This is totally unrelated to flashlights, but QT is a bit of a pet peeve because the Qt GUI toolkit has been a pain in my rear for about two decades now. On the surface it looks nice, a full-featured GUI toolkit which offers cross-platform portability including embedded devices. However, it uses its own programming language which is just different enough from C to need its own compiler, and Qt and its parent company have held back portable Linux devices for decades by wrecking multiple embedded projects. If you’ve ever wondered why smartphones still kinda suck in the year 2017, the answer is largely because of Qt.
First there was the “Familiar” linux distro, a project created by and for the community, and it did all sorts of cool things. It achieved “convergence” back in 2000 or 2001, allowing handheld devices to act like small desktop computers — running the same programs, acting as an extra display, using a regular keyboard and mouse when desired, etc. I had mine set up so I could literally just move the cursor off my desktop screen and onto the handheld like a detachable second monitor. But then Trolltech (owner of Qt) came in and basically broke the community’s relationships with hardware companies, replacing the nice community platform with an incompatible proprietary one. This effectively killed the community projects, and then the market failed since the new platform sucked.
Eventually Google jumped in and made Android, which revived that market. However, Android was mostly incompatible with what the community was using, and that has continued to give it problems to this day. It probably would have died like all the other proprietary platforms, except Google is big enough to force it not to fail.
With the market revived, and only incompatible platforms available, there was a renewed cry for convergence and compatibility. So several projects started, including the Ubuntu phone. It promised all the things we used to have back in Familiar days. But it was based on Qt again, and was incompatible again, and instead of giving the community what it wanted, the Ubuntu phone tried to create a brand new proprietary platform and get people to migrate to it. Unsurprisingly, it failed, that entire branch of my company got laid off, and Qt was a big part of that. And now the market is mostly dead again.
To me, Qt is a symbol of what goes wrong when companies try to override the community and tell the people what they want instead of listening and working with the community to build something mutually beneficial.
[/rant]