Am 24.02.2022 um 15:38 hat Volker Hilsheimer geschrieben:
Evidently, the people commenting in this thread care deeply enough about Qt on the desktop to participate in the discussion. And I suppose most of us on this list are software engineers, many perhaps for more reasons than to put food on the table. My question to you is: how can we make it easier, or more fun, or more motivating to contribute to Qt, and to help with making things better?
my 2 cents in decreasing order of rank. * Many of us work for companies/clients that paid north of $600K for 5 developer seats and those companies were lead to believe the bulk of the licensing fees would be used to zero out the bug database that was north of 5000 at the time. Instead, Qt 6 was forced out the door YEARS before it was close to ready dramatically increasing the number of bugs per the original message of this thread. * There have been many stories over the years of people who went through the pain and suffering of setting up a development environment per the haloed instructions, had a laughing good time writing a test, then submitted the patch into the abyss. Nobody looked at it. Patch rotted until the version of Qt it was made against was no longer supported. Those people left Qt for good, most of them, if any are left, they aren't going to waste their time. Life's too short to waste that much of it when there is less than a 50/50 chance of a patch getting through? * There is no OpenSource Qt anymore. There is just alpha-quality pre-release commercial software one then has to pay to use. OpenSource Qt died when the LTS became commercial only. * On multiple occasions TQtC people have talked about the stock price of the company. Given the comment Bernhard Lindner made, the above comment really is the view of the OSS world. Why would anyone want to work for free to increase the stock price of a company that doesn't fix their bugs. Yes, some bugs eventually get fixed, but the company adds new features rather than whittling the bug database down to under 100 first. * Lastly, for Americans anyway, it might now be illegal. America has a long storied history with slavery and a whole lot of laws to prevent it in many forms. Read up on the massive fines Walmart had to pay for making hourly workers work off-clock. Every major hospital has a massive number of volunteers working there. The hospital can't function without them. The hospital also had to set up formal volunteer programs that complied with the law and after N hours of volunteer work said volunteers have to have access to benefits like health care, etc. In general it is illegal to work for free for a for-profit entity. A fact Facebook and the other social media giants are tap-dancing around right now. The "we're just a platform" argument is falling apart. So, when the OSS world was controlling the direction of Qt and providing an LTS, everyone was free to work for free. TQtC was free to sell support contracts and license things they developed on their own that weren't released to the OSS community. That's the way it works in America. It got __really__ gray and iffy when TQtC began exerting control over the direction of the product and the OSS effort. Exactly when that was doesn't matter. At that point it became highly questionable. One had to desperately cling to the existence of the LTS and spin a tale TQtC was just scamming license fees from companies that could otherwise use the LTS for free. Today, from what everyone says, the OSS community doesn't control the direction of the product. There is no OpenSource LTS allowed to exist. The community can't even create one if it wanted to. By extension of that, there is no OpenSource Qt, just pre-release commercial software one is allowed to use for a little while. A non-profit charity that has filled out the paperwork to get itself classified as a non-profit charity like OpenSource projects accepting donations in/from America can have any number of people working for free for as long as those people care to work for free. A publicly traded for-profit entity cannot. I'm not a lawyer, but I've had clients that had to deal with this time and time again. In their case, people are honked off at them because they have to turn them away. The time, cost, and effort of setting up a formal volunteer program and complying with government regulations just isn't worth the effort. They do it for temporary internships, but nothing else. Many corporations opt to pay their interns just to avoid the hassle. * Many Linux distros dropped KDE long ago and now many are talking about dropping Qt as well. Other than possibly WireShark, every other Qt based OpenSource project with any kind of user base has "something" written with a different tool set that does many of the same things. Per Nyall's comment ===== Now only a very tiny portion of our users receive the fixes (specifically, those using recent Fedora releases, as Fedora have moved away from Qt 5 upstream packages to instead following the KDE maintained 5.15 fork). Our Windows, Mac and debian based users will likely never get the fix for their Qt 5 versions. ===== -- Roland Hughes, President Logikal Solutions (630)-205-1593 http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com http://www.infiniteexposure.net http://www.johnsmith-book.com http://www.logikalblog.com http://www.interestingauthors.com/blog _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
