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Programming Software

Nokia Makes LGPL Version of PyQt 263

EtaCarinae writes "Nokia didn't succeed in convincing Riverbank to change its licensing terms on PyQt, and so decided to create their own LGPL'ed version of it. From the FAQ at the PySide site: 'Nokia's initial research into Python bindings for Qt involved speaking with Riverbank Computing, the makers of PyQt. We had several discussions with them to see if it was possible to use PyQt to achieve our goals. Unfortunately, a common agreement could not be found , so in the end we decided to proceed with PySide.'"
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Nokia Makes LGPL Version of PyQt

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  • by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @03:47AM (#29250081)
    If you cannot get the source to open-source, open-source the source.

    Kudos to Nokia.

    E

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @03:58AM (#29250109)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jurily ( 900488 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {yliruj}> on Sunday August 30, 2009 @04:09AM (#29250141)

        Or isn't the GPL considered open anymore?

        Not if you want to write commercial software on top of it, which is what Nokia wants to enable. Just as they did with releasing Qt under the LGPL.

        It also helps integration if you can get both from the same vendor, and for a project like this, integration is the goal. From now on, you can expect simultaneous and/or bundled releases.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @04:19AM (#29250179)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Riverbank provided superb Python bindings

            While I'm not disputing the usefulness of their bindings, I'd describe them as "working", but not necessarily "superb". Their API is not very pythonic or concise and feels pretty much like writing C++, without the segfaults :P

            • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:4, Interesting)

              by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @06:06AM (#29250481)

              The point of PyQt is to remain faithful to the official C++ Qt API, making your skills & docs directly transferrable and code easy to port over in either direction.

              PyQt has added a new, more pythonic API for signals, and PySide will do the same thing eventually. But it's essential that we retain almost-1:1 C++ mapping (though losing trivial stuff like QString).

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by Anonymous Coward

                But it's essential that we retain almost-1:1 C++ mapping

                Why? I see no point, Python and C++ are two vastly different languages. It's essential that all the capabilities of Qt are exposed, but not necessarily in the exact same form. (ie. fields vs setters/getters, signal/slot objects vs signal/slot strings).

                making your skills & docs directly transferrable

                Python bindings should be designed to accommodate Python programmers, not C++ programmers.

                Anyway, the new signal/slot binding seems nice and indeed what

                • [quote]It's essential that all the capabilities of Qt are exposed, but not necessarily in the exact same form. (ie. fields vs setters/getters, signal/slot objects vs signal/slot strings).[/quote]
                  The C++ Qt interface sucks from a C++ point of view too.
                  The reason it's like this is historic.

                  It depends whether they want to design an API for stuff that already exists or one that would only work for new projects. But if I were to make a new project, personally, I'd certainly not use Qt but rather a much more mode

                  • But if I were to make a new project, personally, I'd certainly not use Qt but rather a much more modern technology.

                    Such as...

                    ?

                    • Such as a declarative one.

                      The future Qt declarative UI system is a step in the right direction, but not really there yet.

                    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                      by mweather ( 1089505 )

                      Such as a declarative one.

                      Such as... ? If it doesn't exist yet, it's not modern, it's futuristic.

                • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                  by ultrabot ( 200914 )

                  Python bindings should be designed to accommodate Python programmers, not C++ programmers.

                  I don't think we really want a big divide between Python and C++ programmers. The programming model of C++ Qt programming is not fundamentally broken, so it's not something that needs to be fixed more than what was already done. I'd like to see future breed of Qt programmers proficient wth both C++ and Python, not one over the other (Python isn't "dumb man's c++", it's "busy man's C++"). Both have their place.

                  Any friendly additions for python programmers can be done over the existing "raw" binding.

                  • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:5, Interesting)

                    by WaywardGeek ( 1480513 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @08:43AM (#29251095) Journal

                    I'm personally a fan of what Nokia is doing. In general, the big GUI libraries need to be LGPL or BSD to gain the widest acceptance. Requiring license fees for non-GPL leaves companies like Nokia flapping in the wind with no solution. This is also why GTK gained so much momentum at Qt's expense. This allows me to learn one way to write code, and to be able to either contribute it to the open-source community (which I do often), or to sell it through my work (which I actually get paid for).

