[Interest] The willy-nilly deletion of convenience, methods

[Matthew Woehlke]

On 23/03/2021 06.59, Roland Hughes wrote:
> 30 years is __nothing__ for production systems. It is ordinary for a 
> well developed system to run 10+ years without any modifications.

On that note, how many people are aware there's a computer that has been 
running non-stop for almost 45 years? :-D

You kids and your uptime measured in hours...

> The phone world [...] [is] actually how this downward spiral started,
> with the introduction of QML and forcing people to re-write,
> re-write, re-write.

That does, indeed, seem to have been the turning point.

> The Qt OpenSource model simply does not work. It cannot really be made 
> to work.
> 
> You can't pursue licensing from lone wolfs and shoestring startups and 
> expect well run legitimate companies to have any respect for you. It's 
> not going to happen.
> 
> The only thing that is going to work for the big ticket companies is a 
> 100% commercial product that happens to release its older stuff as 
> OpenSource and sometimes accepts software developed by others for free. 
> Nobody wants to hear that, but that is the only model that works. With 
> that model comes fixing all bugs inside 90 days. None of this hoping 
> someone in the OpenSource community fixes it for free.

Here, however, I'm going to have to disagree. I fail to see why the open 
source version can't be the latest and greatest, so long as the paid 
support *does* actually provide support, as you're saying.

(Dislaimer: This is my employer's business model. It seems to be working 
quite well for us.)

What I think it broken is the commercial licensing model. Either pay for 
support (and *get* support), or don't pay, and get whatever the 
community gives you. I'm not actually convinced that paying Qt customers 
aren't getting the support they paid for; that information is generally 
not going to be publicly available. What *is* broken is the alimony 
licensing model and all the fear-mongering around the licensing terms. 
*Proper* commercial support for open source products lets you try before 
you buy with no punishment afterward, no penalties if you want to drop 
support later, or drop it and pick it up again. You pay, you get 
support, *period*.

For that matter, it seems like Qt's commercial model is working just 
fine *for them*, at least at the moment. Ironically, the arguments you 
are making probably are *why* it's working. The problem is that they're 
busy killing the community and doing severe, possibly irreparable damage 
to Qt's reputation.

> It's highly doubtful that any company could pull in the staff to 
> maintain all of the markets and eliminate all of the bugs, but that 
> would have to be the starting point for such a venture.

Right, which is why we *need* a community, or a consortium, or something 
of that nature. We need everyone that cares about what Qt *could* be, 
without Digia's efforts to break it, to pool their resources.

I believe that if we could pull that off, Qt can still have a bright future.

> Because they don't have bugs that have been rotting for over a decade, 
> CopperSpice went to a support and consulting contract only model. It 
> seems to be working.

I haven't much looked into CS, but that sounds plausible. Again, that's 
basically how my own employer works. It's a perfectly functional 
business model for organizations with the commitment and ethos to pull 
it off.

I'm also not sure how much I *want* to look into CS. The CoW stuff 
scares me, and I think they've gone too far in throwing out the good 
parts of Qt with the bad. There are quite a few changes in Qt5 that are 
good (the new OpenGL framework for one, not to mention all the C++11 
related changes). Ditching MOC is IMO questionable, especially when the 
overhead of MOC is so negligible these days.

No, I don't for a moment think QML is on that list :-). I looked at it 
once, briefly, and didn't see the point, and you're probably right about 
how it adds too much complexity for whatever dubious value proposition 
it might have. (For that matter, I'd like to see all the style sheet 
crud ripped out of Widgets as well.)

> Medical devices, industrial controls, even desktop apps want a long 
> stable platform.
> 
> Phones only care about what is shipping next week.

Yup, and this is the same reason why I loathe and want nothing to do 
with web development. Learning a new "platform" every month is a waste 
of time.

-- 
Matthew