Hi,
The bigger issue here is that _something_ needs to happen to the
project. It's currently hosted on a Nokia-owned virtual server, and
although I can arrange the hosting to continue, I can only easily extend
it to mid-2012, because that's when my own employment at Nokia will end
as well. Of course, the services could be then moved to some other
virtual server, but I personally don't see how PySide could be better
off by itself than as a Qt add-on.
More comments below.
On 11.11.2011 18:54, ext anatoly techtonik wrote:
1. Bugtracker
Jira suxx. It doesn't support OpenID and OAuth, has an ugly theme and
is too overloaded for PySide (or for me, whatever).
Actually, I believe using the same bug tracker with Qt would be one of
the bigger practical gains of the change. Whenever a PySide bug turns
out to have a root cause in Qt, it'd become much easier to reassign the
bug, instead of reporting another one and (in the worst case) manually
syncing the contents.
2. Design
PySide pages has an attractive design and leave a good consistent
feeling of the project in general. I can't say the same for Qt pages
and its green-ogre-in-the-cloud theme. It is consistent, but no good.
I'm not starting a bicycle-shed painting argument here... ;-)
3. Mailing list
I am quite happy to have a Google Group mirror, and I am not sure it
will be possible to sync it with a new list anymore. Considering that
Qt uses the same mailman, there is no gain.
There would be the gain that someone would host the mailing list, take
care of the backups, etc. The Google Groups mirror is trivial to setup,
no matter where the mailing list would be hosted.
4. Repository
Gitorious suxx. Just because there is GitHub with pull requests, pages
and dozen of other nifty features.
Gitorious is quite slow at times, I admit that much. However, it would
mostly be used as a plain read-only Git repo, since Qt uses Gerrit for
code reviews. From the developer perspective, that would be a
significant improvement to the current situation. GitHub mirrors can be
trivially setup by anyone who wishes to do so.
I guess it makes this part - "We welcome any contribution without
requiring a transfer of copyright." - no longer valid. A pity. An evil
world is where you need to sign a paper to do something good.
A copyright transfer would still not be required. And for any new
contributions, it's just a simple click-through (although I admit that
might not be a case for existing contributions, because it's probably
less work to get signatures by email than set up a custom click-through
service for PySide contributions).
The agreement primarily facilitates Nokia's compliance with its commitments
under the agreement with the KDE Free Qt Foundation, and enables commercial
Qt users to participate in the Qt Project. Most of the Qt code is currently
licensed under the LGPL v2.1, so there would not be drastic changes for the
PySide open source licensing.
[2]http://qt-project.org/legal.html
I don't understand what stops commercial Qt users from using PySide?
IIUC after the agreement is signed, you give up all your authorship
rights and Nokia or Microsoft or Oracle can do whatever they want with
the license. I doubt they will change the license to MIT of public
domain. I doubt they won't want constrain open source users more with
patents and trademarks. So, it doesn't look very positive at all from
this point of view.
No, the contribution agreement does NOT make you give up all your
rights. You still have copyright to your code. You do grant a
non-exclusive license for Nokia for the contribution, as well as a
patent license. The explicit patent license is an improvement from the
current situation as it provides certainty for all users that there are
no patent traps in PySide.
One of the bigger issues why all Qt contributions require a contribution
agreement is the KDE "warranty" agreement: if there are no free versions
of Qt released during 12 months, Qt would fall under a very liberal BSD
variant. [1] This would apply to PySide as well.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Licensing
The commercial licensing of Qt has been sold to Digia, and as a
side-effect of the migration, Digia would acquire rights to sell
commercial versions of PySide. Nokia does not directly benefit from
this, but it would potentially broaden the PySide user base quite a bit,
because many companies are due to internal or external regulation
prohibited from using any open-source software. Commercial use would
provide lots of additional interest in PySide and a direct professional
incentive for supporting and maintaining the project. This would
directly benefit the project and the open source users, just as it does
in Qt proper.
But yes, back in 2009 when we were planning how to setup the PySide
project, I insisted on not requiring a contribution agreement. I didn't
anticipate how much the situation of MeeGo, and by extension, PySide,
would change. My bad.
Well, if you didn't ask - I wouldn't answer. I've got a feeling that
PySide is going to die, because Nokia can not afford to
support/sponsor it anymore. So far it was a very pleasant experience,
and if Qt umbrella is required for PySide project to continue - I
guess I don't have any other choice than to support that move.
I don't see the situation as bleak. PySide already has a large number of
users, both open source and commercial, and I expect the interest in a
liberally licensed Python Qt project to increase, not to wane in the future.
I'm not sure the proposed change would be the only possible way for
PySide to continue, but I genuinely believe it's the best bet for the
project at the moment, due to reasons explained above.
Anyway, PySide is awesome! =)
Thanks! It's the community that makes it great. :-)
ma.
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