                    However, this is a troubling new way for a big company to crush a small one... "Give me your technology for free, or I'll rewrite it and then give it to the world for free." It sounds a bit like Microsoft.

                    • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:5, Informative)

                      by iamwahoo2 ( 594922 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @09:27AM (#29251361)
                      It appears that Nokia most likely wants to bundle the PyQt package into their phones. The problem arises that when the binding is linked against both Python and Qt, the GPL then extends to those products (according to the GNU website). Nokia is a business, if Riverbank had offered their product under a desired license to Nokia at a price that is less than what they could have developed it themselves, then they would have gotten paid for PyQt.

                      Put yourself in Nokia's shoes. They need a scripting interface to encourage development on their platform. How much would you pay riverbank for a product that does not exactly meet your needs? The GPL is simply not going to work in the phone environment because not everybody is going to want to license their apps under the GPL. The LGPL has proven to be a far superior compromise as evidenced by the fact that Qt (when it was GPL) previously lost traction to inferior products due to their GPL licensing.

                    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

                      How do you know they wanted it for free? Perhaps this has been discussed somewhere, but I don't think the details of the discussion have been made public.

                      It seems to me that this is exactly what happened years ago before Qt was GPL'd. People were unhappy with the terms of the Qt license and so they made GTK. In the end, I think we are all better off and I have no reason to suspect differently this time. Competition is good.

                    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                      by Anonymous Coward

                      How did this get modded up to 5? There's no indication anywhere that Nokia demanded PyQt for free.

                    • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:4, Interesting)

                      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @11:21AM (#29252125) Homepage

                      This is also why GTK gained so much momentum at Qt's expense.

                      At the same time, what would Qt be without the license income from commercial licenses? Nokia can justify putting money into it to support their products, but Trolltech was a software company. I did look at both GTK and Qt for hobby development and Qt was much higher quality in my personal opinion, and that's because they had real income to hire dedicated developers and make a kick-ass development platform. McDonald's is cheap and popular, that's what GTK is to companies but it doesn't imply that it's good food.

                      I often find the development of open source projects painfully slow (yes, this is from the and-I-want-a-free-pony-too department) but Qt has always been a positive high note. I love how they take top notch things like WebKit and make them incredibly easy to use in QtWekKit. They're a little bit like Apple, except for developers - they take what's out there and really everybody's doing already but is difficult, package it up in a great way to make it easy for the win.

                      One thing I really like is that they have, unlike much other open source stuck in the 20th century, embraced long function names and code completion. I just tried to check what the longest function name was and "availableAudioOutputDevicesChanged()" is pretty close. But since it's object oriented, you type the ./-> and the autocomplete list appears. Unlike the fcntl vs iocntl or whatever article that was here recently, it's retarded naming for people still using text editors (let the flamewars begin).

                      In short, you talk about how much momentum Qt would make, I'm hoping it won't lose any of the momentum it has had. It's basically the standard library C++ should have had to compete with Java/C#...

                    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

                      A bit like Microsoft, yes. But MS would've been more like "Sell/give us your technology for next-to-nothing, or we'll buy someone else's inferior competing software, market the fuck out of it, and ruin you."

                    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                      Insightful post! QT wouldn't be where it is without the income it made licensing software, but at the same time, it couldn't dominate because of the license fees. I think Nokia has the kind of deep pockets to really put QT development on track. I think development will accelerate. Of course, I made my bet, and chose QT 4.5 for my company's next product, so now I have a vested interest in QT winning. Further, I'm learning QT, which I feel is about as hard as learning a foreign language (that is, to lear

                    • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:4, Insightful)

                      by berj ( 754323 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @12:01PM (#29252451)

                      I looked at Qt for internal software development at my company. In the end we chose WxWidgets. It was a pain in the ass for years.. but we did it because I wasn't interested in feeding Trolltech's cockamamie pricing scheme. One license per (named) developer per platform? Can only change developers once every 6 months? Ridiculous. We employ co-op programmers who come and go every 4 months. Simply not workable.

                      I asked more than once for them to sell the product as a package.. a site license or something pro-rated based on the number of developers (1-5, 5-10, whatever).. I also asked them to simply offer a paid yearly support contract which I would gladly buy since our biggest complaint with Wx was the lack of support. No across the board from Trolltech.

                      So.. we found an alternative.. a free one, as it happens.. but money wasn't the issue.

