I am not nearly as invested with big business as the rest of the people here and lack the experience most of you have. However what currently seems to be happening is a back and forth of "We need to progress, because technical debt and X" "Yes but big companies can't progress because Y" This has been repeating for the last few threads without seeming to go anywhere. Don't get me wrong, I found it fascinating to read through but I don't think it furthers the discussion at the moment. It would surprise me greatly if Qt wasn't aware that some of their largest clients are intrinsically depending on Windows 7.
So to get my naïve and inexperienced opinion in here: Instead of continuing on the aforementioned cycle, why don't we see if there could be some alternative route. Some sort of compromise. It seems that neither continuing support for win7, nor dropping it is satisfactory for any side. To go by what Roland Hughes said, companies of that scale often want to keep software for up to 30 years which would mean carrying win7 around for up to 2039+, which is another 19 (!) years of maintenance. And at some point this decision probably has to be made. As Oliver Wolff said: > [...] dropping support for an OS is never ideal [...] One possible solution that came to mind is that after the LTS is dropped for Qt 5.15 it could be opened to the public for contributions with some elected people as the maintainers, perhaps from larger companies that are in close contact with the Qt company. That way there would still be support for Qt 5.15, basically indefinitely, without every single company needing to invest the same amount of effort just to have a maintained version of their software running. That said, I am unsure if this would be a choice the Qt company would, and even could make. There might be licensing issues or other things prohibiting it. Additionally there could be problems with the direction of the project. Version 5.15 being controlled by few big players might lead to some very off-scope specific features being implemented which could cause hassles for less influential groups of people. Sincerely, Jonathan Purol _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
