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Comment by 4684499 | Hacker News Reader

Electron is bloated indeed, but it's open source.

Tell that to the users who have to wait ages for "Electron" to start, and then gives their system resources the hug of death. Life is way more nuanced than "FOSS is good, everything else is bad".

Maybe, but for projects like this, it's as simple as "FOSS is a prerequisite", for me at least.

Suit yourself. It's just a shame for the users who have to suffer a worse product because of your dogmatism.

Sometimes you wish copyleft licenses were still popular...

The WebCore module of Ultralight is open-source: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/ultralight-webcore

And support linux

Sure, it's not open source, but their licensing terms are quite generous. It's free for noncommercial use and for independent development (<$100k per year)[1].

Compare this to something like Qt, which is open source. But (as I understand it) it's LGPL licensed, meaning it can't be used commercially without paying the developer for a commercial license or releasing all the source code.

Of course, take this advice with a grain of salt. I've not really worked with Qt or Ultralight before, but I've been exploring my options for a project for a school club.

[1]: https://discuss.ultralig.ht/d/6-ultralight-0-9-beta-now-avai...

Edit: added source

That's not what LGPL means, no. It's not GPL.

Interesting. I thought Qt was dual-licensed using the (L)GPL and a commercial use license[1].

[1]: https://www1.qt.io/faq/#_Toc_1_2

It is, but LGPL does not mean what you said it did. It doesn't force you to open your code if you allow users to replace the LGPL components. If you don't want to do that or run in an environment where you can't do it, then you have the option to buy a commercial license to free you from these restrictions.

Correct. The LGPL does not mean it can't be used without releasing all the source code AFAIK.

What they meant was that the LGPL is perfectly fine to use for commercial use, but you have to a) provide the source for just the library when requested (easy enough: provide a link), and b) allow for the program to run using a different or modified version of the LGPL library that's used.

That means you can dynamically link QT, and your program doesn't have to be (L)GPL. No commercial license required.

> Sure, it's not open source, but their licensing terms are quite generous.

That's nice, but not being open source means it will never have the breadth of players who both use it and contribute back that Electron does, which is why it won't beat Electron on the long term, even if it had some intriguing advantages.

Funny you didn't mention sciter. Sciter is also free for noncommecial use. In terms of memory usage, binary size, sciter is good enough. The downside of sciter is its script engine isn't javascript, and it's closed source too.

Edit: When I say open source, I didn't mean it has to be free of charge.

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