                      For the kind of small-scale internal commercial development we do Trolltech's business model was not workable.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward

            The problem with PyQt was that as it was the only python binding, you had no choice but to pay to riverbank. Considering that they don't own Qt themselves, they got a slight "monopoly"/gatekeeper position on other people's code.

            Also, PyQt was not all *that* open source, you couldn't fork it because they only release the generated code.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Writing good wrappers isn't trivial. If what they did was trivial, someone would come along, redo it, and put them out of business. Turns out that, for a long time, their work was worth paying for. It took a company as big as Nokia, with a vested interest, to decide it was better for them to do it themselves.

              It's not like you NEED PyQT to use QT.

          • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Jurily ( 900488 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {yliruj}> on Sunday August 30, 2009 @04:41AM (#29250241)

            I simply think it's unfair to make Riverbank look like the bad guys and Nokia the saviours.

            Nobody wants to make Riverbank look bad. However, Nokia is doing something bigger now: they're gathering all the little pieces you previously needed to find yourself (MinGW, Qt, an IDE, and now PyQT), bundling them up, and releasing them as one package. Open Source GUI programming on Windows has literally never been easier.

            My next phone is going to be a Nokia. They deserve it.

            • My next phone is going to be a Nokia. They deserve it.

              My current phone is a Nokia (E71), and it's bloody annoying. What they deserve is a kick up the arse.

          • I know the terms of the GPL and LGPL, thank you. I simply think it's unfair to make Riverbank look like the bad guys and Nokia the saviours.

            Well, Trolltech insisted on not LGPL'ing their code, and therefore, requiring a commercial license to deliver Qt applications. This was very inconvenient for small business and independent developers, who had to resort to using other toolkits like wxWidgets (eew) or GTK (double eew). Do you know how painful it is to write GUI applications with GTK?

            Nokia ARE heroes by allowing us to use Qt instead of GTK for proprietary applications (we have to pay the bills, youknow). Riverbank is becoming an obstacle to Py

            • "Do you know how painful it is to write GUI applications with GTK?"

              It seems not painful enough to make paying Troll Tech's fee (which was not excesive) worth it.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by lokpest ( 1136949 )

          Not if you want to write commercial software on top of it...

          s/commercial/proprietary (or non-free)

          The GPL is a commercial license. It clearly permits the licensed software to be sold.

        • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:4, Informative)

          by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @05:25AM (#29250361)

          "Not if you want to write commercial software on top of it, which is what Nokia wants to enable. Just as they did with releasing Qt under the LGPL."

          Bullshit. PyQT also has a commercial license. [riverbankcomputing.co.uk] You're just being a freeloading leech right now.

          • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:5, Insightful)

            by cowbutt ( 21077 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @05:55AM (#29250453) Journal

            PyQT also has a commercial license. You're just being a freeloading leech right now.

            The availability of commercial licenses for PyQt show that Riverbank has no philosophical objection to people writing and distributing GPL-incompatible code that uses it, but they'd like some money for that use (which is fair enough; they're the authors after all).

            Now, Nokia seems to be standardising on Maemo/Qt for their future phones, and part of that is that they'd like to build a viable application marketplace for their phones, a la the iPhone. Keeping it free (gratis) to develop for their platform will encourage developers, which suits their goals. Presumably after asking nicely, they also offered Riverbank some cash or equivalent, at least equal to the costs they eventually incurred in developing PySide. Presumably Riverbank didn't think that was enough, and decline (which is still their perogative).

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Jurily ( 900488 )

            You're just being a freeloading leech right now.

            Dude, they're bindings from one third-party platform to another. How is it leeching to suggest that a license fully compatible with both of these is a good thing?

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              It's leeching because apparently you want to make money off someone else's work without ever having to pay him. After reading your post it's painfully obvious that you only care about it being gratis, not about it being open source.

              • "It's leeching because apparently you want to make money off someone else's work without ever having to pay him."

                By that argument anyone who has ever sold a commercial Windows program leeched from Microsoft because their software only works if the underlying Windows calls are available. Either you haven't thought this out very well, or you don't understand the situation. Either way you are phenomenally far off base.

                • How's that the same thing? Assuming the developer didn't pirate Windows, he paid for it. The situation I'm talking about is like a baker wanting to sell bread without paying the flour supplier.

