And therefore, beware any OS attempts to break cross platform browser compatibil...

camccar · on May 17, 2020

And pay QT like 5,000 $ a year to keep it closed source. No thank you. Would rather write it 6 times. Or just use electron.

roblabla · on May 17, 2020

Qt is LGPL licensed is it not? LGPL license means you can distribute your app closed source, so long as the user can swap out the Qt implementation. This usually just means dynamic linking against Qt so the user can swap the DLL. The rest of your app can be kept closed source.

On iOS and Android the situation might be a bit more complicated, but this discussion[0] seems to say that dynamically linking would also work there.

[0]: https://wiki.qt.io/Licensing-talk-about-mobile-platforms

api · on May 17, 2020

Qt doesn't require that but even if it did writing it 6 times is vastly more expensive. People would just rather spend 500k on writing it 6 times than 5k on a license because they are somehow offended at the notion of paying for dev software or tooling.

It's a major reason UI coding sucks. There is no incentive for anyone to make it not suck, and the work required to build a modern UI library and tooling is far beyond what hobbyist or spare time coders could ever attempt.

detaro · on May 17, 2020

Qt is mostly LGPL. It's really not that hard to comply with that on desktop, and doesn't require you opening your source code.

camccar · on May 18, 2020

It’s hard to satisfy the requirements in various app stores. They also sneak in more restrictive licenses in their graphs

Narishma · on May 17, 2020

AFAIK you only have to pay if you modify Qt itself and don't want to release those changes.