[PyQt] LGPL license.

[Giovanni Bajo]

On 2/11/2009 4:09 PM, Ville M. Vainio wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Giovanni Bajo <rasky at develer.com> wrote:
> 
>> I doubt that any company on earth would save £350 and change programming
>> language. This kind of decision is made by amateur programmers that just
>> want to play around with Qt, but those can already use the GPL version.
> 
> Not necessarily change, but it may effect the initial selection.
> 
> I am not really interested in pursuing this discussion further (it has
> been done enough times already), but the licensing of Qt is the reason
> people/orgs chose other toolkits over Qt, despite technical
> inferiority. And everybody seems to be pretty enthusiastic about the
> license change, so it's not something to laugh off, really.
> 
> Be it as it may, if ruby had a LGPL Qt and Python didn't, it would be
> real technical plus for ruby and minus for python (as opposed to other
> benefits claimed by the ruby community, which are typically fictious).
> If developing in Python costs you 350pounds / developer and ruby and
> c++ are free, many companies would definitely weigh this against
> python.

You're basically restating your previous point, without debating mine. 
The language choice affects companies much more than £350 / programmer.

If they have Python programmers, you need to teach them Ruby and make 
them productive on Ruby, and evaluate if all your other 3rd-party needs 
(besided Qt) are covered by Ruby. I think we agree that this is not 
going to cost less than £350 / programmer.

If your company has never used neither Python nor Ruby, I don't think 
the decision will be taken on the basis of the Qt binding licensing 
cost. There are other factors (like, eg., the availability of 
consultants on either language, the availability of other libraries, the 
easyness of deplying the application to your target, an internal 
technical evaluation process of both languages, etc.) which are going to 
affect the decision much more than the license cost *and* are going to 
cost *themselves* more than £350 / programmer.

I would be surprised if a single company preferred QtRuby over PyQt just 
because of the license cost. And I won't be suprised if the QtRuby 
people will push this as a marketing argument though -- I just find it 
incredibly weak.
-- 
Giovanni Bajo
Develer S.r.l.
http://www.develer.com