This. I shake my head every time Qt shows up in HN as an upvoted thread. Its licensing model is so antithetical to smart planning I find it unusable for any project.
I gave up ongoing fees for software components I use to develop with Borland Turbo C++. I am not going back now.
My interpretation is that I could switch to LGPL Qt for client software and keep my source code if I dynamically link to Qt.
I may be too strident as a commercial developer in my anti-LGPL 3 rhetoric, but my cloud-apps have been avoiding it assiduously. Client side, I should look for this kind of flexibility.
Even the GPL should not be a problem for you in the cloud, since you're not distributing the software, just provide a network interface to it. And the LGPL is even more forgiving. This web service use case is the reason for the AGPL, which does prescribe that even web services should open their code, should they use AGPL dependencies.
There is no alternative. No one other than Qt will expend the massive amount of effort to maintain such a thing. Everyone sees the writing on the wall with the new ARM Macs if it wasn't already apparent. Desktop applications are on their last leg. You will just write a mobile app and that will be backwards compatible with desktop automatically.
> You will just write a mobile app and that will be backwards compatible with desktop automatically.
A PWA? Sure. But a native app with seamless integration? No way.
Instead of Windows, macOS, and various Linux flavors, now you've got Windows, iOS, still macOS (for now), various Android versions, and various Linux flavors (including Chrome OS). Good luck!
(Depending on the type of app, you might also want or need to support various embedded devices or game consoles. I guess QT doesn't help there though.)
>>Desktop applications are on their last leg. You will just write a mobile app and that will be backwards compatible with desktop automatically.
I don't understand your point. In your opinion what's a mobile app that's "backwards compatible with desktop", and what makes that app not a desktop app?
A mobile app written in portable code that runs without emulation on a desktop.
The desktop OS would expose the same platform SDK as the mobile OS. (Needless to say, apps depending on the accelerometer, selfie cam, etc. for major functionality would not work.)
This is already the case with the latest generation of Macs. No speculation necessary. It's possible and has been done. Also Chromebooks can run Android apps.
What remains to be seen is when (not if) Windows would mimic what Apple did, as they have been doing for the past decades. I suppose the easiest way would be to run Android (and Google Play) on WSL. Android and Google Play can run on x86–no need for emulation. How clunky this turns out is how willing MS and Google are to work together.
In the end there will just be two platforms you would have to support as a GUI applications developer: iOS and Android.
I think the idea is that developers will forgo tradition desktop development when then can just create an ipad app that works incidentally on the desktop and iOS. Personally not convinced when Windows still owns the desktop.
Developers have already foregone traditional desktop development since webapps and Electron took over. Webapps are as incidental of a substitute for desktop applications as mobile apps that run on desktop would be. Companies don't volunteer for expen$$$ive development work just out of a sense of purity when it doesn't bring in any more money.
Windows still owns the desktop but they mimic Apple. Also since ca. 2008 the population under 30 has been mostly on Apple. Those people will get older and replace the generation that was brought up on Windows.
I gave up ongoing fees for software components I use to develop with Borland Turbo C++. I am not going back now.