[Interest] The willy-nilly deletion of convenience methods (was: Mixing Commercial and Open...)

Konrad Rosenbaum konrad at silmor.de
Sat Mar 20 00:57:08 CET 2021


Hi,

On 19/03/2021 16:07, Roland Hughes wrote:
> At any rate, it has been a perfect storm.
>
> Licensing FUD + death-of-perpetual-license + death-of-OpenSource-LTS + 
> Qt-6-rolling-out-incomplete + deleted-convenience-methods = 
> customers-leaving
>
> If you've already got to go through a full re-certification you might 
> as well jump to a platform that promises not to do that to you in the 
> future. There was no way the above math was going to lead to more 
> licenses and support contracts being sold.
>
> Maybe Konrad is seeing something different where he lives? It sounds 
> like we travel in much the same industries. In America the stalwart 
> industries of Qt use appear to be abandoning it wholesale.
Industry, yes. Same? Only sometimes. I do not do medical devices - my 
experiences are 100% different from that over-regulated world.

I spend my work life mostly automating and testing in semi conductor 
factories, very little time in related industries (like photo voltaics). 
In this industry there does not seem to be much difference world wide, 
because the key suppliers are the same. The working style is very 
different: never enough time, high fluctuation, no regulation for mere 
software developers, don't bother with detailed specs - make it work!

Currently almost no new project is started using any C++ framework - it 
is not "in" or as my younger colleagues would say "very much not rad". 
In addition Qt is still seen as primarily a GUI toolkit and most 
development in this industry is non-GUI.

For automation work C++ is not used very often because you need to add a 
scripting layer to the framework - you cannot trust many industrial 
developers with pointers - they'll hurt themselves. Most industry 
frameworks use Java or C# for that reason.

Qt is very much a niche framework in this industry. You rarely see it 
underneath the operator GUI of a machine or in a specialized GUI of a 
3rd-party software, but never where the majority of developers work - 
various customization services.

This situation has been pretty much stable for the last 15 years (that's 
when C++ began to disappear). I average 1.5 Qt projects per decade. 
That's at least 2 projects more than all my colleagues in the consulting 
company I work for combined.

So the good news is: Qt is not disappearing en masse from the semi 
conductor industry.
The bad news: because it was never really here.


However, in case you wonder why I'm even here: personally most of the 
time that I use Qt I use it as an Open Source developer in my spare 
time. In that function I don't give a rat's furry behind about all that 
politicking and what the commercial license is about. If it is 
convenient I use current Open Source packages for new developments, but 
my main target is whatever Debian and Ubuntu will provide when I think 
my software will be ready for release.



     Konrad


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