PySimpleGUI 6

ggeophph 2 days ago 21 commentsRead Article on github.com

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Discussion Sentiment

85% Positive

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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

GeorgeTirebiter•35 minutes ago

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.

ezst•5 minutes ago

> never use code that can stop working until you pay ransom

Funny because that describes pretty much exactly "cloud-first" software architecture, and people jumping on it in troves, unexplainably.

foolswisdom•23 minutes ago

Given it was older code, were you not able to use an older version of pysimplegui that was freely available?

crazybonkersai•about 2 hours ago

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?

geophph•about 2 hours ago

Seems it. A nice gesture of sorts to make it available to everyone after the updates made during the commercial phase.

dilawar•about 3 hours ago

This project started when I started my Ph.D.. I had a few interactions with the author when I added UI to some programs I wanted to showcase as TA.

Every time I needed a GUI, I reached out to this library. Very beginner friendly. Good memories.

DonThomasitos•about 3 hours ago

It would be great to have a few screenshots on the readme.md or Doc pages to understand quickly what we‘re talking about.

harwoodr•about 3 hours ago

https://www.pysimplegui.com/

mutagen•about 2 hours ago

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.

bobajeff•about 2 hours ago

I remember looking into GUI libraries for Python a while back and this one and qt came up.

However I ended up settling on making a Web UI served via FastAPI. I'm still happy about that decision but this one sounded really nice back then.

nomel•about 2 hours ago

WebUI (assuming you're mean python-WebUI) doesn't actually include any UI. This is why PySimpleGUI is nice...you can make a button!

bobajeff•about 1 hour ago

No, sorry, I wasn't referring to any library. I just meant a UI I made out of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

IshKebab•about 2 hours ago

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.

But I'd still pick it over this in a heartbeat.

NewsaHackO•about 1 hour ago

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)

xenophonf•about 2 hours ago

I stopped using this when the dev did their rugpull and won't go back.

ltbarcly3•about 3 hours ago

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.

marshray•about 1 hour ago

Is this a new form of gatekeeping?

I.e., "too human-friendly to survive in the presence of The Great AI™".

If so, where does that lead us?

dartharva•about 2 hours ago

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.

elteto•5 minutes ago

And you say this as a prolific open source contributor I’m sure.

matsemann•about 2 hours ago

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.

NewsaHackO•17 minutes ago

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.