[PyQt] LGPL license.

[Phil Thompson]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:09:17 +0200, "Ville M. Vainio" <vivainio at gmail.com>
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.

All my experience of talking to and working with organisations over the
years completely contradicts this.

The selection of a language happens much earlier than the selection of a
GUI toolkit. A GUI toolkit is (or at least should be) a relatively minor
issue. Availability of skills (and documentation, and books and other
training material) is the most important as people are the most expensive
resource.

I have been involved in many evaluations of wxPython vs. PyQt. I have never
known of an evaluation of QtRuby vs. PyQt.

Phil