                  • "How's that the same thing? Assuming the developer didn't pirate Windows, he paid for it."

                    Who cares if the developer even had a copy of Windows? Maybe he developed it cross platform on Linux, and it runs on Windows also. The issue has absolutely nothing to do with the tools the developer used, and everything to do with deployment. No offense, but you don't understand this issue at all.

                    • My point wasn't about possible deployment issues to users. I'm criticizing his attitude of wanting to be able to profit off someone else's work without allowing that someone to profit off it as well. It's like a baker wanting to sell bread without paying his flour supplier.

                    • "My point wasn't about possible deployment issues to users."

                      Right. I already stated that you have no idea what you are talking about, and make no valid point. Stop pulling out the "bake bread but don't pay for the flour" analogy, because it doesn't even remotely fit into the situation. In essence, you have openly admitted that you are not concerned with the issue, nor do you intend to educate yourself enough to speak intelligently about it. I get it. Thanks. No need to keep driving the "point" home ..

              • It's leeching because apparently you want to make money off someone else's work without ever having to pay him.

                What's wrong with that? Nokia is releasing Python bindings under the LGPL in an effort to build market share for other products. It's a loss leader, like milk sold below cost at a supermarket.

                Do you think that people who go to the store and buy cheap milk are leeches, too?

            • Ah, the old open-source vs commercial flame-war. I write both. I'm very happy the Python QT bindings will be LGPL. That way, I can continue to contribute to the open-source community without having to learn two different GUI toolkits - one for open-source work, and one for commercial work. Do you know what a PITA it is to explain to management we need to negotiate a software license for a mysterious language like Python's mysterious QT binding library? Unless it costs under $1K, I have to explain that

          • Re:Kudos to Nokia (Score:5, Interesting)

            by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @08:32AM (#29251049) Homepage Journal

            Full disclosure:
            At work, I have a PyQT commercial license. I've had to look into the licensing issues around Qt and PyQt. The following is based upon my reading of the various licences and issues. I am an engineer, not an IP lawyer, and even were I a lawyer, I am not your lawyer - so do your own research.

            I am all for supporting companies like Riverbend who offer both GPL and proprietary licenses.

            However, there is a complication that Nokia was trying to address here. Whatever license you are using for PyQT you must also be using for Qt, due to the way they are linked.

            Now, with Riverbend, the only licenses they offer are GPL and proprietary. That means that if I want to release a proprietary application using PyQt, I must use the proprietary PyQt. However, that means that I now must use the proprietary license for Qt as well. But that now means I have to buy the developer licenses for my team from Nokia - again, not a big deal from an initial monetary outlay.

            Now, for my application I cannot use the GPL license because parts of my application are licensed from other people who don't want to GPL their code - it sucks, and I'd rather not deal with it, but when you are in the RF communications business and you have to support CDMA, you HAVE to do business with Qualcomm, and they will NOT change their minds.

            So when I ship my app as a Windows or GNU/Linux application, I cannot use the GPL. Now, just considering Qt, I can use the LGPL - the library is dynamically linked against my code, the user can replace the library, all is right with the world.

            Except that I cannot use the LGPL for Qt and use PyQt, as PyQt does not support LGPL. So, in case you cannot draw the Venn diagram for yourself, I am left with using the proprietary license for both Qt and PyQt. Now, even though the licensing terms are pretty generous, I still have to track all the licensed code I ship - so you just added a bunch of cost to my accounting of program. This gets even worse when the program is freely available (remember, you can be free and not be Free).

            I had contacted Riverbend when Nokia announced the LGPL'ing of Qt, and at that time they said they were considering it. Obviously, they decided they couldn't do it and remain viable as a business - and while that sucks for me, I can certainly understand their point of view. But without the ability to use the LGPL version of Qt from Python, the utility of Qt is greatly diminished. I can understand why Nokia did what they did. Yes, it would have been nice if Nokia could have worked out a way to fund Riverbend such that Riverbend could have LGPL'ed PyQt, but evidently that couldn't happen.

        • According to the GNU FAQ, "The interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; a free software license like the GPL, based on copyright law, cannot limit what data you use the interpreter on. You can run it on any data (interpreted program), any way you like, and there are no requirements about licensing that data to anyone."

