Have you looked at the Migration page in the CS Overview documentation?
Yes I migrated my Qt personal diary project called EventTalker (https://github.com/crispinalan/) some time back in anticipation of the Qt licensing changes. I found the process straight forward and it did not take much time to do. However, I did have to get my head around things like the CopperSpice network classes (see the Network classes forum post on this) and some issues with the SQLite driver (see the Copperspice 1.7.0 SQLite QString Blob forum post on this). I found that the CopperSpice way of doing signals and slots very logical as is using the CMake build system. Most companies should find the migration process straight forward especially as CopperSpice provides custom subscription support.
We agree that it is unusual for a company using LPGL to re-license something as closed source. Sort of implies they do not respect the open source community.
CopperSpice is a viable alternative for me. I am wondering how larger open source projects like KDE and Krita are going to deal with this licensing change.
Update: I have just listened to a UK Linux podcast entitled Tyler's Techcast #8 | KDE Roadmap, GNOME 40 And Linux Mint 20.1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtX5J7YrI4s&t=131s) which seems to indicate that KDE could use the Qt version following a Qt LTS release.
Yes, they do have the rights and there is nothing stopping them from making QtCreator closed source, right now it is is GPL 3. We are looking at our options to provide some UI designer for CS users.
I had not realized that QtCreator could go closed source like Qt LTS.
We are looking at our options to provide some UI designer for CS users.
I have looked at KDevelop, juCi++ and Geany as possible alternatives to QtCreator.
I found Kdevelop (https://www.kdevelop.org/) to be geared to the KDE project and it looks like it is built using Qt. To import a CMake application you use Project->Open/Import Project and select the CMakeLists.txt file. This opens the project with its contents. I was able to build a CS project. There are downloads for Linux, Windows and Mac.
juCi++ (https://github.com/cppit/jucipp) is interesting as it is designed for C++ development and uses the CMake build system. I was able to compile juCi++ from source on Debian 10 but had an issue with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due to a dependency version. After playing around with it for a while I came to the conclusion that it is great for C++ gtkmm development on Debian.
Geany (https://www.geany.org/) has an integrated terminal and I have been able to build CopperSpice projects using cmake and terminal commands.
Code: Select all
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
The Geany IDE uses "tags" files for its autocompletion (https://wiki.geany.org/tags/start). With Linux, these tag files are copied to (./config/geany/tags/) to enable code completion. There is a very good "tags" file for Gtk 3.0 and so I have found Geany great for C and GtK 3.0 Linux development given that it possible to add pkg-config commands with the set up compile options.
There is a Qt 5.1 tags file and so it should be possible to create a CopperSpice tags file. This would then provide users with a bespoke IDE alternative to QtCreator although there would be no what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) GUI designer like Qt Designer just editing the UI descriptions in XML format.
With Linux, I had to compile the Geany source code using the Autotools build system (https://www.geany.org/manual/current/#source-compilation) to get the latest version 1.37.1. Although it is a Gtk 3.0 application there is a Windows executable (https://www.geany.org/download/releases/) and a Mac version.
Geany looks like the best of the bunch to me for CS development especially if a CopperSpice tags files is created. Hopefully my experiences of using these IDE's may be helpful to other users. I had a quick look at the CodeLite and CodeBlocks IDE's but I have not used these for projects and so cannot comment on these.
What other alternative options are you considering for CS users should QtCreator go closed source?