I've noticed that a few times with people pretending to care about open source but in reality they care mostly about the free as in free beer part.

Not that long ago there was an announcement by GitHub where they talked about adding a feature for developers to monetize their projects. I don't remember what it was exactly but I think it was that you could make the releases only available to people who paid and some people were outraged. This isn't even a new thing, people were selling copies of OSS for decades.

And it's not only about money. There's too much shitting on OSS devs for minor problems. Some project doesn't get updated every day and people just start blasting the dev even though they got the software for free with no strings attached.

I'm not saying you can't criticize but personally I'm a lot more lenient on something I got completely for free, no limits, no contracts.

I understand the confusion, but it makes sense if you look at the history. Qt was initially released by Trolltech into the open source community. There has been some acquisitions and the reason people are on edge about Qt removing open source support is because it’s initial foundation was laid by contributions of the open source community. Several fantastic applications and even linux distributions have used Qt as their primary GUI framework for years. There are commercial licensing available for closed-source projects that would permit a company to use Qt in proprietary software. There have been talks in the past of making the framework entirely closed source, but this was met with instant push back from the community that has made countless major contributions to Qt and implemented countless applications using the framework.

I would hope any business that acquired such a project would respect the foundation laid by the open source community through their contributions over the last two decades. After all, the reason Qt is hailed as such a fantastic framework is because it has been collaborated on for years by the same community that used it to create their own applications. The heavy use of the framework is what makes it valuable. KDE is an expample of an entire open source distribution that uses Qt much like gnome uses the GTK.

https://www.qt.io/company

https://www.qt.io/blog/top-contributors-to-qt-project-in-202...

The Qt Company deserves the names they get called. Their licensing model for Qt is designed by complete shitheads and is engineered to mislead, frustrate, and ultimately bleed money from you in perpetuity. If your company is large enough to have lawyers, they will imply a threat of legal action to get you to pony up for their useless commercial licensing as soon as they catch wind that you're using the library under LGPL. This is such a fundamental part of their business model that you can't even use their installer any more without providing an email with which they can ask you about whether or not you're breaking the terms of their license.

I like Qt. It has some fucked up bits, but for the most part, it's one of the least frustrating UI experiences I've had. That being said, I can't discourage anybody from using it in a commercial context enough. Please don't give them any money. If you're curious on specifics, just ask; I don't think a wall of text of me just listing my gripes would be terribly helpful.

Does anyone make a Qt-server to minimize all required coupling?

I agree with that is very dominant culture among programmers that they want things for "free" and not pay anything to everyone that have worked hard on it.

Myself I have zero problems paying for software if it is good. My problem with Qt is that it isn't worth my money.

> everyone wants FREE and GREAT and also calls the company management bad names?

These two are not mutually exclusive, one can want a good FLOSS library and at the same time dislike the tactics of company that is currently developing said FLOSS library.

They are free to contribute into making wxWidgets great again, or whatever fits their liking.

Sure and i'd rather see people contribute more to wxWidgets as i prefer it to Qt myself (in that if i really had to choose between the two i'd go with wx), but that is not really relevant in the topic of criticizing the Qt Company's practices.

It actually is, because it proves that having a top notch GUI framework doesn't come for free.

It absolutely can - the company I've worked for has released top notch native GUI frameworks for free. Stating otherwise is simply ludicrous.

I welcome you to allow us to judge if they are really top notch.

links, or it didn't happen!