Re:Very nice! It's death of RIA!
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately WxWidgets are too buggy on every platform, and bugs are different accross platforms.
I have several friends trying Wx for their commercial apps, all of them abandoned it due to bugs and lack of features.
Very nice! It's death of RIA!
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Very nice move!
This also means serious damage to RIA aproach too. Without QT, it was very difficult to create cross-platform apps (running on OSX, Linux and Windows).
Java was an option, but too few people used it for small apps like shareware utilities.
RIA was an option, but their are immature and do not allow to implement a lot of things.
Gtk was another ugly option.
Also running web server locally (e.g. with web server for CD and USB drives ) was elegant option for some cases when UI is rendered by web browser and backend is implemented using server-side programming language like php or python running locally.
Now it seems a lot of shareware authors will start using QT even for developing Windows-only apps. This means a lot of new apps that are stable and cheaper to develop will enter the market soon. Hopefully most of those apps will probably be ported to OSX (and even Linux) by their authors afterwards.
I know a lot of projects that decided to use compiled languages (that compile to machine code, not bytecode) because it allowed to "hide" source code and logic. Originally Java and.NET code was easy to decompile too, but now there is a whole industry for obfuscation of compiled Java and.NET assemblies that scrambles the logic and removes names of identifiers.
Fortunately, tools to hide source code for trully interpreted (dynamic) languages also exist
(here is a sample catalogue of JavaScript, Perl and VBScript obfuscators), though sometimes they require adaptation of source code.
I would obfuscate (=mangle, =scramble) the core of your product (the part they wouldn't change anyways - the libraries you wrote and use). Or even better - give out all code in obfuscated form, and each time they need some module in non-obfuscated form, they will contact you and you'll ask them why they need particular module in non-obfuscated form, what they need to be changed in it and so on).
If your code uses C/C++, then use tool similar to Stunnix C/C++ Obfuscator; for
Perl, JavaScript and VBScript/ASP obfuscators also exist
from that company and several others.
A viable option is assigning a dedicated coder from your team to that customer ("lease" him to them) and fork your code for them - this way their developers won't spend monthes studying your code before being able to produce anything useful.
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I have several friends trying Wx for their commercial apps, all of them abandoned it due to bugs and lack of features.
This also means serious damage to RIA aproach too. Without QT, it was very difficult to create cross-platform apps (running on OSX, Linux and Windows).
Java was an option, but too few people used it for small apps like shareware utilities.
RIA was an option, but their are immature and do not allow to implement a lot of things.
Gtk was another ugly option.
Also running web server locally (e.g. with web server for CD and USB drives ) was elegant option for some cases when UI is rendered by web browser and backend is implemented using server-side programming language like php or python running locally.
Now it seems a lot of shareware authors will start using QT even for developing Windows-only apps. This means a lot of new apps that are stable and cheaper to develop will enter the market soon. Hopefully most of those apps will probably be ported to OSX (and even Linux) by their authors afterwards.
I hope they are running Wiki directly from CDs. There are some web servers for running sites from CDs, some of them even allow to start web server and php, perl, python, java server-side scripts directly from the same cd on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Fortunately, tools to hide source code for trully interpreted (dynamic) languages also exist (here is a sample catalogue of JavaScript, Perl and VBScript obfuscators), though sometimes they require adaptation of source code.
If your code uses C/C++, then use tool similar to Stunnix C/C++ Obfuscator; for Perl, JavaScript and VBScript/ASP obfuscators also exist from that company and several others.
A viable option is assigning a dedicated coder from your team to that customer ("lease" him to them) and fork your code for them - this way their developers won't spend monthes studying your code before being able to produce anything useful.