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What I'm missing are some points regarding: - Maintainability: Who will maintain a Qt application once it's deployed? How fast can a Qt application become modi

by donjoe 9y ago

What I'm missing are some points regarding: - Maintainability: Who will maintain a Qt application once it's deployed? How fast can a Qt application become modified? - Cost for/of developers/development: How easy is it to find good Qt frontend developers/maintainers? - System upgrades: How will HAM upgrade its appliances? I assume he's talking about HAM as BSH (Bosch and Siemens Home Appliances). They're currently heavily researching IoT for their appliances. Looking at certain planned features, I guess their appliances will soon be equipped with more powerful embedded systems anyway...

bb88 9y ago
The cost of hardware at scale dwarfs the cost of software. If it means paying 5 people a %25 percent premium to save $1m then it's probably worth it.
- donjoe 9y ago
  That's about right. Yet, I think BSH (HAM) will continue to maintain their GUIs on a daily basis since they will want to keep older devices up to date with their IoT ecosystem, too. In the past, once a UI for appliances was written, it stayed the same until the appliance broke down. In a world of IoT, code will become updated on a regular basis. That's why I was questioning the initial development costs vs. maintaining an application's GUI until its EOL. I wonder Espruino was not mentioned so far. Their approach could speed up dev time by a lot.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    I don't have concrete data on this, but can't imagine updating a Qt app to be very difficult. The Qt folks usually tailor well to clients and are pretty supportive.
jacobush 9y ago
And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. HTML is (in practice) more liberally licensed. (Edit: not GPL, but LGPL. Which is almost as bad for embedded systems as GPL itself is. How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Nightmare. Just pay up. Qt LGPL is (or was) fine for desktop apps pre app stores. Now, not so much.)
- mkl 9y ago
  Qt has been LGPL as well for years now.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Ah, yes, true. See my edit though.
- bkor 9y ago
  > How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Where in the GPL or LGPL is this stated?
  - detaro 9y ago
    GPLv3 section 6 requires you to to provide instructions that allow the user to replace GPL-licensed software on a device, unless there is no upgrade functionality at all (so if you have an upgrade mechanism, you must open it to the user, if you burn the software to unchangeable ROM you don't have to replace that with writeable memory just to enable user replacement) LPGLv3 section 4 modifies this for LGPL-licensed software, requiring you to allow replacement of LGPL-licensed parts of software under the same mechanisms. This is commonly known as the "anti-tivoisation provisions".
- Const-me 9y ago
  > And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. And if you need on-screen keyboard, there’s no LGPL option available. You have to pay them significant amount of money, and also per-device fee.
  - tjoff 9y ago
    There is an API for creating one yourself, I did, not hard at all. Now it might not have a dictionary and other fancy features but it was adapted to our needs and it didn't take long at all to implement.
    - 9y ago

by donjoe 9y ago

bb88 9y ago

The cost of hardware at scale dwarfs the cost of software. If it means paying 5 people a %25 percent premium to save $1m then it's probably worth it.

donjoe 9y ago
That's about right. Yet, I think BSH (HAM) will continue to maintain their GUIs on a daily basis since they will want to keep older devices up to date with their IoT ecosystem, too. In the past, once a UI for appliances was written, it stayed the same until the appliance broke down. In a world of IoT, code will become updated on a regular basis. That's why I was questioning the initial development costs vs. maintaining an application's GUI until its EOL. I wonder Espruino was not mentioned so far. Their approach could speed up dev time by a lot.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  I don't have concrete data on this, but can't imagine updating a Qt app to be very difficult. The Qt folks usually tailor well to clients and are pretty supportive.

jacobush 9y ago

And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. HTML is (in practice) more liberally licensed. (Edit: not GPL, but LGPL. Which is almost as bad for embedded systems as GPL itself is. How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Nightmare. Just pay up. Qt LGPL is (or was) fine for desktop apps pre app stores. Now, not so much.)

mkl 9y ago
Qt has been LGPL as well for years now.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Ah, yes, true. See my edit though.
bkor 9y ago
> How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Where in the GPL or LGPL is this stated?
- detaro 9y ago
  GPLv3 section 6 requires you to to provide instructions that allow the user to replace GPL-licensed software on a device, unless there is no upgrade functionality at all (so if you have an upgrade mechanism, you must open it to the user, if you burn the software to unchangeable ROM you don't have to replace that with writeable memory just to enable user replacement) LPGLv3 section 4 modifies this for LGPL-licensed software, requiring you to allow replacement of LGPL-licensed parts of software under the same mechanisms. This is commonly known as the "anti-tivoisation provisions".
Const-me 9y ago
> And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. And if you need on-screen keyboard, there’s no LGPL option available. You have to pay them significant amount of money, and also per-device fee.
- tjoff 9y ago
  There is an API for creating one yourself, I did, not hard at all. Now it might not have a dictionary and other fancy features but it was adapted to our needs and it didn't take long at all to implement.
  - 9y ago