suppose to be first citenzen in KDE (which is pure Qt base). But are they ?!

it is really sad to see Qt Apps sold in other OSs & Not Even being available for KDE !

Brilliant Deve wrote:I agree in all to the points you have mention mshelby .

one point I want to stress is : Qt Commercial Applications under the commercial lineces are suppose to be first citenzen in KDE (which is pure Qt base). But are they ?!

Why should they? KDE is not a brand of Digia nor does Digia develop KDE. I don't know how you come to this strange conclusion.