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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

I very badly want to get back to this. Maybe with Python and Qt on Mac?

I don't trust Qt licensing anymore. Whatever company owns Qt will forever try to squeeze it for money.

They recently changed their licensing AGAIN: https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020

They have not changed any licensing. They have changed the way they are releasing their product. The only thing really that is different here is the fact that they are pushing less code as open source for their stable LTS releases.

If you rely on having a stable Qt, why not pay the company that develops the software? You and I, the developers that use Qt without paying for it, still get the latest and greatest Qt, with all it's source code for free, under the same LGPL license that Qt has always been under.

Actually Qt was not always LGPL, it was first under the QPL, then the GPL, and now the LGPL. So it is quite an improvement from a license forbidding commercial uses to a permissive license.

There is also a legal framework to make sure Qt will remain open source forever: the KDE Free Qt Foundation.

Historically you are correct, yes. I should have had an asterisk and explanation next to 'always'.

The fun fact that this also brings up is that the KDE Free Qt Foundation also means that if Qt does not keep supporting open source Qt, then the framework code becomes licensed under the BSD.

It is literally in Qt's best interests to keep the open source community by it's side.

This does not detract from my point that the license of Qt is not changing.

> If you rely on having a stable Qt, why not pay the company that develops the software?

Because it's too expensive for me to afford. More than an order of magnitude too high for me. As side projects I write closed source software so they do pull in a a bit of money. But this is typically only a few hundred to a few thousand per year per app. I think they target corporations rather than individuals or small shops.

It was not just LTS. The rumor [1] was:

  > As a result, they are thinking about restricting ALL Qt releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months.
  > They are aware that this would mean the end of contributions via Open Governance in practice.

[1] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.h...

I did a couple of small projects in Python using wxWidgets recently, and I was surprised at how easy it was (as well as how consistent the results were between Windows and Mac OS).

I'm overall surprised at how unpopular/unknown wxWidgets is when the discussion turns to cross platform UI toolkits.

I've used it a lot, as well as other popular toolkits (Qt, GTK, etc.) and I find that wx is, at the very least, the least bad option and overall programming in it hasn't been a pain, regardless of which binding I used.

I guess my only complaint would be that it's a bit harder to do something way outside the norm when compared to Qt, but at that point it might be better to use native SDKs or straight up OpenGL or something for your GUI.

I am surprised too. It is easy to talk to the devs about issues and also the documentation is good.

There are some rough spots here and there but all in all I am really baffled why you don't see more use of it. I use it in C++ for all my GUIs.

The wxPython demo (which spawns many apps that show use of many widgets, including complex ones), is very good too. And is a non-trivial wxPython app itself. Separately downloadable from wxPython itself, last I used it. All apps come with source (of course), good for learning from and adapting to your own app needs.

I've been using it for years, and what attracts me is the native UI widgets instead of the self-drawn widgets in Qt and GTK.

This also makes customizing the widgets much harder (if possible at all). There are also some self-drawn widget libraries available for wxWidgets.

Nitpick, but wxWidgets is for C++. wxPython is the wrapper for Python.

Works well for my needs. QML has a JavaScript runtime and follows both a declarative and a reactive programming paradigm, too.

GTK bindings via PyGObject also work on macOS[1], if Qt's licensing doesn't suit you.

[1] https://pygobject.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started.h...

C# and WPF. WPF is what the web would have been, if it had been designed for applications and not documents.

Only downside is that it is Windows only.

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