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While I think the price of Qt is easily worth it, I agree that the license is probably the biggest factor in keeping people from using Qt. With Nokia's 770/N800 for example, I assume they used GTK to be more friendly to third party, closed source developers. Like you say, you don't want to force people to pay a license to develop for your device. Then again I don't really know if the choice of GTK encouraged any developers either. I don't see any third party apps for the Maemo platform that are not open source anyway (aside from Opera, and they use mostly their own toolkit anyway).

Look at it this way. If you're going to be paying to license a toolkit, you gain exactly zero benefit over a proprietary toolkit and you get into the same vendor-lock-in issues and forced obsolescence issues that plague proprietary vendors. And because you're not coding to a multi-vendor standard, you can't even switch to a competitor. If you're going the licensing route, multivendor J2ME is a much better better deal -- especially since you can even compile it for speed and the flaws and workarounds of J2ME are well documented and well known and there are scores of programmers who already have J2ME experience.

IMO, if Nokia were interested in switching away from Gtk+, IMO, they'd likely go FLTK or wxWidgets or XUL or some other unencumbered toolkit rather than switch to Qt.

Edited 2007-08-12 21:21

I understand what you were trying to say, i.e. need to buy a Qt "commercial" licence for using the KDE API in a closed source application, but I'd like to emphasis that, while it is obviously the preferred way of developing on KDE, it is my no means the only possible option.

KDE, as a platform, is - and has been for years - based on shared infrastructure used through IPC and common files. Very few cases would require a third party to to actually use KDE API, Qt or even C++, e.g. application plugins.

Well, sure, you can write GTK+ or wxwidgets apps and have them run in KDE. Or did you have something else in mind?

I don't get this attitude. You want to build a closed source app off of which you supposedly want to make money, but you don't want to pay the license fees? So, you want your cake and you want it for free? Qt is a high quality product and the reason it is is because the core team is able to work on it, get paid to work on it and that's all they do. If you open source your app so others can get it for free then QT has no issue with you. So, open your app and license the support of it or whatever. Another thing, they sell you commercial licenses for support purposes so you can call and they will help you out. It isn't all just for the right of closing your app.

Edited 2007-08-12 21:24

A paid-for toolkit is OK. It's just that the price might be too high for many shops. If even Adobe, VMWare and Nero chose GTK+, not Qt for their Linux software, what can be said about smaller shops?

Also, it's perfectly OK, both morally and legally, to build closed source software without paying license fees. For that you have BSD- and LGPL-licensed libraries and toolkits.

If you open source your app so others can get it for free then QT has no issue with you. So, open your app and license the support of it or whatever.

Exactly. But at the same time, it's possible for developers to write closed-source GTK+ apps for free, and still make money without offering any support, isn't it? That seems like quite a proposition.

Perhaps Trolltech should follow your advice about licensing support and giving the product away for free...?

Edited 2007-08-13 04:09

I think it is unacceptable to expect commercial developers to embrace a platform where they have to pay per-developer licensing fees

If not commercial developers, who should pay licensing fees for development tools? Should all development tools be unconditionally gratis? Isn't this one of those "gotta spend money to make money" situations?

Also, Qt is not a platform. Although a platform vendor could conceivable restrict its platform to Qt applications, most platforms happily run applications based on a variety of toolkits. It's just a toolkit. You have a choice.

No other widely known desktop platform requires developers to pay a single company licensing fees for the right to develop applications for their platorm.

Don't you have to pay a per-seat licensing fee for Visual Studio? Even if you're making free software? Microsoft gets all the money, right?

I understand your position. You rather like Qt, perhaps better than any other toolkit, but you don't want to pay for it, even if you intend to profit from it. Maybe it's too expensive with respect to your projected revenues. Or maybe your time isn't valuable enough to warrant paying for convenience. Perfectly understandable.

But isn't Trolltech's business model also understandable? It's a value proposition. For some commercial developers, it's an outstanding value, and for others, it's not.

Also, Qt is not a platform. Although a platform vendor could conceivable restrict its platform to Qt applications, most platforms happily run applications based on a variety of toolkits. It's just a toolkit. You have a choice.

Ah, but KDE is a platform, and any product wanting to achieve the tightest integration possible with it must use KDE.

It is the "native" toolkit of the platform.


Don't you have to pay a per-seat licensing fee for Visual Studio? Even if you're making free software? Microsoft gets all the money, right?


No, actually.

First of all, you don't have to buy Visual Studio to develop commercial Windows Applications. You can use Visual Studio Express, MingW, Borland, etc. And most of those companies offer site-wide licensing or licenses that can be transferred as many times as you want between developers.

Trolltech, on the other hand, offers licenses that are per-developer only and that are limited to being transferred once every six months between developers.

Second of all, you have a choice between many different vendors for the same platform, and in the end, you still end up using the same native platform toolkit. Not so with KDE/Qt. Not only that, there are many *zero-cost* development options for Windows.

I understand your position. You rather like Qt, perhaps better than any other toolkit, but you don't want to pay for it, even if you intend to profit from it. Maybe it's too expensive with respect to your projected revenues. Or maybe your time isn't valuable enough to warrant paying for convenience. Perfectly understandable.

Apparently you don't understand my position. The point is, no other platform (talking about KDE) has a setup that *requires* a developer to pay licensing fees to a single vendor for closed source application development (it could even bee free-as-in-beer, but not open source). It is pretty sad when there is more competition in development tool providers in the Windows world than there is in the KDE world. Due to KDE's choice of Qt as their toolkit, developers are limited to chosing from a single vendor for their platform development needs if they want to achieve the highest level of integration possible with the platform.


But isn't Trolltech's business model also understandable? It's a value proposition. For some commercial developers, it's an outstanding value, and for others, it's not.

As I said earlier, that is why I wished someone had bought them out. Because it would obviously be commercial suicide for Trolltech to change their licensing terms. However, it is also understandable that commercial developers would complain about the *requirement* to pay licensing fees to a specific company just to build closed commercial or non-commercial applications for a platform (KDE).

Edited 2007-08-13 13:09