Quit whining, diversity is good [LWN.net]

Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 26, 2005 19:11 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786)
In reply to: Quit whining, diversity is good by ewan
Parent article: A toy and a promise from Nokia

Admittedly the Qt documentation etc. is excellent, but have you looked at
the Qt commercial version prices?
http://www.trolltech.com/products/embedded/pricing.html
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html

"All developers in your company using Qt will need individual licenses."

For a small company, especially the embedded version prices are pretty
steep. The developed software has to sell pretty well to get back both
the cost of development effort + development SW for the developers and how
many of the companies producing just PDA software are doing economically
that well?

Anyway, I don't think it will take that long from someone to port Qt to
the device. It seems pretty standard Linux with X11 and all...

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Quit whining, diversity is good

Posted May 28, 2005 5:50 UTC (Sat) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

The licensing prices aren't all that unreasonable for a business, relative to the probable salary of the developer. So I wouldn't expect the license cost to affect businesses much. Non-businesses that don't want to use the GPL may have troubles with the price. For instance research labs at some universities may want to distribute software, but not be allowed to use the GPL for one reason or another (perhaps the funding agencies require something else, like a BSD license).

I am personally happy that Trolltech has a GPL release for such a great software library. And I don't worry about the C++ API for two reasons. First, I've met a lot of GUI developers that like C++. Second, I use the python bindings.