Qt Contributors Summit is an annual event. Developers involved in the Qt community and its development gather for two days to discuss the state of the project and its road map.
Qt Contributors Summit 2014 was held on 10-11 June at Estel convention center Berlin, Germany. More than 60 contributors of Qt Project visited it. The sponsors of the event were three of the most active companies working with Qt: Digia, KDAB, ICS as well as other companies such as: Pelagicore, Froglogic, basysKom, Intel, Canonical and e-GITS. Although Jolla and BlackBerry were not among the sponsors several of their employees attended the event.
The opening presentation was by the Qt online community manager Tero Kojo. After that there was a keynote by Lars Knoll about the state of the Qt project. Well known contributors such as Thiago Macieira, John Layt and others shared the stage with Lars.
Unfortunately it was announced that Digia has negative financial results for 2013 as well as for the first quarter of 2014. It was acknowledged that Qt is experiencing difficulties to move from OSS to enterprise. Despite all the download statistics of Qt 5.2 and Qt 5.3 are impressive. Qt 5.3 has been downloaded more than 300K times just in the first week of its launch. For more details please have a look at the whole video of QtCS 2014 opening talk below:
Video
The focus on the whole event was on the community. Tero Kojo announced a reboot of the Qt Ambassador program. He plans to split the program into several different areas: community builder, content creator, quality assurer, documenter, framework developer, application developer and evangelist.
Tero also announced plans for major changes of Qt websites. Qt-project.org and qt.digia.com will be merged into a single site. This new site will be based on industry leading open-source solutions. Another important topic for the community that was discussed on QtCS2014, are the plans for establishing a Qt Foundation.
The talks dedicated to the technical part of the projects were primary related to QML and mobile platforms. There were discussions related to the state of Qt ports to iOS, Android, WinRT. Tomasz Olszak, the co-founder and leading developer of Qt for Tizen, also participated actively in QtCS2014. The discussions about Qt Core lead by Thiago Macieira attracted enormous attention and two sessions were dedicated to it.