OSNews

GTK actually get s a fair bit of commercial backing from Redhat and Sun. Also Qt is open-source[1], and has benefited from a lot of input from its users (particularly the KDE devs).

-----
[1]Qt4, which is what is being tested, is GPL-licensed on Windows, Mac and Unix/X11

Indeed.

And yet QT is still developed by a commercial company, and QT w/ commercial licenses is their bread and butter. GTK is primarily community-driven and developed, with some backing from the more active open-source companies.

QT is dual licenced GPL/Commercial - depending on the usage.

The "propietary" software is evil and inferior. Not the commercial one.

It's great if it's free (as in freedom) and also can pay the rent.

So, it seems that the commercially-backed and professional solution outperforms the fully open-source-community-developed one by 6-7 times.

I thought commercial software was evil and inferior, and all that jazz?

First of all we're only talking about one metric. Secondly cairo is still a fairly new technology. Cleary QT wins this round but when cairo has matured more I'm not so sure the differences will be as dramatic.

There is also the point to be made that the Cairo folks are much more concerned with output quality and API elegance than speed at the moment. IMHO, this article should've included at least some quality comparisons of the two rendering engines, particularly using corner or degenerate cases.

I think the technology in QT is just as new, isn't it? It is just one benchmark, though, and it would be nice to see how they compare with other loads. For instance, how do they compare when used how Firefox 3 would use them on a typical webpage?

So, it seems that the commercially-backed and professional solution outperforms the fully open-source-community-developed one by 6-7 times.

I thought commercial software was evil and inferior, and all that jazz?

And here I thought Qt was an open-source toolkit

Ah, but I notice you cleverly navigated around this little detail: Qt is "commercially-backed", as opposed to Cairo, which is only backed by ... uh, RedHat, for example. Oh, and Cairo is "community-developed". Surely community input must have had a negative impact on rendering performance. And, of course, Qt is a "professional solution"! Isn't that good to know.

But anyway, Cairo is still a young library, and until recently hadn't concentrated on performance work at all. Not that the benchmark is unfair or anything, but it would be idiotic to think the Cairo developers are at their wit's end with the current state of affairs.

Qt is "commercially-backed", as opposed to Cairo, which is only backed by ... uh, RedHat

Gecko 1.9 will also utilize Cairo as its rendering backend for all 3 platforms. I am sure Mozilla is interested in getting Cairo's performance up to par with previous versions of Gecko.

last time i checked the free-software foundation's website, the GPL was more free than the LGPL (which, after all, stands for Lesser GPL).

so Qt is more free than Cairo, at least according to their (pretty high) standards.
and as others have said, gtk gets a lot commercial development as well, and gnome even more (something like gnome 70% paid/30%spare time, and KDE the reverse).

last time i checked the free-software foundation's website, the GPL was more free than the LGPL (which, after all, stands for Lesser GPL).

You people are funny.

what's inferior is confusing the "commercial / non-commercial" dichotomy (such as it exists) with the "free / non-free" one. the two sets of concepts are orthogonal.