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Comment by injuly | Hacker News Reader

Qt licensing is its own mess. For commercial software, the pricing is 350-500$ per developer, per month. Seriously [1]. The company that now owns the framework doesn't seem to acknowledge the gap between big enterprises and solo developers/smaller teams.

[1] Yes, one can use Qt for commercial software without buying a license (as long as it is dynamically linked), but their marketing does everything it can to hide that fact. Also, the newer additions to Qt do not fall in this category – for those, you have to pay.

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Mess?

Here are the most commonly used options:

- Go LGPL. Sure, you will need to ship binaries and libs, but there are tools within the SDK that do this automatically for you (windeployqt, macdeployqt, etc.). And as others have stated, it is a problem that was solved years ago.

- Go Commercial to link statically. If you are a single developer, there is an annual license available for $499 (up to $100k yearly revenue).

It always shocks me developers complain so much about QT licensing. For any other business, an expense that small for so much value seems trivial. Without a decent UI software is a terrible for experience for most users.

Imagine that, having to pay for the tools one has to use for their work, what an abuse.

Having to pay a monthly fee in perpetuity in order to distribute an application is absolutely egregious.

The fee is for selling someone else's software. I personally despise capitalism, but your complaint about it is among the least convincing ones I have ever heard.

That is 4,200-6,000 $/yr. In the US, a junior developer in a software company costs (all-inclusive, not just salary) around 150,000-200,000 $/yr. That is 2-4% of yearly cost on tooling. That is not very much.

It might not be worth the price, but that is hardly ridiculous. It is quite believable to get a 4% productivity improvement from appropriate tooling. You need to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine the answer to that question.

No they'd rather spend weeks to reimplement scrolling.

Lol scrolling on qt is worse than on the web. I mean, you can use normal scrolling super easily on both (you don't have to do anything, and it just works). But truly custom scrolling is much harder on qt than web. In a way that's a good thing, but again, the default is just as easy on the web as it is on QT. Plus you don't have to deal with the qtquick/qtwidgets/etc thing and the non open source parts of qt

Because subverting users' expectations about scrolling is the step 0 of efficient software. /s

That's why I said it might be a good thing. My main point was that it's just as easy on the web for standard scrolling. But even if you don't want standard scroll behavior, it's still easier. There's nothing easier to do on qt than on web. Compare a qtgraphicsview or qt3dcanvas to a webgl canvas and again, it's fighting against the framework versus stuff just working. Now sure qt is much better for tons of other stuff, but I just found it weird that the comment I was replying to mentioned wasting time on customizing stuff as being the downside of web apps, as if it's not a much more difficult task to do in qt.

You remind me when microsoft was claiming that bash was hard and as example did some crazy obfuscated bash scripts, rather than just doing them the sane way.

If you're doing a GUI, you have no reason to be doing canvas manually.

What? Even with QT you often have to use a painter and draw what you want more or less. You also need a canvas to display anything that is visualisation related. In any case it doesn't matter, as I said, scrolling is just as easy on the web as it is on QT. my point was more general, if you want to do anything custom it's easier to do in JS than with QT. Even using the multiple tools QT offers to customize the view (the painters, canvases, 3d widgets, etc)

You're just showing me you've never dune as much as an hello world using QT. Which is completely fine, but don't paint yourself as knowing what you're talking about.

That isn't true. Are you really saying that qt is easier to customize than a plain JS/HTML UI? Seriously?

I have to use for work a software that is implemented in electron.

I think less than 1% of the users use it on mobile, but it's designed as a mobile interface.

To scroll you need to click and drag, or you need to click 5px buttons. Regular mouse scroll doesn't work.

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