Licenses craziness!
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Hi,
I moved to Qt since many years ago. I consider "How to build XX plugin" is the most common kind of questions in Qt community because Qt distros comes with stupid plugins need to be re-build whenever something new occurs (most of time I need to re-build them for updated Qt version as it happed recently).
I wonder when decision makers in Qt will decide to fix this troubled logic of licenses!
Many commercial dev. tools haven't this kind of problems.
For example Delphi doesn't need any thing to deploy Android apps (only one click) with MySQL or Postgresql plugin while Qt needs tons and tons of procedures to be able to see "Connected ot Postgreql" message (recently I dream to see in Windows & Linux too)!
I hate to use Delphi or any other commercial product but sometimes I forced to use them because Qt troubled with licenses which make deploying process really painful.
How it comes a commercial product works perfectly with open source project while open source project (in our case Qt) doesn't work smoothly with another open source project (ex. Postgreql, MySQL... etc)!!!
I really frustrated of licenses troubled logic because I want to spend my time on developing by Qt not deploying Qt app or build Qt pluign for XX !
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Hi,
Let's take a step back. Checking on macOS, Qt provides pre-built plugins for SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL and ODBC.
What happens usually is that developers use a different version of the database system that was used to build the Qt plugins hence the potential need to re-build the corresponding plugins. If you want to avoid that, then you should maybe consider using ODBC. You have to take into account that many of the database system you are talking about have several versions supported in parallels with sometimes different features. Do you expect Qt to provide a pre-built plugin for each of these versions ?
One thing you might not realise is that for example on Windows only there are at least 3 different compilers that are supported and it's only now with VS2017 that there's backward compatibility with an older version of Visual Studio (and its limited to VS2015).
Another example, Android, there is officially not MySQL client library for that platform. However there's a possible workaround using MariaDB. Are you expecting the Qt Company to start building MariaDB for Android to provide the plugin ? Doing this would mean that they would have to start debugging the MariaDB code if there's a problem with that plugin on that platform. Therefore you would be basically asking them to support a non official library on a platform that originally doesn't support that which means diverting resources for that and all of that for free.
Because Qt can be used under LGPL/GPL doesn't mean its development is free nor that there are limitless hardware to build and produce the pre-built release nor thousands of developers working on it every day.
I understand your frustration regarding licenses but it looks like you don't realise the jungle that it is. Because a product is free it doesn't mean you can do whatever you want to with it.
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@SGaist said in Licenses craziness!:
What happens usually is that developers use a different version of the database system that was used to build the Qt plugins hence the potential need to re-build the corresponding plugins.
This isn't an excuse because I don't face any problem when I use commercial products (as I mentioned before ex. Delphi). Do other companies make a magical solution for this issue?! Of course not.
If you want to avoid that, then you should maybe consider using ODBC. You have to take into account that many of the database system you are talking about have several versions supported in parallels with sometimes different features. Do you expect Qt to provide a pre-built plugin for each of these versions ?
Since I knew Qt I couldn't use any Qt plugin (specifically SQL plugins) by default because I always need to rebuild it from scratch (the old Qt binary distros didn't include binaries for SQL plugins except SQLite)
Because Qt can be used under LGPL/GPL doesn't mean its development is free nor that there are limitless hardware to build and produce the pre-built release nor thousands of developers working on it every day.
I understand your frustration regarding licenses but it looks like you don't realise the jungle that it is. Because a product is free it doesn't mean you can do whatever you want to with it.
This issue not related to open source version Qt, the commercial version of Qt has same problem!
