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A Quick Cost Analysis of Qt vs GTK
An anonymous reader writes "George Staikos responds
to Michael Meeks' arguments
of using GNOME over Qt. There is also a discussion of events at KDE.News. In Meeks' same set of slides, he states that Ximian OpenOffice is much faster to start than native OpenOffice."
One of the biggest lies that the Gtk/GNOME people like to spread is the myth that commercial third-party software companies prefer Gtk over Qt because of the licensing issue. This despite the absolute majority of facts dictating otherwise. Trolltech is perhaps the most successful Free Software company around and they have no shortage of commercial third party software companies that choose Qt. Here is one such statement from the dot:
As someone who works for a company that owns Qt commercial (for unix), I'd like to offer my point of view.
Management tended to be overly estatic about this Linux development environment because it's "free". So, obviously, there needed to be some justification of making a $2300 purchase in order to support this "free" linux system.
When first learning about what was available a few years ago (GNOME and KDE) I set up machines to evaluate both. We chose KDE, and it was 95% because of Qt; it's API, it's professionalism, the signal/slot idea, etc. All of the software we've developed with it has been proprietary in house stuff; we haven't made any money off of software sales - just off of its use.
But I'm sure other people may feel differently. Obviously if you're a lone consultant, it may be a bit too expensive for you to attempt to spend money up front in order to make money off of software. I suppose that's part of capitalism.
But I am a happy Qt commercial user, and we will continue to support KDE development, and pay for Qt, as long as we're still writing software for Linux.
If a GNOME advocate can point me in the direction of information/screen shots of something that can match the power of Qt/KDE/ and KDE kiosk mode, while providing clean documentation, a quarterly newsletter, and 1 year of e-mail support, I'd be interested in finding out more information.
Until then, KDE and Qt well exceed our needs, and I'm happy to be able to use them.
If you used free Qt for a project and later wanted to fork I'm sure Trolltech would sell you a commercial license.
Just take a look at the documentation to know which to use.
The GTK project seems to have gotten away with not having updated its documentation for 1.2 since it was 75% done in 1999. Looking over the documentation requirements and comparing those to what I expect from good documentation, they were really more like half done.
The GTK 1.2 documentation is still in that state, & GTK 2.0's documentation doesn't appear to be much better.
Not every function or object has a complete description, almost every struct has an incomplete description, not all methods of objects are explained fully, almost no signals have any useful documentation about what they do beyond what can be gleaned from their names. The various states for widgets and GTK as a whole are barely even mentioned.
Assuming QT has documentation that at least approaches professionalism (which I guess is safe since QT is a professional company), I know what I'd pick.
There's the TCO, then there's the time and money it takes to train your staff. On GTK+, I think that the investment on doing that would be simply unreasonable.