it's so expensive, too bad there are no good alternatives to this
(Source: Used to work for Nokia)
EDIT:
(Source2: https://www.qt.io/pricing)
(which is a shitty thing to do when you're not a mom&pop shop but a company like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344677)
Just like my answer to the other comment, there are a ton of "perfectly reasonable" things that one can do, that are still shitty behaviour.
That's like when someone leaves free books for anyone to take, you'd take one but never put another one for other people. You're not breaking any laws or rules. Still shitty. Especially if you have enough money to build a whole freaking library.
Like, anyone can go to a food bank charity to have a free meal. If you have a 5-digit monthly salary, that is still a very shitty thing to do, even if you and everyone else plays by the rules.
1. Could easily afford it, as you say
2. Presumably aren't releasing their software as Free and Open Source
Why? That's the whole point of LGPL, it doesn't matter how big you are, so long as your users can replace your copy of Qt with a modified copy you can use it under LGPL.
(genuine question, I'm doing a bit of market research in this area)
1) Personal License - free if <50k annual revenue
2) Startup License - keep current price (500usd/month) but
a) allow 1 month subscription commitment instead of paying 1 year upfront
b) when subscription not get extended you should still be allowed to distribute product that is not updated
c) if you payed for 1-2 years of subscriptions and cancelled subscription after 1-2+ year, you should be able to keep using the version of Qt the moment when you first signed for .
3) allow Startup to choose another licensing option. Instead of paying upfront licensing fee, just allow paying annually 5% of revenue from products that keep using Qt.
Qt5: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5.15/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons
Qt6: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons
Sciter supports same platforms as Qt and uses H/W acceleration (DirectX, OpenGL) in 10 years or so.
Everything that you can do in Qt you can do in Sciter.
Just in case: Sciter.JS that is in alpha/beta now is aimed as a direct ElectronJS replacement as it uses standard JavaScript (ES6). It already supports MithrilJS and Svelte applications running transparently as in SciterJS as in browsers. React (PReact in particular) out of the box support is coming. The main goal of SciterJS is to provide compact (5mb runtime) desktop runtime environment that can use components and designs made for Web.
Yes and no.
Yes, it allows to create declarative UI.
And no, not just declarative UI. It supports immediate mode graphics for example and use of native UI components including existing HWND, GtkWidget, NSView, etc. based ones.
As of other non UI parts of Qt... Sciter does not provide all that beauty, yes. Host application (C/C++, Go, Rust, etc) that uses Sciter UI layer is free to use whatever libraries/runtime they prefer, and usually each runtime is superior to what Qt provides.
That's the cornerstone idea of its design - it is embeddable UI layer. While Qt is a foundation (a.k.a. framework) similar to MFC, Gtk and other frameworks.
At early stages of C++ having things like CList & Co did make sense. But not in recent 10 years. Yet I am silent about Go, Rust, Python and other languages / runtimes that use Sciter.
This thread seems to indicate that Win10 style is also possible which would make sense since it uses native elements https://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=46574
What about the Tk/Gtk family of products?