On Thursday 28 October 2010 John Layt wrote: > > Big questions. Anyone with big answers? :-) Here is a big answer: Let's merge Qt and the KDE development platform. Let's put all KDE libraries, support libraries, platform modules into Qt, remove the redundancies in Qt, and polish it into one nice consistent set of APIs, providing both, the wonderful KDE integration, consistency and convenience, as well as the simplicity and portability of the Qt platform. I know what you think ("madness", "no", "KDE 5", "impossible", "governance", "binary compatibility", "Nokia", "impossible", ...), but if you put that aside for a while and think big, wouldn't that be a wonderful answer to all the struggles we have with kdelibs? We all love Qt, without it KDE wouldn't exist. We also love the KDE development platform, it provides all that what Qt doesn't have or didn't have at some point in time. But is there still a real reason to keep them separate? Wouldn't it be much more elegant, if you wouldn't have to decide, if to use some KDE classes or write a "qt-only" application, if you would get all the wonders of KDE from Qt in one consistent way? Sure, this would be a massive effort, and require huge changes, it would probably mean Qt 5 and KDE 5, it would take quite some time, it would need further changes to the Qt governance model, it would mean investments from Qt Development Frameworks, it would mean a long transition phase for applications to adapt. But wouldn't it be worth this effort? What's the future of the KDE development platform long-term, independent of Qt? There are probably a hundred times as many Qt developers out there than KDE developers, and if Nokia is only half-way successful with their plans for Qt, this ratio will continue to change rapidly in favor of Qt. By merging the platforms we could turn all these Qt developers into KDE developers. We could benefit from and contribute to the success of Qt without restrictions. We would reach way more users. We could much more easily acquire contributors. Over the last couple of years, KDE development has constantly shifted from library development to application development. Our struggles with even just doing the basic maintenance of the libraries show that. But we have a lot of shiny apps, people are excited about being part of our subcommunities centered around applications. There are still brave souls taking care of kdelibs, but it's really hard to keep up there. On the other hand Qt has broadened a lot, and recently with the ambition to provide a full API for MeeGo this has accelerated. That's a bit similar to what KDE did quite some time ago. There is more and more redundancy and overlap between Qt and KDE libraires, and we still don't really have a good answer to that. A merge would be an answer, a big answer. As said, there are tons of obstacles to overcome to make this happen, but let's just assume for a moment that we would be able to remove these obstacles, wouldn't it be a great thing for KDE for the long term? Am I crazy? Or could this be exciting? What do you think? -- Cornelius Schumacher