          So I do not see why it matter whether it is GPL or LGPL. I am not going to link against PyQt when I can link directly against Qt, and the viral effect of the GPL does not exten

        • by RedK ( 112790 )

          Or isn't the GPL considered open anymore?

          Not if you want to write commercial software on top of it

          That makes no sense. You're essentially saying the GPL isn't open because you can't take code licensed under it and then close it. The GPL is precisely about keeping things open. It is the most Free license out there precisely because it forces people to either play by the open source rules or go write their own.

          I bet you thought the GPL's Free was about the programmer's freedom. Sorry, it's not, it's about the code's freedom.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by gavron ( 1300111 )
        The free version is licensed under the GPL. However, if you're complying with Qt's licenses, you have to pay to get the commercial PyQt to get a similarly licensed product. See http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/license [riverbankcomputing.co.uk]. There are many open source licenses, and having a product that relies on a library have _different_ licenses than that same library unless one pays for it is not the open way.

        Cheers

        E

      • PyQt is open source. Or isn't the GPL considered open anymore?

        The GPL is too open-source, man! As a developer, I need to be able to put some locks and chains on it.

    • It was already open-source, just under a different license.

      It also looks like PySide is nearly 100% compatible [pyside.org] with PyQt, which decreases the headache people who want to switch.

    • So now mega corporations are out-sourcing open source companies to increase their properties... am i in a dream ?

      As someone who enjoys raving on about the evils of the commercialization of open source i feel i have nowhere to go now (except maybe to the shop to buy a N900 so i can hook it up top my freerunner) ...

  • by omar.sahal ( 687649 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @04:29AM (#29250197) Homepage Journal
    Don't forget to give credit where it's due.

    OpenBossa is a division of INdT, a nonprofit research institute in Brazil that was founded by Nokia and the Brazilian government. OpenBossa has close ties with Nokia and is well-known in the Maemo community

    Taken from the arstechnica [arstechnica.com] web site that also carried this story

  • Nokia & OSS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mcelrath ( 8027 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @04:31AM (#29250203) Homepage
    I'm liking this new approach of Nokia toward open source, with Maemo and Qt. It's a smart move. Python bindings will make for rapid app development. They should soon have armies of OSS developers making apps for their new phone (N900). I must be dreaming, to have both Google's Android and Maemo available on what is historically the most closed computing platform in recent history (cell phones). It seems it will be possible to install both on their new phones. I hope for lots of cross-pollenation, and an app list that puts the proprietary iCrap to shame.
  • by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @05:00AM (#29250289) Homepage

    Applications gravitate towards being perfectly open-source. He's right. They do. If there's a closed-source app, eventually someone's going to sit down and clone it to be open-source. They'll do it because they need a version that they can access the source code for, and they'll do it because they're not willing to pay the license fees, and they'll do it because, hey, we went to all this work, why not let other people use it?

    He's right.

    But the license that code gravitates towards isn't the GPL.

    The GPL is restrictive. The GPL is - in some senses - closed, rather than open. The GPL cannot be used for all purposes.

    The license code gravitates towards is the BSD license. The MIT license. The libpng/zlib license. The license that says, in brief, "Hey. Here's some code. Don't sue us. Have fun."

    Because every software package - every software package - is pushed by that same force, that force that says "I need software with specific allowances, and if I cannot find it, I will make it." And the GPL does not allow everything.

    The GPL is a fantastic, amazing license. I've licensed code under it, and I'm glad it exists.

    But it's a midpoint - not an endpoint.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by speedtux ( 1307149 )

      You're confusing the GPL and the LGPL. The LGPL is a perfectly fine license, and it happens to be what Nokia chose.

      The BSD/MIT/... license has specific problems and pitfalls relative to the LGPL; in particular, it raises the possibility of a proprietary fork. Both Apple and Microsoft have made proprietary forks of BSD/MIT-licensed projects, with arguably worse outcomes than if they had been forced to open source under the LGPL.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by salted-fry ( 1625847 )
        He's not confusing anything. This story is about Nokia rewriting a GPL library and using the LGPL for the rewrite. His comment about software becoming progressively free-er is entirely relevant.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by speedtux ( 1307149 )

          He is "confusing" it in the sense of using Nokia's GPL-to-LGPL change in order to argue that the "end point" is a BSD/MIT/Apache license. In fact, I would argue that the natural "end point" for licenses is the LGPL, not the BSD license. There are good reasons to rewrite a GPL'ed library in LGPL or Apache form (I have done that myself). But people don't usually rewrite LGPL libraries under BSD/MIT/Apache form, and if they do, there is no reason to believe that the BSD/MIT/Apache version is going to be more

    • by cowbutt ( 21077 )

      I disagree, I think applications gravitate to the GPL license since it means that any distributed improvements are available to all, which reduces the likelihood of private forks. This comes at the possible cost of discouraging some improvements altogether (i.e. from people who want - for sake of business model or ego - to have their improvements exclusive to their fork).

