Which GUI toolkit is THE best?

[Alan Franzoni]

Paul Boddie on comp.lang.python said:

Now, since the commercial licence is "per developer", some cunning
outfit could claim that only one developer wrote their product (rather
than one hundred developers, say), but this would be a fairly big
breach of trust (although nothing unusual in the world of commerce, I'm
sure). Would a business making software for other such businesses care
about such things? What kind of recourse would they have?

Just one thing I don't understand: if you're developing all your software
inside your company, how would they know if you already coded it or you
still have to?

Also, couldn't a big company buy a *single* commercial license from the
beginning, build a software employing hundreds of developers using the GPL
license, and then distribute the software pretending that the single
developer had done everything? This would hit Trolltech anyway.

I think the problem has to do with the QT license system. It's their
problem, not a developer's one. Also, I suppose one of their commercial
licenses provides with far lot more than a license - e.g. I think they'll
offer support, design tools, additional docs and libraries.

And what would then be their income if they refused to sell you a
commercial license because they *know* you've already coded your app using
the GPL license of Qt? You could simply throw away your app and never
distribute it, and they would'nt see a cent anyway.

Personally, I don't like Qt licensing, since I think there're good widget
sets around that don't have such limitations, but I don't think that people
at Trolltech are really trolls :-=

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Alan Franzoni <[email protected]>
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[Paul Boddie]

Just one thing I don't understand: if you're developing all your software
inside your company, how would they know if you already coded it or you
still have to?

I have no idea. But as I said elsewhere, I'm not in any sense a party
to the process that would attempt to define such enforcement matters.

Also, couldn't a big company buy a *single* commercial license from the
beginning, build a software employing hundreds of developers using the GPL
license, and then distribute the software pretending that the single
developer had done everything? This would hit Trolltech anyway.

True, but then have you ever used proprietary software with those
irritating floating licences or with licence keys? Sure, a company
doing stuff on the cheap could buy fewer licences than they need - I've
been in a situation where an employer has bought n licences of some
flashy-but-not-exactly-necessary solution that everyone (n + x people)
has been forced to use, and you end up with all sorts of management
workarounds ("if you're not using product X, can you log off and log
back in later?") - and I'd imagine that where technical measures aren't
the means of limiting the number of users, you get all sorts of
management workarounds to give the impression that only one developer
is using the software in other enforcement regimes: having one person
that collates and forwards support requests, for example. That
businesses would rather waste their employees' time at a much higher
cost than just forking out for more software isn't a surprise to me
whatsoever.

I think the problem has to do with the QT license system. It's their
problem, not a developer's one. Also, I suppose one of their commercial
licenses provides with far lot more than a license - e.g. I think they'll
offer support, design tools, additional docs and libraries.

I believe so, yes. However, the problem with any licensing system is
generally the developer's: if you want to sell a solution based on
Microsoft Office, is it Microsoft's problem that they chose an
ultra-proprietary licence? As a developer you do get to choose other
solutions, however. (Perhaps I've misinterpreted what you meant,
though.)

And what would then be their income if they refused to sell you a
commercial license because they *know* you've already coded your app using
the GPL license of Qt? You could simply throw away your app and never
distribute it, and they would'nt see a cent anyway.

I have no idea. It's best to ask them that question rather than random
newsgroup contributors, I think. ;-)

Paul

 

[Chris Mellon]

I have no idea. But as I said elsewhere, I'm not in any sense a party
to the process that would attempt to define such enforcement matters.


True, but then have you ever used proprietary software with those
irritating floating licences or with licence keys? Sure, a company
doing stuff on the cheap could buy fewer licences than they need - I've
been in a situation where an employer has bought n licences of some
flashy-but-not-exactly-necessary solution that everyone (n + x people)
has been forced to use, and you end up with all sorts of management
workarounds ("if you're not using product X, can you log off and log
back in later?") - and I'd imagine that where technical measures aren't
the means of limiting the number of users, you get all sorts of
management workarounds to give the impression that only one developer
is using the software in other enforcement regimes: having one person
that collates and forwards support requests, for example. That
businesses would rather waste their employees' time at a much higher
cost than just forking out for more software isn't a surprise to me
whatsoever.


I believe so, yes. However, the problem with any licensing system is
generally the developer's: if you want to sell a solution based on
Microsoft Office, is it Microsoft's problem that they chose an
ultra-proprietary licence? As a developer you do get to choose other
solutions, however. (Perhaps I've misinterpreted what you meant,
though.)


I have no idea. It's best to ask them that question rather than random
newsgroup contributors, I think. ;-)

It's pretty obvious, though. The whole point of people doing this is
that they only want to pay for 1 license once rather than X licenses
for the whole dev cycle. By not selling you a license they lose $1000,
but they keep enforcing a licensing system that makes them a lot more
money. Their leverage comes from the fact that you've invested however
much time and effort into the app development and while you can toss
it you're out a great deal more than they are.

I suspect that if enough money changed hands (like, you paid for your
X developers backdated to when you started development) you could
convince TT to sell you a license, too.

 

[Piet van Oostrum]

ME> I've used both wxPython and PyGTK. I find wxPython to be horribly
ME> un-pythonic; combining that some problems on the Mac, and some
ME> other installation/environment issues, I ditched it for PyGTK.

But AFAIK GTK doesn't have a native implementation on the Mac, only X11. At
least not in a stable version.

 

[Renato]

Hardly a showstopper: gtk works now (with X11), and will work even
better soon (native).