Re: Talking about the KDE Free Qt Foundation

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 11:07 AM Martin Konold <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Am Montag, 16. Dezember 2019, 12:44:34 CET schrieb Paul Brown:
>
> Hi Paul,
>
> thank you very much for you very professional questions. While I am not able
> to answer them in total I want to give my 2¢.
>
> > > Sure, I'd say it's more about saying the right thing in the right
> > > forum though, rather than the world.
> > > But a bit of everything needs to be done, yes.
> >
> > This is one of those things I need to get my head around to do it properly.
> > So, excuse me, but I have more questions:
> >
> > What sort of readers are you interested in attracting? Developers? Managers?
> > The general public seems not to be it, correct?
>
> From my PoV the following is kind of important to know:
>
> The KDE Free Qt Foundation is currently being pressurized to make more and
> more rather one-sided confessions towards the The Qt Company.
>
> IMHO this is in most cases not to the best for KDE nor the Qt developers as a
> whole.
>
> I think we need public support in keeping up with the increasing pressure.
> E.g. just today we learned that Lars Knoll, long term KDE person steps down
> and is going to be replaced with Juhe Häkämies.
>
> Rough times are ahead as I have been told that Juhe is a businessman with no
> understanding of free software only his numbers ....
>
> Basically they want to make the free Qt version less and less usable and only
> for hobbyists. (e.g. making LTS releases only available to commercial
> customers, more and more components commercial only and move more and more
> compontents to business unfriendly GPLv3 instead of LGPL.)
>
> Olaf just recently made an excellent effort in describing the benefits of the
> Foundation, its role and its contracts.
>
> https://www.olafsw.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Benefits-of-Free-Qt.pdf
>
> > See if any of these fit what you have in mind:
> >
> > - Does the Foundation accept fellows, supporters or something like that? If
> > that is the case, do you want more of them?
>
> We are currently looking for supporters watching the Qt code and the Qt
> website. E.g. currently there are Terms & Conditions on their website which
> are incompatible to our contracts. Also we must what when they add or phase
> out functionality e.g. they plan to phase out XML Module without an
> appropriate replacement.
>

Would this include also watching for things like inconsistent
application of the open governance concepts within Qt Project, along
with different rules surrounding compatibility promises for
contributors (with one set of rules for Qt Company employees and
another for Community contributions)?

I ask because we've definitely encountered both of these in the past few years.

For those wondering why we don't have MacOS CI - you can blame the Qt
Company, it's 100% their fault and a direct consequence of the conduct
of their employees.

> > - Do you want the Foundation to be taken into account in the business world?
> > Get its members invited to summits, consulted by companies, and so on?
>
> Yes.
>
> > - Do you want to kill the myth that Qt is a risk to use for dodgy licensing
>
> Regards
> --martin

Regards,
Ben

>
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