11 ms·
it's so expensive, too bad there are no good alternatives to this
by nunodonato 6y ago
it's so expensive, too bad there are no good alternatives to this
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoLooks like it's available under the fairly permissive LGPL licence - https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt6-dev/licensing.html https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt6-dev/licensing.html
- dijit 6y agoFor commercial purposes it is actually very expensive. (Source: Used to work for Nokia) EDIT: (Source2: https://www.qt.io/pricing https://www.qt.io/pricing)
- beojan 6y agoYour software would have to be very locked down to preclude using LGPL libraries.
- jcelerier 6y agoEven Tesla were able to use LGPL Qt in their cars: https://electrek.co/2018/05/19/tesla-releases-softwar-open-source-licences/ https://electrek.co/2018/05/19/tesla-releases-softwar-open-s... (which is a shitty thing to do when you're not a mom&pop shop but a company like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344677)
- aninteger 6y agoFollowing the license should not be considered a "shitty thing to do". In fact, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
- jcelerier 6y ago> In fact, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Just like my answer to the other comment, there are a ton of "perfectly reasonable" things that one can do, that are still shitty behaviour. That's like when someone leaves free books for anyone to take, you'd take one but never put another one for other people. You're not breaking any laws or rules. Still shitty. Especially if you have enough money to build a whole freaking library.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoBut Qt chose to release under the LGPL. If they had wanted to restrict unpaid use of Qt to Free and Open Source software, they could have done so with the GPL licence.
- jcelerier 6y agothe point is not to restrict - it's to give back when you have more than enough capital to do so. Like, anyone can go to a food bank charity to have a free meal. If you have a 5-digit monthly salary, that is still a very shitty thing to do, even if you and everyone else plays by the rules.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoSure, I see your point, especially as Tesla: 1. Could easily afford it, as you say 2. Presumably aren't releasing their software as Free and Open Source
- Phlogistique 6y agoI do agree with you, but in the specific case of free book sharing - I hear that most of the time, the problems is too many books rather than too few, so you should really not worry about taking a book even if you are not sure you're going to put another one for other people.
- beojan 6y ago> which is a shitty thing to do when you're not a mom&pop shop but a company like... Why? That's the whole point of LGPL, it doesn't matter how big you are, so long as your users can replace your copy of Qt with a modified copy you can use it under LGPL.
- jcelerier 6y agoSure, it's legally fine. There are a thousand billion things I can do that are perfectly legal and still shitty.
- nickelpro 6y agoYes, sure, but why is it shitty? The code is released under LGPL, why is it wrong morally or otherwise for anyone to use it under that license?
- exikyut 6y agoI really wonder how Tesla thinks I'm going to replace libQtCore.so, given that I'd presumably need to root the OS first...?
- lights0123 6y agoglibc is also LGPL, but basically everything uses that unless you're going for musl.
- boudewijnrempt 6y agoEven Autodesk, which uses Qt for pretty much all its products, including Maya, doesn't pay a cent for Qt. Same with The Foundry. As soon as Nokia made LGPL licensed python bindings for Qt, they dropped PyQt, stopped paying or contributing, and just went on freeloading.
- sgerenser 6y agoIt's perfectly possible to use an LGPL library for commercial purposes (and lots of companies do). There's just some criteria you have to follow like allowing end-users to re-link their own version of the library and giving back any code changes made to the library itself (which in my experience it was never necessary to make any patches to Qt itself). Whether that extra burden is worth it vs. just paying for a commercial license is up to the individual company.
- thu2111 6y agoI'm curious what price range you feel a library like Qt can justify? (genuine question, I'm doing a bit of market research in this area)
- throwaway546456 6y agoI think combination of JUCE/IntelliJ pricing and Unreal Engine model would be a sweet spot: 1) Personal License - free if <50k annual revenue 2) Startup License - keep current price (500usd/month) but a) allow 1 month subscription commitment instead of paying 1 year upfront b) when subscription not get extended you should still be allowed to distribute product that is not updated c) if you payed for 1-2 years of subscriptions and cancelled subscription after 1-2+ year, you should be able to keep using the version of Qt the moment when you first signed for . 3) allow Startup to choose another licensing option. Instead of paying upfront licensing fee, just allow paying annually 5% of revenue from products that keep using Qt.
