LeanQt VS notes

> Then do you (developers on HN) stay away from CLAs?

Depends on the CLA, but generally I do stay away. E.g. I never checked in anything to the official Qt repository because I don't agree the the CLA by QTC. Instead I finally made my own fork and call it LeanQt and LeanCreator (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/leancreator/).

The "weird licence which is basically a modified version of the MIT licence but with a clause that prevents competitive usage" is likely not even recognized as a true "open source" license.

> would it be possible to relicense a fork of Polaris to MIT (removing the Shopify clause?)

Likely not, because only the IP owner can determine who can do what with their IP under what license. If you use the software of an IP owner under a specific licence, you usually don't have the rights to re-license their work, even if you modified it.

My response to this question was https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt, but I'm not using QML nor xmlpatterns.

I made myself independent of the adventures in Qt Land by switching to https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt.

https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt

A minimum and easy to build fork of QT

If you (like me) don't need all that stuff and are not up to the latest craze, have a look at LeanQt (https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt).

Right. In the Gui module you have everything you need for this: platform independent windows and events, 2D bitmap and vector graphics, fonts and even rich text handling. Unfortunately there are some dependencies in Qt Gui to Qt Widgets, but if you use e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ instead of original Qt these are resolved. So with this you can implement your own widget toolkit on top of the Gui module if you want, and still benefit from the very powerful platform independent foundations of Qt.

> Qt for MCU [..] seems like a big advantage over Qt LGPL-3.0. I have my doubts. MCUs powerful enough to run Qt GUIs smoothly are more expensive than, say, an i.MX6ULL with a Cortex-A7 application processor and Linux. It’s a lot easier to find developers for an embedded Linux system ...

This is a very convincing argument. A Linux embedded system is also more flexible and the degree of code reusability is usually higher.

> Shall we use Qt LGPL-3.0 or Qt Commercial?

LeanQt (https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/) is still available under LGPL v2.1. I will not switch to Qt 6 with my projects.

Plume is actually based on my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. You can already get it on Flathub, Snap Store etc. Notes uses just a simple plain text editor while Plume has a completely revamped block editor that I built from scratch. That parts of Notes used in Plume will remain open source (per the MPL license) but the rest of the code will be closed source. At least for the time being.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Plume is built on top of my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. Since Plume is based on Notes, I'll of course comply with the MPL license and release all existing files that were changed (and must stay MPL licensed).

But I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source with Plume[2]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4.5 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584960

2. Each note is just a simple plaintext in the underlying data (although currently stored in a database, but in a future update we'll convert the database to an arbitrary folder).

So you can create beautiful and advanced notes, easy. In a non-proprietary format (when that future update arrives). All while using a resource efficient and fast software that is cross-platform.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

[2] https://www.get-notes.com/

My Noets app[1] editor is built on top of the Markdown syntax of QOwnNotes.

My new app Plume[2] is built on top of Notes but features an advanced block editor and a new design.

[1] https://www.get-notes.com/

[2] https://www.get-plume.com/

Indeed, I want this feature badly myself to create wikis and such. There's an open issue[1]. We'll definitely implement that some day.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/issues/431

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best native GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??).

Unlike you, I like the direction where Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick.

I do worry of the continuous friction with open source development and hate the online installers as well. I can recommend this useful tool https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall that allows you to easily download prebuilt Qt binaries. I hope they can revert their approach on that.

I beg to differ, QML is great. I'm implementing a feature that converts all tasks in Markdown editor to a Kanban view (written in QML) and it's been so easy to do. Work in progress GIF here: https://imgur.com/a/sZNHnp6

And it's even crazier that most of it compiles to C++. It's so fast to develop with it, and runs so fast.

BTW, source code here: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574

Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (:

We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes