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> And QT, a popular window toolkit, is quite expensive unless you release your software under GPL (at which point you can use QT for free under the GPL license).

WHY do people keep repeating that?! Qt is NOT under GPL, you do NOT need to release your software under GPL to use it!

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They use a dual licensing model, one copy-left and one commercial. To be specific they use LGPL, not GPL. http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/opensourcelicense.html

If you don't want to abide by the LGPL requirements you will have to fork out 459 USD a month. For an established development company this is not a big deal, but for a side project?

If you know the difference, then why did you claim it requires you to license your code under GPL? You can use Qt and other LGPL libraries from a proprietary, closed-source code base if you wish, no license fee required. LGPL is a lot less onerous than GPL.

LGPL is mostly a problem on iOS, since as far as I know it collides with App Store licensing rules, but not that big a deal on desktop platforms.

Yeah, my mistake. From what I gather after reading more about it one only has to take care to dynamically link the qt parts when compiling a binary.

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