The Qt Company Is Tomorrow Moving Qt 5.15 To Its Commercial-Only LTS Phase

[mdedetrich]

The matter of fact is, if you want a good cross platform toolkit than Qt is your only real hope (please dont mention GTK, its complete crap from a UI/native look PoV for anything outside of *nix). As stated else, Qt also provides an entire ecosystem (i.e. they basically have their own stdlib which comes with everything and the kitchen sink) because back in the days, C++ was horrible in this regard.

It turns out that maintaining such a project is enormous, its probably one of the most complex codebases as it has to cater for all of the desktop/OS'isms (between Mac/Windows and *nix) while still being native. Qt is the only such successful project that achieves this, and it turns out this happens to be really expensive.

Really this is analogous to what happened with JVM (which is GPL with a library sharing exclusion) and CentOS stream, i.e. the latest upstream is for free and open source but if you use outdated versions of our software then you have to pay for it. For projects of this size and complexity it makes initial sense although I hope that alternatives do crop up.

Also as said earlier, you are always free to fork Qt but by the mere fact that there is no serious well maintained fork of Qt is already indicative of how complex it is.

[JackLilhammers]

Qt as a platform sucks even more, its a horrible mess no one should use in 2020, even worse then Electron since Qt5 and thats impressive.
But at least it as a software isn't a major moral issue. But defending the platform equals to defending the horribly people who work for Qt or even worse fix bugs they are too lazy to fix themself and contribute aka give all rights of that code to the Qt Company thanks to their more then greedy CLA.

So, tell us, what should we use in 2021?

However any significant software seems to have someone calling it "horrible mess" and besides that you don't always get to choose every technology you like.
In fact people usually work on existing projects, which always have their fair amount of quirks.

That said, I like working with Qt, as many other people, so it might be that different people have different tastes and your opinion is just that...

[AJSB]

Qt sure do know how to boil a frog without killing it.

Its an Art XD

[jabl]

Calling for a fork is cheap. Actually developing and maintaining one isn't.

It seems that relicensing Qt under the LGPL during the Nokia years took away most of the commercial income, and now that it has been spun off into its own company again they are finding it difficult to work economically.

Successful open source projects tend to be community style projects, where a bunch of individuals and companies, some of which are competitors with each other, come together to share the burden of maintaining the commodified base upon which they depend. Case in point, the Linux kernel. But of course a poison pill licensing structure with copyright assignment, like Qt, prevents such a community from forming in the first place, as there's this one special contributor that's more equal than the others.

I'm not really sure what the solution would be here. Seems most competitors to Qt are offered for free by big companies as a means to drive developers to their platforms, so they have no need to show positive income by themselves. How are you supposed to compete with that?

[Vistaus]

It's an interesting project, but I don't think it has the traction needed to be a valid alternative.

That, plus the fact that it's mainly maintained by 2 persons, so the community will go nuts, just like how they are constantly going nuts over TQt3 by the TDE project being maintained by too few persons...

[Alexmitter]

I don't defend the company. They suck. I can't stand their management and every statement they make and I don't think I ever defended them here or anywhere else.
I defend Qt as a platform.

Qt as a platform sucks even more, its a horrible mess no one should use in 2020, even worse then Electron since Qt5 and thats impressive.
But at least it as a software isn't a major moral issue. But defending the platform equals to defending the horribly people who work for Qt or even worse fix bugs they are too lazy to fix themself and contribute aka give all rights of that code to the Qt Company thanks to their more then greedy CLA.

[skeevy420]

skeevy420 You did not capitalize the initial letter of the stop words. This is a pivotal trait of clowns speak

If the FBI doesn't need of, neither do I

[JackLilhammers]

skeevy420 You did not capitalize the initial letter of the stop words. This is a pivotal trait of clowns speak

[skeevy420]

JackLilhammers 👏You👏Can’t👏Separate👏Company👏And👏Platform👏Because👏
Of👏CLA👏

👲🏽Technically, 👲🏿 Separation 👲🏻 of 👲 Company 🧴 and 🍆 Platform 🏧 is 💦 a 👦 Fork 🏕️

[JackLilhammers]

JackLilhammers 👏You👏Can’t👏Separate👏Company👏And👏Platform👏Because👏
Of👏CLA👏

May I ask you why you edited your post? Did you miss an emoji? A capital letter? Any other fundamental piece of information?

However, that's just wrong. Last time I checked Qt can be forked at any moment. The problem is not the cla, but the resources needed to maintain this eventual fork.
Fork that I hope will be done, by the way