[PyQt] Deploying commercial PyQt app

Petar petar.djetlic at gmail.com
Thu Oct 23 19:01:29 BST 2014


I'm learning PyQt (and Python) for the last half a year and I am planning to
buy PyQt commercial version in the future, but I'm a little confused and
worried about deploying the commercial apps.

I'm an oldtimer developer (25 years of experience, but not pro) and remember
the time when it was so easy to deploy the app. I'd bought commercial
developing tool, created exe and deployed exe with runtime libraries to the
user's site.

Now, with Python and PyQt it's so complicated. Why?

Why there's no way to buy PyQt, install all necessary free libs (python,
numpy, matplotlib,...) to the user's computer and also install some kind of
PyQt "runtime" (that you get when you buy commercial license) and install my
app (just copy several source code .py files or .pyc files, source code can
be on user's computer, I don't care, like anybody will ever watch it) to the
user's computer?

The simplest way would be that besides installing python and other libs on
user's computer I install PyQt GPL and my source files, but as I understand
it, that would be a license breach. But why if I paid a commercial version
and I practically guarantee that none of my commercial end users won't use
PyQt (for anything, only my program will use PyQt libs), they won't even
notice it's installed on their computer, and they don't know or care that
the app they would use every day for business is written in PyQt. My users
are not developers, they just want to use business apps I wrote and that's
all. They've never heard of Python, much less PyQt.

>From the PyQt site:
"The right to distribute the required PyQt5 modules, PyQt4 modules,
PyQtChart modules, PyQtDataVisualization modules, dip modules and
QScintilla2 library with your applications so long as the users of those
applications do not themselves have direct access to PyQt. Otherwise those
users themselves become developers and require their own copies of the
commercial versions of PyQt."

What developers, my users don't know anything about programming.

I can't see how can I discourage the end user to use PyQt libs, Who can
prevent any end user to install PyQt GPL and use it whatever he wants, only
police.

If it is a license breach (which is so wierd to me, but that's a legal
question and I'm not an expert). am I obliged to use pyqtdeploy which brings
one more level of complexity to the story. I just don't have time for that.
Learning all that stuff, building static libs for all the libraries,
compiling c++ (come on, I choose python, not c++).

What are my options:
- buy commercial version, install PyQt GPL to the user's site and be clean
in front of myself, but not legally, is it enough that the source code is on
the user's site or am I obliged to publish it (where, on github?), in that
case I don't need a commercial version, but I want to buy a commercial
version and use PyQt for selling software and making money
- buy commercial version, install special commercial PyQt version as I
understand I will get from Phil and get one more level of complexity to my
life
- use pyqtdeploy
- use freeze tools like py2exe or cx_freeze

Are there any other option

Why deploying PyQt commercial is so complicated that it diverts developers
(or just only me :)) from buying a commercial version and using it. So
strange.

Petar




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