Once again, I am looking at Qt.
I have been watching it off and on since maybe 1999 or so. Back then I was developing a research application (since open sourced) on Win32. The Qt platform costs quite a bit more than my student budget allowed at the time.
Now, I find myself in the position of recommending Qt due to it’s use in a 3rd party tool. Looks like I may have to eat the license costs, as well as spend my time learning the API for a 3 month one-shot project.
The TT sales staff seem to be very reasonable. I won’t go into details on the agreement we reached, but I will say that I think it’s very fair.
However, it bothers me that, on paper, Qt’s “dual licensing” is simply the most confusing and apparently restrictive license I have dealt with. I still wonder how much better market penetration Trolltech would have garnered by now with a somewhat less restrictive license, or even one that was easier to understand.
[Update: I never did find the time to actually sit down and do anything other than read a few bits of the manual and run one of the demo programs. The 30 days are up. I got one followup email to which I replied "Never had time to demo." And that was that. The single user/platform seat is $3300 USD. Too risky. I have used the wx platform on both windows and linux. I like it. And it's free.]
