Qt Project: Open to all with skill and will

jasonblack | 25 October, 2011 13:55

The Qt Project is a big step forward for the Qt community, but it is not a big departure from the path we have been on since the very beginning.

All versions of Qt have been available through open source licenses since the Qt 4.0 release in 2005, and some versions of Qt have been available under open source licenses since the 1990s. All members of the Qt community, now over 500,000 strong, already have full access to source code for the Qt Framework and the Qt Creator development environment. Some members of the community also contribute code back to the framework in the form of bug fixes and feature enhancements, but for technical reasons it has been easier for developers employed by Qt and Nokia to influence the code base than it has been for other community members. That changes with the Qt 5 release and the Qt Project.

The Qt Project is now live,  just in time for Qt Developer Days in Munich, and the open governance model completely levels the playing field: developers employed by Nokia and our contractors will work on the code base with exactly the same tools and under exactly the same guidelines as everyone else. If you have the skill and the will to contribute, you can do so regardless of your corporate affiliation or lack thereof.

Daniel Kilhberg summarizes the goals on the Qt blog:

The Qt governance, roadmap and releases will be driven openly by the Qt Project – open to all the stakeholders willing to contribute. It will have an open governance model based on equal access to all discussions and tools, an open contribution process and meritocratic assignment of roles. We want Qt to excel by all measurements as a transparent, merit-based and participative open source community project. We believe this is the key to speeding up development and increasing the adoption of Qt.

There are fives roles under the new way of working, from a contributor who pushes suggested code updates to the open source repository to the Chief Maintainer who oversees the entire community. Most roles are associated with a particular portion of the code base and therefore individuals may hold multiple roles. For example, one might have been nominated and approved by the community as a Maintainer for a portion of code in the QtWebKit module and also be a contributor to the QML UI framework.

Infrastructure for the Qt Project includes a new code review system based on the open source gerrit project. As Lars explains in his posting on Qt Labs "We have invested some time and resources to integrate gerrit with the continuous integration system we at Nokia run for Qt. The CI system gives us automated regression testing of changes on our major platforms. As we move forward the goal is to enable any new Qt ports to hook themselves in there."

 

For more details on Qt Project and how it opens up the Qt framework to all those with the will and skill to contribute, check out:

 

 

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