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Comment by Lariscus | Hacker News Reader

I have a very low opinion of developers who decry having to pay for a commercial licence for otherwise LGPL licensed software libraries. They expect to be paid for their work, and ensure that by creating closed source software. That's fair enough. Yet, the devs that solved the actually difficult parts of creating a UI library have to be utter saints who freely bestow a gift of code upon the world.

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I think his complaint is not that he has to pay money per se, but having to pay several thousand dollars. That's a bit much for an independent developer.

I have little sympathy for that kind of argument, imagine a carpenter complaining that they have to buy wood and nails. Besides, a Qt license for small businesses is nowhere near thousands of dollars. Only in software development do we expect quality tools to be given to us free of charge with no strings attached.

Qt for Application Development Professional (ADP) is 3460 €/Year.

If you're making something which you sell for $50 or so you'd need 100 sales per year to just pay for the development environment. That also assumes that it took you less than a year to make said product.

'Qt for Application Development Enterprise - Small Business (ADE-SB)' is $499.

You're right. I didn't see the Small Business tab when I was quickly looking through it.

Still ends up being a blocker when you're not sure how many copies of the product you'll sell.

I guess that is just one of the many risks you have to take if your trying to build a business. A couple of hundred dollars in licensing fees are not going to sink your product. For a side project that you don't expect to make any money it might be too much, but in that case you could just as well open source the project.

> but in that case you could just as well open source the project.

Which doesn't necessarily mean you cannot get paid for it.

It's also worth considering that the value of this license is very likely not a net loss even if your initial product doesn't work out.

Your take is very weird.

He's shopping around. When something is out of his budget it's natural to not buy.

wood makes sense to pay for. wood doesn't grow on trees. software works a bit differently though it should also be paid for

It's especially hard when the application you're building isn't yet proven. As there's no guarantee that it will get any sales, let alone enough to cover the Commercial Qt expenses.

You do not have to pay before your first sale.

And $500 is laughable small compared to developer salary. If it saves you half a day of work, you are covered

There is a huge gulf between saving a half a day of work versus _having_ $500 to spend on a tool that would save you that half day of work.

Exactly this.

Qt is amazing, so if your requirements are so strict in terms of space and you know/like Qt, investing in the license, or make the product open source, shouldn't be an issue here.

Agreed. Also didn't get why he felt complying with the terms of the LGPL for a statically-linked .exe would be so much of a problem. Just put the object files and build script in a zip file, and upload it to the same webserver where you plan to put the program. Add a line in the "About" dialog (or whatever) pointing to it. Done.

Whilst I don't understand the users who are hell bent on having a single-executable work, if you have users who are hell bent on using but a single executable, you have to meet them where they're at.

In my experience Windows users don't care about the statically linked part

What they care about is having an executable and not needing a zip with dlls

And that is trivially achievable by bundling the dlls into the exe file

Also trivially achievable by making an installer instead of shipping separate files. People are really used to that pattern.

No, it makes perfect sense to complain about paid software libraries because it inevitably makes getting to them a huge pain in the ass and that causes folks who just want to easily give the library a try every reason to go try something else. Then as a result the ecosystem of apps using sad framework begins to stagnate.

Yes, closed source libraries are a pain to work with. This is why I like the GPL/Commercial dual licensing model. You can try it out for as long as you like, have full access to the source code and can even create commercial software for free. You are only required to pay for a license if you want to create closed source software. I consider this an absolutely fair deal, yet the blog author seems to take issue with that which is what I am criticizing.

That’s fair in theory, but it really feels that they’ve made it more difficult to find the open source version of Qt last I checked. I haven’t tried to use it in a while, but I recall last time I tried I just gave up.

Unfortunately they do and they really try to scare you away with the GPL boogeyman. It is a fair criticism. I would recommend to ignore the installer entirely and rely on a package manger like vcpkg, conan, apt, or brew instead.

You can find the manual installer here:

https://www.qt.io/download-qt-installer-oss

Yeah I should have just used brew. I was trying to find the package for Mac a while ago to see if I could write some swift bindings. I moved on to messing around with some other library for my experimentation.

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