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I had heavily used PySimpleGUI in various work projects, and one day, when I had to run some older piece of code I had not run in a while, I get a notice that PySimpleGUI won't work, because was free, but nobody paid, and so, good luck! So I was piping mad, paid the 3-year or whatever the max license fee was, received a code, and THEN I was able to get my stuff to work, like it used to.
LESSON: N E V E R Use code that can "stop working" until you pay ransom. N E V E R.
At this point, it's irrelevant, because the LLMs can replace PySimpleGUI with PyQt etc so --- thanks but no thanks. I did like it because you could throw up something around a CLI and it looked at least presentable. Now, since 2025, nobody codes anymore, so ... seems to me, this PySimpleGUI 6 is just a bit of history.
First they made it commercial. Then they realised there were not enough people prepared to pay for the project and shut down the project. But now it is back in free form?
I understand that people have had bad experiences and in general I don't want to pay for software components either. But it's weird how much hate there is against developers sometimes just for even trying to make money from their libraries.
Great to see this back as Open Source (LGPL 3.0). However, it points out the continuous need for proper funding for Open Source. Tough in ZIRP times, exponentially more difficult in more difficult economic times.
Loaded question but why does Visual Basic 6.0 (both the IDE and the language) for modern languages / OSes doesn't exist anymore? I feel like it was way ahead of its time and there is no similar RAD and GUI design tool ever since
I was a VB6 user back in the 90s, I think there's a bunch of reasons:
- Microsoft killed it: "let's rewrite the entire thing as VB.NET and make it completely different"
- The UIs designed in the RAD weren't particularly responsive in the sense of "responsive design" - generally you couldn't resize a window and have all the elements resize correctly. When I learned Java Swing and elements were defined programmatically as percentages of their container that was kind of eye opening to me.
- The small-time apps that were being developed with VB6 in the 90s are basically all web apps now.
Delphi and Lazarus are still kicking, the latter is free and open source.
I know you asked for "the language", but Object Pascal really ain't that bad to get around. If you were proficient in VB6, you should be fine adapting. :-)
There have been and are many, many similar no code or low code tools. And actually Visual Basic 6 still works.
What changed was the level of popularity and acceptance of those tools.
I think it comes down to trends and programmers psychologically subconsciously not wanting to be mistaken for users.
Because unfortunately what subconsciously is accepted as programming must involve colorful cryptic text. And if you are just dragging things around and setting parameters, you are not doing that, and someone might accuse you of being a user.
Not saying it makes sense, but that seems to be the explanation.
But look at WordPress, VB.NET, n8n, LabView, Unreal Engine, Houdini, Unity, etc.
C# with WinForms and Visual Studio was a decent successor for a while, but for whatever reason microsoft decided to go all in on XAML and then a bunch of other half baked frameworks. I have no idea what to even use anymore if I wanted to make a native Windows app, it's a mess.
Hmm apart from distribution (which is a pain to set up) I still don't think you can beat QtWidgets and QtCreator for simplicity of getting a professional GUI. It has a form editor that actually works. I think maybe the only one I've ever used. Then you can pretty much just click on buttons and add event handlers. Very easy to get going and it scales very far.
There are a few downsides... there are better options than C++ these days (Rust most obviously), QtWidgets is in maintenance mode, it's a bit of a pain to make an installer from your app, and it doesn't really support modern styling.
Yes, especially with AI unless the user has literally never programmed anything before, it seem actually easier to use Qt for something like this (honestly, it probably would be easier to just make a webapp if they have no experience)
LOL, I remember this one being a famous traitor to FOSS by starting out as a community project and then closing doors to make money from it. Guess they weren't able to make any money after all. Karma in action.
Or it's just another example of why FOSS fails - people (like you) expect free labor and never want to pay for it. They tried to make it a sustainable project, and it would probably have died even earlier if they didn't.
> For the last 5 years, PySimpleGUI offered free software with the hope of sustaining the project with donations. We appreciate the support we received, but the amount has been too small to support the project.
I don't think this is a complete characterization of what happened. From looking at a previous thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369353), the owner curiously did not allow outside contributions to his GPL project. This is odd, especially if it seems like he was complaining about having issues with maintenance of the project. Then, after he tried to switch the license, he deleted/obfuscated the repo history. Even though it is GPL, because he had the "foresight" of not allowing outside contributions, he was able to take this action unilaterally. I suspect that the owner had his mind on commercialization from the very beginning, and was using the whole FOSS bit as a way to get free publicity before rugpulling.
Seen it with Gnat, with Borland, with plenty of others. Dual-licensing a dev tool almost never works when there are free alternatives. The community forks it and moves on. Would've been smarter to go commercial from day one instead of building expectations.
"Karma" implies they deserved to fail, but the evidence on this is pretty mixed. Projects that go proprietary don't fail at notably higher rates than those that stay open, as far as anyone's tracked. The more likely explanation here is just market size — GUI toolkits are a crowded, mostly solved space.
I think AI coding has made these "we dumb down a real UI framework for you" libraries obsolete. Anyone can get a GTK or QT app up and running now. This isn't a criticism, they were very useful to build GUIs in the past, but now they are just obsolete and more likely to introduce bugs or limitations you can't work around than to help much.
These libraries are not more human friendly. Humans can write GTK or win32 or QT or Cocoa code just fine. GUI frameworks are very complex and often have very in depth setup code that is required. It requires a huge investment to get an app up and running with a GUI framework, and AI makes setting that up approachable when it was a real challenge before.
Have you ever written GUI code using one of the big GUI frameworks?
Taken to an extreme, what's stopping us from going back to C? The security issues will be found and resolved, performance will be great and it will compile on all platforms that ever existed.
Has anyone actually measured this? My suspicion is AI gets you 80% there on Qt/GTK fast, then you spend days fighting signals, layouts, or threading bugs that PySimpleGUI would've just... not had. The abstraction still has value if the last 20% costs more than the first 80%.
Pedantic note on crazybonkersai's framing: it wasn't really "shut down", it was put behind a license-key paywall. The code still ran, you just had to authenticate. IIRC that's what made people so angry -- it silently broke existing installs that had no idea a paywall was coming.
LESSON: N E V E R Use code that can "stop working" until you pay ransom. N E V E R.
At this point, it's irrelevant, because the LLMs can replace PySimpleGUI with PyQt etc so --- thanks but no thanks. I did like it because you could throw up something around a CLI and it looked at least presentable. Now, since 2025, nobody codes anymore, so ... seems to me, this PySimpleGUI 6 is just a bit of history.