Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 16th Feb 2009 14:07 UTC
Late last week we ran a story on how the Google Chrome team had decided to use Gtk+ as the graphical toolkit for the Linux version of the Chrome web browser. It was a story that caused some serious debate on a variety of aspects, but in this short editorial, I want to focus on one aspect that came forward: the longing for consistency. Several people in the thread stated they were happy with Google's choice for purely selfish reasons: they use only Gtk+ applications on their GNOME desktops. Several people chimed in to say that Qt integrates nicely in a Gtk+ environment. While that may be true from a graphical point of view, that really isn't my problem with mixing toolkits. The issue goes a lot deeper than that.
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Member since:
2006-09-12
It's one of the reasons given, but I've seen no Windows or Mac development companies getting interested in GTK+ because of the license. It was a really rather sad argument to make. "
Call it sad if you will, but QT license does get in the way;
We develop a suite of apps for our local investor community. We don't charge for the software, but provide it as a means to accessing the exchange data which we do sell.
Our current target platform is Windows. Of course, the platform and libraries do come at a cost, but it's a cost the customer is very willing to pay. They take it for granted.
Were we to adopt QT, we would have to charge a fee for each instance of our application suite; where our customers pay nothing right now, the QT app would cost them more than the Microsoft one- guess which one they would choose?
Conversely, our adopting the GTK allows us to continue to provide the app at zero cost to our client base; the choice is up to them whether they run Microsoft or Linux, without any cost implication.
I strongly suspect a similar reasoning for Google-Chrome.
Edited 2009-02-16 18:37 UTC