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Qt can also be used in free software as well as proprietary software. I am absolutely certain because I use it for free software as a KDE developer and for proprietary software as a developer in a software company.

Actually some of the alternatives have only plain LGPL licences, which means it is not possible to link them or parts of them statically into a product without distributing all the rest as relinkable object files as well.
There is no way our management would approve these.

Only if you buy a license for proprietary software.

There are some other good GUI toolkits with licenses that allow both use in free software and proprietary software. So, this can be an advantage of some toolkits other than Qt. "

Buy a license for Qt, and it allows you to use it in both free software and in commercial software.

Don't buy a license for Qt, and it allows you to use it in free software.

I can't see any particular advantage there for other toolkits ... Visual Studio requires you to buy a license does it not?

There are I believe some no-cost toolkits that can be used for both free software and for commercial software (Tcl? GTK+? FLTK) ... but AFAIK these have nowhere near the power and capability of Qt. I wouldn't have said they qualified as "good GUI toolkits" to the same standard as Qt provides.

But ... by all means enlighten us. What are these other toolkits of equivalent features that are better options than Qt because of their licensing?

Mono + GTK# perhaps? Is it really better? Is it really unrestricted?

Edited 2008-05-08 04:53 UTC

How about wxWidgets to name one? It's licensed under the LGPL plus some exceptions, making it a very liberal license. It's a very nice and complete library, with bindings for many languages.

Uhm... NO?
Anyone can build and distribute windows .NET or API32 apps for free and sell them as closed source apps if they want. Nobody is required to buy any license. Of course if you want Visual Studio you have to pay for that, but you don't need that. Microsoft offers a free limited version and a complete command-line SDK. The conditions are the same as with GTK.
In QT, on the other hand, you must pay an additional tax to distribute your proprietary software.
For proprietary vendors, QT isn't freer than .NET at all.

There's nothing straw man about it.


Then that's a decision you'll have to make yourself. Quite frankly, the STL and libraries like Boost are often complained about as a reason why people just don't like C++.


I'm not entirely sure what you think locks you into Qt. The only thing you can be talking about is the development effort you put in with Qt, but that's true of all libraries you might use.

It's more complicated than that. At face value, it seems like a disadvantage that Qt costs money for commercial development. However, this price gives you commercial support and some promises of future viability. This is an investment in your tool and your tool makes your work easier and more efficient - so this will give some returns. If you were to pay $0 for a toolkit which would stop being developed or advancing at a reasonable rate after your project is far along, dealing with the situation would probably be even more expensive.

Edited 2008-05-08 22:37 UTC

Of course, if you paid Trolltech^WNokia and then Nokia had a change of heart, you'd be doubly SOL. But large companies rarely exhibit changes of business strategy. Especially the ones that have been committed to this course for a very long time, like Nokia. So you are probably OK.