- theincredulousk 6y agoof course they don't advertise the per-device royalty for embedded - do you (or anyone else here) have an idea what it costs?
- stjohnswarts 6y agoeverything...
- mroche 6y agoIt's worth noting that there are specific add-on modules that are only available under the GPLv3 license. Qt6 doesn't have all of them yet, and they (supposedly) will be coming in the 6.1-6.2 releases. Qt5: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5.15/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons https://doc.qt.io/qt-5.15/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons Qt6: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons
- m4rtink 6y agoWell, the more software uses GPLv3 the better. All the locked bootloader shenanigans and software patent FUD is really getting out of hand and more widely used GPLv3 software can help at least a bit.
- flohofwoe 6y agoThe company behind Qt has been getting very passive-aggressive in the last 1..2 years about using the LGPL version for commercial projects. They didn't shut it down (yet?) but they're definitely not happy about it. Personally I wouldn't consider Qt for future projects because the writing is on the wall.
- infinite8s 6y agoLuckily the LGPL license can never be revoked on previously released versions. So it's possible to use Qt 5 and never have to worry (as long as you follow the requirements of the license in terms of dynamically linking the libraries).
- toyg 6y agoThat’s true for 6 as well. I believe there are clauses in Qt’s ownership documents that prevent it from ever becoming closed source without automatically invalidating previous licenses and becoming GPL-only, or something to that effect. The poison-pill was designed when Trolltech first sold away Qt, if i remember correctly.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shaan7 6y agoDid you mean to comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344762 instead ? xD
- justin66 6y agoThere's CopperSpice. https://www.copperspice.com/ https://www.copperspice.com/
- kayson 6y agoMaybe not a "good" alternative, but its at least an "ok" alternative! https://www.wxwidgets.org/ https://www.wxwidgets.org/
- gnulinux 6y agoI used to use wxWidgets a lot back in the day when I was developing software for academia (about 5 years ago). Is it not considered good any more? It used to be pretty useful for developing GUI, although I think OSX implementation was buggy?
- RMPR 6y agoUsed it for my last side project (https://github.com/atbswp https://github.com/atbswp). On Linux it looks fine (because GTK), but on Windows iirc it still uses Win32 which looks a bit archaic.
- kayson 6y agoThe widget screenshot comparison shows a Win7 style which isn't that archaic. This thread seems to indicate that Win10 style is also possible which would make sense since it uses native elements https://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=46574 https://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=46574
- tabtab 6y agoRe: "too bad there are no good alternatives to this" What about the Tk/Gtk family of products?
- c-smile 6y agoSciter (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com) and Sciter.JS ( https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk ) can be considered as alternative I think. Sciter supports same platforms as Qt and uses H/W acceleration (DirectX, OpenGL) in 10 years or so. Everything that you can do in Qt you can do in Sciter. Just in case: Sciter.JS that is in alpha/beta now is aimed as a direct ElectronJS replacement as it uses standard JavaScript (ES6). It already supports MithrilJS and Svelte applications running transparently as in SciterJS as in browsers. React (PReact in particular) out of the box support is coming. The main goal of SciterJS is to provide compact (5mb runtime) desktop runtime environment that can use components and designs made for Web.
- formerly_proven 6y agoSciter could be considered a competitor to Qt Quick, but probably not even to Widgets or any of the other (many) modules that are part of the core (not to mention add-ons), considering that Sciter is just an UI library.
- c-smile 6y ago> Sciter could be considered a competitor to Qt Quick Yes and no. Yes, it allows to create declarative UI. And no, not just declarative UI. It supports immediate mode graphics for example and use of native UI components including existing HWND, GtkWidget, NSView, etc. based ones. As of other non UI parts of Qt... Sciter does not provide all that beauty, yes. Host application (C/C++, Go, Rust, etc) that uses Sciter UI layer is free to use whatever libraries/runtime they prefer, and usually each runtime is superior to what Qt provides. That's the cornerstone idea of its design - it is embeddable UI layer. While Qt is a foundation (a.k.a. framework) similar to MFC, Gtk and other frameworks. At early stages of C++ having things like CList & Co did make sense. But not in recent 10 years. Yet I am silent about Go, Rust, Python and other languages / runtimes that use Sciter.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- higerordermap 6y ago