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0 pointsinjuly1y ago0 comments

Qt licensing is its own mess. For commercial software, the pricing is 350-500$ per developer, per month. Seriously [1]. The company that now owns the framework doesn't seem to acknowledge the gap between big enterprises and solo developers/smaller teams.

[1] Yes, one can use Qt for commercial software without buying a license (as long as it is dynamically linked), but their marketing does everything it can to hide that fact. Also, the newer additions to Qt do not fall in this category – for those, you have to pay.

0 comments

turrini1y ago

Mess?

Here are the most commonly used options:

- Go LGPL. Sure, you will need to ship binaries and libs, but there are tools within the SDK that do this automatically for you (windeployqt, macdeployqt, etc.). And as others have stated, it is a problem that was solved years ago.

- Go Commercial to link statically. If you are a single developer, there is an annual license available for $499 (up to $100k yearly revenue).

dexwiz1y ago

It always shocks me developers complain so much about QT licensing. For any other business, an expense that small for so much value seems trivial. Without a decent UI software is a terrible for experience for most users.

pjmlp1y ago

Imagine that, having to pay for the tools one has to use for their work, what an abuse.

Maxatar1y ago

Having to pay a monthly fee in perpetuity in order to distribute an application is absolutely egregious.

readyman1y ago

The fee is for selling someone else's software. I personally despise capitalism, but your complaint about it is among the least convincing ones I have ever heard.

Veserv1y ago

That is 4,200-6,000 $/yr. In the US, a junior developer in a software company costs (all-inclusive, not just salary) around 150,000-200,000 $/yr. That is 2-4% of yearly cost on tooling. That is not very much.

It might not be worth the price, but that is hardly ridiculous. It is quite believable to get a 4% productivity improvement from appropriate tooling. You need to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine the answer to that question.

guappa1y ago

No they'd rather spend weeks to reimplement scrolling.

mardifoufs1y ago

Lol scrolling on qt is worse than on the web. I mean, you can use normal scrolling super easily on both (you don't have to do anything, and it just works). But truly custom scrolling is much harder on qt than web. In a way that's a good thing, but again, the default is just as easy on the web as it is on QT. Plus you don't have to deal with the qtquick/qtwidgets/etc thing and the non open source parts of qt

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