Opening Talk: Keynote on Qt

The organiser of the last conference gave us his best wishes and said how nice it was that the conference was now too big to be held in Nove Hrady because he could have a free summer.  

Matthias Kalle Daimer had his laptop with talk notes on it was stolen in Oslo but to show you he had no hard feelings against Olso the speaker was invited from that very city, one of the founders of Qt.

The speaker, Eirik Chame from Trolltech, showed us the Sharp palmtop computer running a Qt application which impresses the press even if the application is only a JPEG viewer for his slides.

How an Itching Toll and a Park Bench Influenced KDE

Haavard Nord and Eirik Chame start Trolltech, met at university in 1998.   They shared a passion for programming starting with connecting their computers by serial port and making a program in assember to let them chat over the link.  Eirik was a speedy coder while Naavard was the perfectionsit.  They consider themselves part of the Turbo Pascal Generation which was text based and easy to learn.  In 1990 GUI programming came along, Motif, Win32 and Mac Toolbox were horrible to use with hard APIs.  They were working on a project which had to work on Motif, Windows and Mac, when sitting on a park bench they realised they needed a cross platform display system.  Cross platform tools existed but were badly done and made Motif programming look like good fun, also they were expensive, so they wanted to scratch the itch.

In 1994 they started Trolltech after and realised they should create a multiplatform software development tool.  They wanted a Free Software version which investers thought was crazy so it was self funded.  Hired only programmers who were better than themselves.  No real sales people at the start because they wanted a product first.  Major development was under GNU/Linux and X11.  Dual licensing was very important.

Toolkit development is different from application development and requires another skill set, takes about 10 times longer to write toolkit code and it will require continuous maintenance.

Design principles of Qt are to make it as simple as possible, focused on perfection to the last detail, API stability, should be as fast as possible and small.

Goal was that anyone with a little C++ knowledge and no Qt experience should be able to read and understand a Qt applicaion.  Minimise glue code, the hard work should be done by Qt.

For perfectionism they sometimes remove functionality from a release to allow it to be made perfect (you have to have a certain release frequency).

Qt 0.6 was in 1994 when they were doing consultancy and packaged whatever they had.  0.9 in 1995 they rewrite signals overnight and released it.  1.0 in September 1996.  2.0 1999 had unicode.  3.0 in October 2001 with database and others.  4.0 late Q1 2004(!)

In 1996 they started to get strange questions about widget flags from someone called Matthias.  Then Matthias posted his famous KDE announcement.  Similar messages were very common at the time but most of them did not get further than a webpage.  Matthias was different, had a vision and ability to solve it, with Lyx he had a known reputation.

Qt usage in Germany grew fast in 1997 due to KDE.  Trolltech recruited several KDE people including Matthias.  KDE made Qt a native toolkit on GNU/Linux.
KDE Free Qt foundation was a responce to the licence issues in 1997.  It was a good way to show support for Free Software.  They hired "intellectual property" lawyers to make the contract who wondered why they were being paid to make a contract saying Trolltech would never stop giving something away for Free.

Trolltech get a lot of feedback from the Free Software developers who outnumber their commercial and proprietry users many times.

KDE gets a free high quality toolkit, Trolltech gets mind-share and good product feedback and KDE is a big showcase for Qt.

Survey sent out to 6000 Qt licence holders (most of them), most customers using it for less than 2 years.  Target operating system is Windows top then X11/GNU/Linux, the "intending to target" figuers indicate windows will go down and X11 up.  31% in US, 23% in Germany with US growing, UK third with 7%.  Large range of industry segments, very popular in electrical design applications.  Applications for sale are at 48% of licence holders (==1500 software companies), 37% use Qt for in house development.  1/3 of licencers have participated in Free Software projects, 2% don't know if they have or not.  97% would recomment Qt to others, 1% said no, 2% don't know (probably the same 2% as the last question).  Market leader for compiled cross platform development.

4400 customers, 90 employees, 17 nationalities with offices in Norway, US and Australia.  They are profitable.

Engineering is split in 2, Qt development is done in Oslo headed by Matthias Ettrich.  Qtopia done in Australia.

Qt 4.0 will be backward compatible, faster, better, smaller, API modernised.