Re: gEDA: SPICE GUI

[Bill Cox <bill@viasic.com>]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 03:05, MSWaters wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> According to the Qt Web site it is free for the development of free software 
> which is good. Even so I'm a little uneasy trusting my fate into the hands of 
> a commercial organisation since of necessity their basic goal in life must be 
> to make money. My basic goal here is write software, I'd rather aline myself 
> with an organisation with this same goal.

You're right...  Qt is GPL'd, just like most of our code.  But, in
addition, they let commercial companies use it for a fee.  That seems
reasonable to me.  In comparison, wxWidgets is basically free for use
either in commercial software or GPL'd software.

> The port of wxWidgets I'm using to develop gspiceui is based on GTK+. How they 
> do it for M$Windows or MAC I don't know.
> 
> Mike

I believe they've done direct implementations of wxWidgets to the basic
primitives available on each platform.  This is good for speed, but
probably causes some inconsistencies across platforms.

It seems to me that the most popular GUI choices are:

- GTK (1.0 or 2.0)
- Qt
- wxWidgets

There seem to be three main criteria for choosing:

- Usability
- Licensing
- Long-term outlook

I've used GTK enough to know that I'm not a fan.  I much prefer the
functionality MFC from Microsoft.  I haven't used Qt or wxWidgets, but
it would be great to hear from someone who's used both.

Of these, wxWidgets seems to have the least restrictive license (you can
sell binary code derived from their source), followed by GTK (GNU
Library license), and Qt (straight GPL).

I feel the Qt restriction is significant.  It's likely that some of the
future open-source EDA efforts will be available both as GPL'd source
and as commercial products.  Thus, it hurts the open-source EDA effort
to standardize on a pure GPL GUI toolkit.

As for long-term outlook, GTK is clearly here to stay, and Qt has a long
history and is supported by a real company.  It sounds like wxWidgets
almost died in the 90's but then came back to life.  It's going strong
now, and gaining momentum.  IMO, picking a winner is key.  Otherwise, we
could all be maintaining and porting an obscure GUI toolkit for years.

Bill