[PySide] PySide to become a Qt add-on

[Matti Airas]

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 - no longer valid.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.