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
Don't beat yourself up. For commercial development, up to just a couple months ago, there was a per seat charge for QT. QT has only very recently been released as LGPL. The fee was pretty steep as well, amounting to about $1500 per seat per platform. They offer 3 platforms, Windows, OS X, and Unix.
Many thanks. I understand now that this is a per-developer seat, which is sort of in the same price range as other dev toolsets. Steep, but probably reasonable. My previous understanding (prior correction) was that it was more like a royalty per customer.
Even so though, convincing a board of directors that we need to rig 20 developers at $1500 pers seat per platform
(or 1500*3 platforms*20 = $90 000),
they would go: "Are you nuts? how do you plan to recover those costs by not charging for your software? do you really need to target Max & Linux? why not just target WIN32 like you have for the past 15 years?"
I am very glad to hear QT has gone LGPL.