[Interest] the path forward - that 7 year thing - was, , willy-nilly

[Volker Hilsheimer]

> On 1 Apr 2021, at 11:55, Roland Hughes <roland at logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
> On 4/1/21 12:40 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> Dropping old platforms has been done since the early 2000s. Everyone who
>> adopted Qt since 3.0 has known of this. It's was not news then and it's not
>> now.
> 
> It is news now.
> 
> During Qt 3.x there were only a few customers, OS/2, and the KDE desktop on fledgling Linux distros.
> 
> Since then, Qt actively pursued the medical device and industrial controls markets. Currently it appears QtC is pursing the automotive market to the exclusion of all else. Despite someone ranting and calling that hearsay that's exactly what it looks like to the customers in the other markets.
> 
> When Qt pursued and penetrated these other markets it had to adjust to the time lines of those markets. These are very long timelines. Fifteen years on average.
> 
> Had Qt only pursued the phone and auto markets, it could have continued on its merry way dropping things whenever the mood struck. The phone and auto markets have about a six month life span before everything is abandoned for the next platform.
> 
> They didn't. The medical device and industrial controls had the deeper pockets. The means the policies and practices of the Qt project must adapt to the market it pursued.


As *The Qt Company* we need to adapt our service offerings to the market we want to sell Qt into. We could for instance provide extended lifetime support for old Qt versions, and maintain special long-term-support branches of Qt that continue to build on old OS versions or hardware platforms or whatever for those customers that have deep enough pockets. Perhaps we do that already today (I know, I know, it’s April 1st...). Last year we made a reasonably recent Qt 5 work on a rather ancient Windows XP Embedded setup. It might not have been cheap.

But why should the Qt Project have to care? The Qt Project doesn’t sell into the medical or industrial automation market.

If a medical device manufacturer makes a technology decision and choses Qt based on the policies of Qt "the Open Source” Project, then I’ll trust that they know what they are doing. And if they are not happy with how Qt “the Open Source” Project operates, then I’m sure they’ll check what The Qt Company can provide as a commercial service that fits their needs.

Perhaps that happens frequently already. That would explain the recent development of the Qt Company stock price...


Volker


PS: Roland, I was looking at your https://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/agile_book.html page, and judging by this sentence, I think your review process is broken. You should probably ask for your money back from your professional editors, or something… :P

"The author of this title has spent over 30 years in IT working on multi-country corporate applications before there was an Interent, to stock exchange trading floor systems, desktop applications, and even multiple medical devices."