The Qt Project is live!

I’m happy to announce that the Qt Project officially went live today. Starting today, development of Qt will be governed as a true open source project.

We now have qt-project.org - a website where all development of Qt will be centered, providing the same infrastructure and processes for everybody that wants to contribute to Qt.

Now that we are here, what next?

If you are interested in participating and becoming part of the Qt Project community, the first place to look is at the projects website at qt-project.org. This page gives a good overview on how to get started, and how you can become part of the community and contribute to Qt.

If you have already been working with Qt, you most likely have an account in Jira, our bugtracking tool. This account is required to get access to the central place where all development happens: codereview.qt-project.org.

Our Gerrit server at codereview.qt-project.org will function as the central place where patches get pushed to, and there the patches are then reviewed and tested. Everybody that has a Jira account can push patches to codereview as a Contributor.

Patches can be reviewed by anyone, and finally accepted or rejected by Approvers and Maintainers. You will also notice that we already have some non Nokians as Approvers and Maintainers. I’d like to especially mention that Thiago, the maintainer for QtCore (the one library everybody is using), is not working for Nokia. This is the most tangible evidence of what open governance means. I expect and hope to see even more non Nokians becoming Approvers and Maintainers in the future.

For details on how to contribute, please head over to www.qt-project.org.

For now we have only a few mailing lists available at lists.qt-project.org, but I expect this to change and to see more specialized lists as we move forward. The most important list is the general development mailing list development@qt-project.org. Note that the development mailing list is also a member of the announcement mailing list, so you will automatically get those as well.

We are continuing to use Jira for tracking bugs and requirements. The current installation at bugreports.qt.nokia.com will be moved over the next few weeks to the Qt Project as well.

True openness

The Qt project is a true open source project. We are inviting everybody to participate and help making Qt a better product.

All development will happen in one central location, with access for everyone at the same time. No more separate code flow for “Nokians vs others”, and no more time delays! What you see is what we see. Discussions, decisions and roadmapping will all happen in the community, by the community, for the community. Anyone can be a Contributor, and even an Approver or Maintainer if they show enough merit.

Talk with us about Open Governance at Qt Developer Days

Sessions regarding the Qt Project and open governance will be happening at Qt Developer Days, and I'll also be talking about it during my keynote. If you are coming to the event, you will have an opportunity to learn more and get involved in the discussion. If you are considering coming to Dev Days, this discussion is one of many good reasons to get yourself there!

Conclusions and thanks

I am extremely happy to see that this move has now finally happened. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the people that have helped making this happen. There are many people that have contributed, but a few should be specifically mentioned : Thiago Macieira for driving the initial work on open governance, Marius Storm-Olsen for taking over much of that work, Cristy Hamley for handling all of the legal issues, and Olivia Puntanen for managing the project. Thank you all.

I am very much looking forward to starting a new chapter in the development of Qt, and excited to work with all of you towards making Qt an even better product.