      Now, canoncial implementations of standards such as file formats and network protocols probably do gravitate to BSD or similar, since this

      • by Jonner ( 189691 )

        That's absolutely right. There's not one "best" license. The GPL, LGPL and an MIT/BSD style license cover the main spectrum of Free/Open Source needs and there are many examples of successful projects using each. However, I think most other licenses are unnecessary, so hopefully the gravitation is toward one of those three options.

    • by petrus4 ( 213815 )

      Thank Kali that the parent is modded +5, Insightful, as it richly deserves to be.

      There are times when I still fear that Stallman's legion of cultists have completely overrun Slashdot. It is extremely heartening to occasionally see indications that that is not the case.

    • But it's a midpoint - not an endpoint.

      That's an incredibly simplistic and unimaginative view of the situation. You're assuming that commercial software will always reign supreme, but that is a bad assumption. The evidence points overwhelmingly to the contrary. Linux is still GPL, and still gaining market share faster than anyone. The GPL is for those who play well with others. Over time, what they can produce is superior, not least because the license permits total code re-use! You don't have to throw away big hunks of code unless they are infe

    • I don't really see that this is the case. Just because some software (in this case, Qt and Python Qt bindings) have gravitated towards LGPL from GPL, doesn't mean that you can infer that eventually they will gravitate to BSD. What about what happened to Wine? Wine gravitated from MIT to LGPL, because of concerns about proprietary forks not giving anything back. Could it not be that for many cases, LGPL is a perfectly fine licence for software libraries, and that there is no great pressure for a BSD alternat
    • by jchandra ( 15040 )

      I don't think you got this right, PyQt is already available GPL licensed, and that is not acceptable for Nokia, so they moved to LGPL.

      The important thing here is that, if a company wants to promote any infrastructure component, GPL is a horrible license to do that. If you release a library of even a device driver as GPL, you are imposing a very strict condition on your customers, that they have to be GPL too.

      This is no way acceptable for most people, and that is why LGPL or BSD licensing is attractive in

  • They couldn't arrive at an agreement with the other party. They tried to do it the easy way and it just didn't work out. But they didn't give up either -- they decided to do it themselves AND to contribute back to the OSS community in the process. I admire the do it yourself attitude as it reflects back to a time when software wasn't "a product" but a mean to solving a problem.

  • multiplatform? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jaclu ( 66513 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @05:24AM (#29250359)

    Also worth to mention is that this implementation is linux only. Isnt on of the main purposes with languages like python/perl/java that they should be platform neutral?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by summner ( 735993 )
      umm it's open source. You want it to be better ? Contribute ! :]
      Nokia is probably focusing right now on the Linux implementation because they want to use it in Linux.
      So you know, implementations doesn't just happen by them selves, they need man-hours. So Man-Up and give it to them. But don't whine.
      • by jaclu ( 66513 )

        Sorry if my post came out as a whine, wasnt my intention.
        Of course anybody could do it in therory, but I'm not that guy.

        My intention wasnt to slam the initiative, just a comment that so far its linux only, since that isnt the platform Im using, it just means that I have to wait a while until I can port my stuff to the Maemo platform.

        • Sorry if my post came out as a whine, wasnt my intention.
          Of course anybody could do it in therory, but I'm not that guy.

          My intention wasnt to slam the initiative, just a comment that so far its linux only, since that isnt the platform Im using, it just means that I have to wait a while until I can port my stuff to the Maemo platform.

          You don't have to wait. You can use PyQt on all platforms already, and can switch to PySide when time is right. They are API compatible.

  • This is a very good thing for Maya scripters.

