Hi guys,

what are your opinions on development for N900 vs iPhone?

For iPhone i get XCode plus SDK for $99 - and I can deliver commercial applications. XCode is quite good at using / designing great looking visual applications. The applications you make with XCode are very easy to convert to OSX platform - and not to bad to "keep" maintaining for multiple platforms.

But with N900 as a developer - I would love to use QT - but QT for commercial applications is charged at $3000,- for a single platform.

What other options are there for commercial application development?

Should Nokia do like Apple and make a low price QT ($99) for commercial application development for handsets? (Maemo/Symbian)? I think that would remove the entry barrier quite a lot - and it would make sure a lot more commercial applications would hit the platforms.

I do know Nokia paid a lot for Trolltech - but since the reason was an increased penetration towards the mobile software market - I think the strategy of a $99,- QT commercial package would make people NOT think twice before developing with QT. And if a QT designer then wants to develop for Win/Linux/whatever no mobile platform - then they could fork over the $3000,-

what do you think? or am I just being stupid and not reading the QT license documents correctly?

Good point. That's a high price. But XCode only addresses 17% of all smartphones and about 10% of desktops/servers, afaik. Qt addresses 60% of smartphones and 100% of desktop/servers. so you get a 300% increase in mobile audience, and a whopping 1000% increase for desktop class OS support.

Qt toolkit and developer tools are all available free of charge under the LGPL, which allows you to develop commercial / proprietary applications.

There are still few reasons to go for a Qt commercial license, none of them relevant to Maemo application developers, and I would say not relevant to any application developer.

side note: on iPhone there are tons of 'engines' charge you more than $1000 if you want to write high class software (esp games).

but as far as I read it - as soon as you link it into your application - then you need to distribute your source code?

But if the package downloads a QT package separate and your software uses that library your are safe?

I would actually prefer to pay $99 for a do it all license - without needing to worry if my developers steps on some toes on how they do the development. If it is easier to distribute the application with the linked library - then that should be the default.

It is $3000 for ONE platform - not all of them...

only if distributed as a single binary.

if the Qt lib is in a seperate dll/lib/whatever, its ok, thanks to the Lesser part of the LGPL...

tho i could have sworn that the LGPL version was only for non-commercial use...

another thing to consider is that unless one is a mac user already, xcode requires a mac to run on...

See the first paragraph of http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

I'm not a lawyer but basically:

The Qt commercial license is basically useful in the case that you make changes to Qt libraries and don't want to distribute them, or that you link to them statically and don't want to provide source of everything.

In a Maemo or Symbian environment the Qt libraries are there available for you, use the APIs available at will, put the license you wish to your software and off you go. This is the greatness of the LGPL in mixed free/commercial environments.

http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2009/11/30/...sing-decision/