I recently attended the Qt Contributors Summit in Berlin, from June 16 to 18, 2011. The unconference was held in the nice Café Moskau, with many room and common areas for chatting. The main focus for the unconference was to talk about the next version of Qt and the definition of an open governance structure, reclaimed by developers for so long.
Lars Knoll opened the discussion about the next version in one of the first sessions. The last major version for Qt – Qt 4 – was launched 6 years ago. The world was a very different place, and users’ expectations now are also different. There was no iPhone or applications store, touch screen was not prominent and social media just starting. Nowadays all this is just basics, and so Qt framework wants to provide easy infrastructure for developers to create applications meeting those expectations. Qt Quick/QML will play a huge role in this scenario – they will have almost the same capabilities and resources as Qt. The intention is to make easier for ‘opportunistic developers’ – those who want to create simple and small applications to monetize – to use Qt. There were many discussions on how to do that, the priorities, but main message – everything is going QML. Pure Qt resources will continue to be available and improved, but QML is expected to be sufficient for most developers. But I invite my friend and consulting resource for QML, Helio Castro, to write more about it.
Another big conversation was the open governance. Community has been asking this for a long time – 11 years to be exactly – and it is finally happening. The governance will be similar to the Linux kernel governance:
This blog post explains it in details – http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/05/20/open-governance-roles-and-responsibilities/ – and as I could not do any better, I will leave to the link to explain J there is also a talk – or rather a discussion – held by Thiago Macieira at Qt Developer Days 2010. http://qt.nokia.com/developer/learning/online/talks/developerdays2010/tech-talks/qt-301s-open-governance-model/
I held two sessions: Qt, MeeGo & AppUp Developer Program and – due the interest raised in this session – MeeGo Application development store.
In the first session, several developers seemed please to find out AppUp is a perfect channel for open source applications to reach mass users on Windows desktops. As Qt is a multi-platform, there are a huge number of Qt applications also available for Windows, but no efficient distribution channel. AppUp is this channel, offering the possibility to distribute open source applications with the source code. When you upload your application, you can choose between several open source licenses, and if you do so, you are required to submit also your SRPM source code package. And your application will be available not only on AppUp, but also on many applications store powered by AppUp. One of the most recent examples is Dixons KnowHow store, pre-installed in netbooks being sold by one of the largest retailers in UK and Ireland. But I shall go into further details in a future post, with screenshots and examples.
During this session, there were many questions on MeeGo application development environment. So we scheduled another session for the next day to talk about the resources and the community to support it. The first place to look at is the main wiki page for MeeGo Apps. Conversations about MeeGo application development are happening in the MeeGo community mailing list and the main #meego irc channel hosted on Freenode. To help developers to package their applications, there is a community OBS server – OpenSuse Building System. For open source applications, developers can request an account for free and submit their code. To host the source code in a collaborative way, MeeGo suggests Gitorious, where developers can also create an account for free.
On the wiki page, you can find the guidelines for packaging applications for Meego, as well as information about the QA process. When one application is submitted to testing, the community can test and rate it. Long story short, if an application has been tested enough and is approved, it will be available in the community repository. You can find more information in the documentation ahead. I’m still learning the process myself, so I can submit more information later.
And overall, was an extremely well planned and awesome event. And even so it was an unconference, the conversations in the hallway still provide many great opportunity and insights. I’ve learn about several great projects, like QML 3D and Gluon, both of with deserve their own blog posts. I also hope the developer present there appreciate our efforts on bringing ClubMate to the unconference – even if that meant empting Germany’s supply that week! And I would like to thank Alexandra Leisse for the amazing job organizing everything – you literally rock! Seriously, you people need to hear her singing…
I shall declare Mondays the Blogging day for me, and hope you all enjoy some of the reports. If you have any suggestions on what subject you would like to see more of, leave your suggestion!
Sulamita Garcia 