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

Jason H jhihn at gmx.com
Mon Mar 22 15:22:37 CET 2021


>
> Even Jason's company, you remember Jason right? QML's biggest, and
> possibly __only__, fan. Even his company dumped Qt. The medical device
> clients I've worked for have also dumped Qt.
>
> It isn't the FUD that is obsolete, just the management of Qt.

I'm apparently Qt's biggest fan boy? Yes, I still think Qt (and yes, QML) is rockstar technology. My problems aren't with the API. It's that QtCorp has chipped away at the LGPL license from Nokia. And the stuff I wanted Qt to do, it didn't, even when under a commercial license.

Qt completely delivered is promise in us getting something to market, but when it was finally feature complete,  that something had more native code in it than Qt, because we were using using Qt just for the UI. Taking that and writing a UI abstraction to native was not that hard.

Qt *could have* made that port away so much harder, but because it's mobile support was so lacking, it was actually quite easy once we put our heads in it.

I'm also at a new company and I've suggested Qt up for evaluation, to replace the patchwork of libraries they are currently using.  We will see how the talks go... I doubt we will be using Qt6, regardless. Roland, what did those companies move to?

The problems I want fixed aren't technical. It's with the project's direction and management. "Open Governance" has not manifest the way I thought it would. Filling bugs and voting for them got my issues neglected. The constant relicensing to, of what was LGPL, to be under GPL 3. But these are issues that can be fixed with the stroke of a pen, or banging on a keyboard for a bit.

Some other inexplicable decisions are why there isn't Qt for Raspberry Pi as a supported platform? A debian package would go along way to introduce people to Qt there in the hobbyist sector, but it's a compile-it-for-yourself situation. Qt continues to get beat by HTML5, but it shouldn't. Especially giving the WebGL plugin. But there just isn't that effort to enable that segment. There is no grass roots support for Qt as a result. And with the licensing issues of late, they've ensured that there won't be. This means that they have to rely on and cater to the big spenders boys in the market.


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