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Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

qt.io

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Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#11

Post by bradfa »

rrgok wrote: post #5
joezydeco wrote: post #2

Two companies with horrendous licensing methods and prices. They'll do great together.

Everytime a QT post comes someone bitch about the licensing model. And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model?

Qt (the company) releases MOST of their code under open source licenses, but not all. Qt4 was LGPLv2.1, Qt5 and beyond are under LGPLv3.

In every major Qt release, there's a handful of super useful but kind of niche widgets which aren't released under open source licenses, presumably as a sales tactic as buying licenses gets you these widgets and sometimes that is cheaper than building them yourself, but unless you need these, you probably don't care about this.

Although my experience attempting to buy licenses from Qt is about a decade out of date now, the way it roughly worked was you paid a per-seat-per-year fee to get a developer license or build-machine license. Then you bought bundles of deployment licenses, and the bigger the bundle then the lower the cost per license. If you are buying a bundle of a few thousand devices then you pay more per license than if you're buying a bundle of a few million. Either way, it is a significant chunk of cash you have to front to get your block of licenses and normally embedded projects are EXTREMELY sensitive to per-unit costs.

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#12

Post by [deleted] »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #6

I have a C++ seasoned colleague who says that It framework went behind the current C++ standard, however I remember Qt Framework much cleaner than C++ itself (by making a sort of a enhanced subset), and would prefer use it. What are your opinions?

[deleted]

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#13

Post by seba_dos1 »

rrgok wrote: post #5
joezydeco wrote: post #2

Two companies with horrendous licensing methods and prices. They'll do great together.

Everytime a QT post comes someone bitch about the licensing model. And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model?

Nothing's wrong with their licensing model, but they've been known for misrepresenting their licensing model in order to steer people towards their commercial offerings.

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#14

Post by bobmcnamara »

vintagedave wrote: post #3

I'm familiar with the normal MSVC/Clang/GCC/EDG C++ compilers, but not IAR's. They seem to make C++ compilers for embedded systems. Does anyone know if these are their own, or based on something like Clang? Their supported standards list 'libc++' [1] which implies LLVM and potentially Clang. I could not find info online. "IAR Embedded Workbench C++ is dialectal and contains some features not part of standard C++." [2…

IAR has their own backend and I believe front-end as well.

They routinely smoked GCC and Clang, and sometimes ARMs tools on a variety of tasks.

I'm not sure I see the advantage on Qt owning a compiler though - one of Qt's strengths is portability.

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#15

Post by bobmcnamara »

rrgok wrote: post #5
joezydeco wrote: post #2

Two companies with horrendous licensing methods and prices. They'll do great together.

Everytime a QT post comes someone bitch about the licensing model. And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model?

> And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model?

This right here! We customers and users alike are often confused by QTs piecemeal licensing model.

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#16

Post by rurban »

I once tried to get a IAR C++ embedded codebase to compile with g++ and it's stdlib on a very small chip. It eventually compiled but never worked. I'll have to rewrite it in C instead.

There were many hacks, like filling the stack with sentinels to detect it at run-time. The linker script was horrible. Rewrote everything from scratch. The resulting code was many KB too large for the available space, it would have needed to slim down the stdlib. Even with the much better optimizations and LTO it was still too big.

Nice for that time, but essentially unusable. The company needed 10 years for that code, my plan is to rewrite it in 2 weeks.

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#17

Post by freedomben »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #6

I have a C++ seasoned colleague who says that It framework went behind the current C++ standard, however I remember Qt Framework much cleaner than C++ itself (by making a sort of a enhanced subset), and would prefer use it. What are your opinions?

Take this with a grain of salt because it's been about 10 years since I slung serious C++. Just my opinion of course, but if you go all-in with the Qt libraries, it's a lot better (and safer). Most people only think about Qt as a GUI framework, but it's much, much more than that. It's a very rich set of libraries that do way more than just UI. We actually used Qt for our server too!

So I agree with you, Qt tends to be a lot cleaner than standard C++ (or even C++ with Boost). I highly value consistency in a codebase, and Qt really makes that possible.

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#18

Post by freedomben »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #15
rrgok wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime a QT post comes someone bitch about the licensing model. And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model?

> And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model? This right here! We customers and users alike are often confused by QTs piecemeal licensing model.

I could be misunderstanding, but my read of the GP is that they aren't confused about the licensing model, they're confused by the hate for it

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#19

Post by linhns »

rrgok wrote: post #5
joezydeco wrote: post #2

Two companies with horrendous licensing methods and prices. They'll do great together.

Everytime a QT post comes someone bitch about the licensing model. And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model?

Because it’s unclear and incomplete. Always prone to some KDE whims.

Re: Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

#20

Post by CoastalCoder »

joezydeco wrote: post #8
rrgok wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime a QT post comes someone bitch about the licensing model. And every time I google and try understand what is wrong with the licensing model. And everytime I end up confused about it. Could you kindly ELI5 me what is wrong with QT licensing model?

If you get confused by it then that's all that needs to be said. The rest has been discussed over and over. I've dropped Qt for other front-end tech and I'm happier now.

I'm curious what you settled on and why. Care to elaborate?
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