The Qt Marketplace, a catalog store of modules and add-ons for Qt, was put into operation.

Qt Company announced about the launch of the catalog store Qt Marketplace, through which various add-ons, modules, libraries, add-ons, widgets and developer tools began to be distributed, aimed at using with Qt to extend the functionality of this framework, promote new ideas in design and improve the development process. Publishing both paid and free packages is allowed, including from third-party developers and the community.

The Qt Marketplace is part of an initiative to break down the Qt framework into smaller pieces and reduce the size of the core product - developer tools and specialized components can be provided as add-ons. There are no strict requirements for licenses and the choice of license is up to the author, but the Qt developers recommend choosing copyleft-compatible licenses such as GPL and MIT for free add-ons. For companies offering paid content, the use of the EULA is allowed. Hidden licensing models are not allowed, the license must be explicitly reflected in the package description.

At first, paid add-ons will be accepted into the catalog only from officially registered companies, but after bringing to the proper form the means of automating publication and financial processes, this restriction will be lifted and paid add-ons will be able to be placed by individual developers. The income distribution model for the sale of paid add-ons through the Qt Marketplace implies the transfer of 75% of the amount to the author in the first year, and 70% in subsequent years. Payments are made once a month. Calculations are made in US dollars. A platform is used to organize the work of the store Shopify.

Currently, the store catalog has four main sections (in the future, the number of sections will be expanded):

• Libraries for Qt. The section presents 83 libraries that extend the functionality of Qt, of which 71 are provided by the KDE community and selected from the set KDE Frameworks. The libraries are used in the KDE environment but do not require additional dependencies other than Qt. For example, the catalog offers KContacts, KAuth, BluezQt, KArchive, KCodecs, KConfig, KIO, Kirigami2, KNotifications, KPackage, KTextEditor, KSyntaxHighlighting, KWayland, NetworkManagerQt, libplasma, and even a set of Breeze Icons.
• Tools for developers using Qt. The section offers 10 packages, of which half are provided by the KDE project - ECM (Extra CMake Modules), KApiDox, KDED (KDE Daemon), KDesignerPlugin (widget generation for Qt Designer/Creator) and KDocTools (documentation in DocBook format). Stands out from third-party packages Felgo (a set of utilities, more than 200 additional APIs, components for code hot reloading and testing in continuous integration systems), incredibuild (arranging a build from Qt Creator on other hosts on the network for 10x compilation speed), Squish Coco и Squish GUI Automation Tool (commercial code testing and analysis toolkit, $3600 and $2880), Kuesa 3D Runtime (commercial 3D engine and 3D content creation environment, $2000).
• Plugins for the Qt Creator development environment, including plugins for supporting Ruby and ASN.1 languages, a database viewer (with the ability to execute SQL queries) and a Doxygen document generator. The ability to directly install add-ons from the store will be integrated into Qt Creator 4.12.
• Servicesrelated to Qt, such as extended support plans, porting services to new platforms, and developer consulting.

The categories that are planned to be added in the future include modules for Qt Design Studio (for example, a module for creating interface layouts in GIMP), board support packages (BSP, Board Support Packages), extensions for Boot 2 Qt (for example, support for OTA updates), resources for 3D rendering and shader effects.

Source: opennet.ru