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   jrb (blandford@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 11:38:47 JST jrb

   The Unity license changes are making me personally feel a whole lot better about fighting the GTK vs Qt battle all those years ago..

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 11:38:38 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦
     • James Henstridge

     @jamesh @mcepl @blandford You don't need to be under a company to through "enshittification". The number of external stakeholders that increasingly have problems with GTK and have been pivoting away from it has demonstrated that there are problems with GTK today too.

     The real issue is that when a group of people get comfortable with their dominance, they stop caring about their stakeholders. Even in tiny ponds like Linux desktop GUI toolkits.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     James Henstridge (jamesh@aus.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 11:38:40 JST James Henstridge

     in reply to

     • Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦

     @mcepl @blandford It's not at all clear that Qt would be available under its current license if GTK didn't exist.

     They went through a number of "not quite Open Source" licenses before settling on the current licensing. It's not clear they would have gone all the way if there weren't alternatives.

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     Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦 (mcepl@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 11:38:41 JST Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     @blandford And fortunately Qt seems to be still OK as well.

   • Embed this notice
     jrb (blandford@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 11:38:45 JST jrb

     in reply to

     • Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦

     @mcepl This is the type of thing that many of us were warning against back then. For a for-profit company, a proprietary technology that is foundational to an ecosystem is too tempting to ignore. Eventually, Enshitiffication comes for it all. For all its faults, GTK's license and governance has proven resilient to that.

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     Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦 (mcepl@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 11:38:46 JST Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     @blandford ??? Relevance? Yes, Unity turned proprietary, but what it does have to have with Gtk (I know, Qt used to be proprietary)?

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 11:42:10 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦
     • James Henstridge

     @jamesh @mcepl @blandford Qt is far less susceptible to this because they have the ultimate poison pill underpinning the project: forced relicensing to a permissive license (BSD-2-Clause, IIRC).

     GTK has no such poison pill forcing them to serve the larger community. It shows.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (conan_kudo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 12:32:44 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦
     • James Henstridge

     @jamesh @mcepl @blandford Sure. But it was nipped in the bud, and they've grown to embrace open source in a way that few corporate-driven open source products do.

     Meanwhile, GTK has always been under the LGPL, but the community around that has been... contentious, to put it mildly.

     There are plenty of examples on the internet, even in the GNOME GitLab of this.

     Open Source alone does not protect you from toxic people. Caring about the community and stakeholders does.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     James Henstridge (jamesh@aus.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 12:32:45 JST James Henstridge

     in reply to

     • Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦
     • Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     @Conan_Kudo @mcepl @blandford I see that poison pill agreement as one of Trolltech's first experiments with not-quite-open-source.

     Qt was not available under the LGPL back then: the status-quo license was the Qt Free Edition license, which you can read here: https://invent.kde.org/historical/qt1/-/blob/master/LICENSE. Far fewer people could use this license than the current Qt Open Source edition.

     If Qt was the dominant toolkit for Linux desktops and was still under that license, then all most Open Source desktop apps on Linux would be dependent on the commercial license. That's the kind of lock in that led Unity to try this royalty change.