Yes, a handful of add-on modules are not LGPL-licensed (Qt Charts, Qt Data Visualization and Qt Virtual Keyboard, plus a couple more), but 99% of the framework, including everything you would need for most applications, is LGPL. If you must use Qt’s charts or data visualization modules, and you can’t get by using a third-party library with a friendlier license, then yes, you will have to buy a commercial license from Qt.
Qt’s commercial licenses are expensive, but they have a reasonably priced offer for small businesses and indie developers — $499 per year for companies with annual revenue of less than $250,000. (If you’re a software developer/company making more than $250,000 per year, I’d argue you can well afford the $4,000 for a full commercial license, although that $4,000 figure is harder to swallow if you’re just using Qt inside a non-software company.)
Really? It makes perfect sense to me. It recognizes that small companies and indie developers can’t swallow $4,000 per developer, but can manage $499, so Qt offers a discount to capture sales it otherwise would never get, and if a small company is successful and becomes a bigger company then it can afford to pay the non-discounted license fee. I don’t see why that’s hard to understand.
It really amounts to a runtime or distribution royalty
I don’t understand that. In what way is it a runtime or distribution royalty? It’s $4,000 per developer whether your company is selling $300,000 worth of software or $300,000,000 worth of software. It’s $4,000 per developer even if your company never distributes software, based solely on your company’s overall revenue/funding and thus your company’s ability to afford tools.
Qt actually does look interesting on a cursory review of their website… but their video resources are woefully painful. I made the mistake of trying to watch the “Getting started with Qt” webinar and i won’t lie it felt like my ears were going to start bleeding…
Is there a better resrouce out there to get more info on Qt and see if it’s worth the time/effort?
** also to stay that in downloading the LGPL-licenced software there were no obvious limitations to being able to sell software, but it explicitly stated that one of my “obligations” was to make the source code available to users…
Google is taking care of the Web Interface, and MacOS and Windows desktop interfaces, Canonical is taking care of the Linux adaptation, probably faster and maybe better than Google. Just it.
I used Delphi a VERY long time ago before I switched to Mac. Then I had to look for a replacement and found RealBasic (now Xojo) and it served the purpose. I really liked Delphi.
For you really old guys like me, before Delphi, I used Clipper, which was a dBase compiler and I REALLY liked it and did a lot of commercial work with it. But it never made the transition to Windows - it was DOS only.
Well, flutter already has Web, iOS and Android, Linux on Alpha, Mac and Windows on development. With this and the MAUI from microsoft, both with single codebase for all platforms.
Looks like Xojo will lose its “Cross-platform” niche
Before CLIPPER I used what became Delphi years later, Turbo Pascal. Clipper jumped into the Windows bandwagon, I used a bit the CA-CLIPPER for Windows before I purchased my first Delphi Pro license when it costed US$99 those days. Then CLIPPER lost its value, but believe me, they exist until today and evolved to OOP, it’s called Project Harbour. It’s a bit abandoned, but probably still works and have active users. https://harbour.github.io/ , and also this fork: http://www.xharbour.org/
Android and iOS are stable, Web is Beta, Linux and Mac are Alpha, Windows is Pre-Alpha (AKA Dev Preview). Both the Flutter UI and the Dart Language are under very active development for those platforms: Web, Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, Windows, and the semi-unknown Fuchsia.
