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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

With the recent (well, last few years) advancements on GTK for WIndows I've been looking at PyGTK as a cross-platform, native looking GUI option.

Time to check out PyQT.

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> Time to check out PyQT.

Not so fast. The Python bindings are still licensed under GPL (and a commercial license) by Riverbank.

Creating Python bindings to Qt is a lot of work, to be sure, but it's not rocket science. Either Riverbank will LGPL PyQt, or someone else will no doubt come along and write their own LGPL bindings.

Either way, this is big news. In general, there has been a lot of hang-wringing about "which GUI toolkit to use", and the main (and pretty much only) reason for not using Qt (its licensing) has just evaporated into thin air.

From the PyQT website: "Like Qt itself, PyQt is provided under a number of licenses depending on how it is going to be used. In fact, we try and follow Trolltech's licensing model as closely as we can." - http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/commercial/pyqt

So I'd guess from this that later versions of PyQt will be released under LGPL, though of course that's not yet certain.

I've found PyGTK is a joy to use, but the major downside for me is that it doesn't use native controls.

It mimics them with a theme on Windows, so presumably it looks okay (though I suspect it misses the finer details).

But on OSX, with its very distinctive widgets, GTK just looks horrible :(

Qt's a bit better than GTK on OS X, but it's still, sadly, not great. Qt tend to look out of place on OS X. Some of it seems curable -- e.g. simple things like getting margins right and so on, and other things are more complicated since in places Qt is trying to support interface elements that aren't used on OS X.

You can kind of see this with a few high-profile Qt apps like Google Earth, Opera, and the Last.fm client, the last being the best looking, but mostly because Max has put a lot of effort into making it not look like ass.

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