Aren't GTK and Qt (community edition) both LGPL (though different versions)?
So Electron does not have downsides? Like far worse platform integration.
So Electron does not have downsides? Like far worse platform integration.
Qt the company is annoying because they make it super hard to use community edition and it is super annoying having per developer licensing with all kinds of super annoying BS one have to deal with when developing for Qt.
For Electron I can get 20 devs hired tomorrow or I myself can start project right away and be up and running in minutes.
That said, Electron has made the number of Linux apps go up, which is a win. Still highly prefer native macOS apps on Mac and GTK/Qt apps on Linux, but I know that's a losing battle.
The only exception I can imagine is maybe a framework that uses the Unreal model, where it’s free to use under USD$1m/year in revenue and beyond that requires only a modest fee.
Qt is a hodgepodge of many different components which have different licenses. This is made worse by Qt being an application development framework and not just a GUI toolkit. It includes much more than necessary and a lot of apps will use those other features and become tightly coupled with Qt. Not that its easy to switch toolkits, but it can be extra hard to move away from Qt.