PySimpleGUI : surviving the rug pull of licence part I

I liked pySimpleGUI, because as a coder that likes tkinter (the Tk/Tcl bindings) and as a former tcl/tk coder I enoyed the syntaxic sugar that was avoiding all the boiler plates required to build the application.

The main advantage was about not having to remember in wich order to make the pack and having to do the mainloop call. It was not a revolution, just a simple, elegant evolution, hence I was still feeling in control.

However, the projet made a jerk move by relicensing in full proprietary license that requires a key to work functionnaly.

I will not discuss this since the point have been made clearly on python mailing list.

Luckily I want to raise 2 points :

• we have been numerous coders to fork the project for doing pull requests
• it higlights once more the danger of too much dependencies

If you have a working copy of the repository

Well, you can still install a past version of pysimpleGUI, but unless you can do

pip install  git+https://github.com/jul/PySimpleGUI#egg=pysimpleGUI

Pro: if that version suited you, your old code will work
Con: there will be no update for the bugs and it is pretty much a no-go.

Expect free alternative

One of the power of free software is the power to fork, and some coders already forked in a « free forever » version of pysimpleGUI.
One of this fork is : Free Simple GUI.

Pro: migration is as simple as :

pip install FreeSimpleGUI

and then in the source :

- import PySimpleGUI as sg
+ import FreeSimpleGUI as sg

Con: a project is as useful as the capacity of the community to keep up with the job of solving issues and the strength of the community to follow up.

Migrating to tkinter

This will be covered in the week to come by translating some examples to real life migration by myself.

Since tkinter has improved a lot and his a pillar of python distribution when it is not broken by debian, it is fairly easy.

Pro: diminises the need for a dependency and empower you with the poweful concept of tk such as variables binded to a widget (an observer pattern).
Con: PySimpleGUI is a multi-target adaptor to not only tkinter but also remi (web), wx, Qt. If you were using the versatility of pysimpleGUI and its multi-platform features you really need to look at the « free forever » alternatives.