    Maya introduced python support a while ago, but the Maya binding was just the same as MEL (Maya own script language). This isn't sooo bad, except when it comes to user interfaces, where it sucks very badly. I'm sorry, it does. Most people have been moving from MEL to python, and this makes the MEL interface stuff more of a sticking point because it looks even worse from a python perspective.

    In a gernal effort of the Maya development team to make the Maya code
  • Size and speed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by paugq ( 443696 ) <pgquiles&elpauer,org> on Sunday August 30, 2009 @07:23AM (#29250741) Homepage

    This is what Richard Dale (the main author of SMOKE and the Ruby and C# bindings for Qt and KDE, and C, Objective C and Java bindings in the past, to) said [kdenews.org] about PySide:

    Currently the total size of the PySide libs for all the Qt modueles is 30 Mb. For just QtCore and QtGui they are 22.5 Mb. These are really high figures, and about twice the size of the existing PyQt libs. They are five or six (!) times larger than the Smoke libraries, which weigh in at just over 5 Mb for all the Qt modules. The Smoke libraries can be used by Ruby, C#, Perl, Common Lisp and PHP, not just a single language too. The large size is caused by the heavy use of C++ templates in Boost::Python.

    Qt alone has about 500 classes, whereas the current KDE bindings like Python and Ruby wrap over 1500 classes, which would give a combined shared library size of 90 Mb or so assuming the same size per class as Qt. So as PySide stands, I would personally consider that these figures are just too high.

    There is a hack in the generate code of doing '#define protected public', to allow protected methods to be called. This certainly won't work on Windows. Fixing it properly will require extra code to be generated to subclass each class with protected methods, and add a public method that calls a corresponding method in the class to be wrapped. This will add some extra code obviously.

    It looks like PySide are huge (3x the size of PyQt and 6x the size of SMOKE-generated bindings!) and there is very little improvement they can do if they keep on using Boost::Python to generate PySide.

    Given that PyQt costs only £350 (roughly 400 EUR) with full support and is much lighter and mature, I can't see why I would use PySide (unless Nokia gives me full, free, support with my commercial C++ license, of course, which I think they won't be doing because they required you to buy a 1000 EUR separate license for Qt Jambi -the Java bindings- )

    • Re:Size and speed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by chrb ( 1083577 ) on Sunday August 30, 2009 @09:19AM (#29251313)

      I can't see why I would use PySide

      Because you won't have a choice if you want to develop for Nokia phones. Nokia will ship PySide as part of the base install and it will be used by their Maemo GUI. Nokia isn't interested in competing with PyQt for that £350 of developer cash - they're interested in shipping millions of QT based Maemo phones with an app store that supports Python applications.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 )

      Given that PyQt costs only ã350 (roughly 400 EUR) with full support and is much lighter and mature, I can't see why I would use PySide

      For me, it's partly philosophical. Python is available under a BSD-like license. Qt is available under the LGPL. However, to make Python talk to Qt, you currently have to add the extra restrictions of the GPL. Not to give short shrift to Riverbank, but I thought it was pretty silly that the most restrictive license in that chain was in the glue that connected the more permissive components.

      If PySide makes it to Windows soon, this will probably be my company's GUI development platform. I'd always prefer

    • Re:Size and speed (Score:5, Informative)

      by mairas ( 102089 ) <mairas@iki.fi> on Sunday August 30, 2009 @11:04AM (#29251973) Homepage

      Hi,

      I'm the Nokia guy responsible for the project.

      It looks like PySide are huge (3x the size of PyQt and 6x the size of SMOKE-generated bindings!) and there is very little improvement they can do if they keep on using Boost::Python to generate PySide.

      You're right: the current size of PySide is an issue, especially if you consider mobile environments such as Maemo, let alone the S60 platform. However, that's also why we are working on Shiboken, an alternate binding component which would create CPython extensions directly instead of using Boost.Python as an intermediate layer. Shiboken is still in its infancy, but we expect we'll be able to solve the size issues for once and all, while retaining full Python-level compatibility with the current bindings.

      Unfortunately, there's not much info on this yet, but check our repo for the source code: qt.gitorius.org/pyside [gitorious.org].

  • Wait, so does that mean there are no SWIG bindings for Qt? I just sort of assumed that for a big popular library like Qt, someone would have done a SWIG binding by now, simultaneously making it available in a whole bunch of languages..

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