[PySide] PySide Digest, Vol 14, Issue 18

[todd rme]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Sergio Pulgarín <serpulga at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi, I might be late to the discussion here, but I would like to
> share my thoughts anyways.
> It is no secret that PySide and PyQt4 are highly compatible
> with each other; with a few modifications you can port back
> and forth easly, and even create cross-compatible sources.
> So basically, at a end user level, there are no (or a few) arguments
> to chose one or the other. The real advantage the PySide has over
> PyQt4 are the licensing options. PySide has the LGPL option, while
> PyQt4 only GPL, last time I checked. I think this alone, makes people
> want to use/port to PySide.

That only helps if you are writing a closed-source application.
Anyone who want to create an open-source end-user application is not
going to care.  They are going to base it on things like features,
support, how active the community is, what is being used by other
projects, and what middle-level python modules they want to use
support.  For these people, PyQt4 is currently the better choice on
all fronts.  And these people are exactly the ones who are most likely
to want to get involved in and contribute back to pyside if they use
it.

If pyside is going to succeed, it will have to do so based on
something other than license alone.  Community, support, and what is
being used by other projects is a chicken-and-egg problem, pyside will
not have these until it gains some momentum.  And it will be hard to
get middle-level toolkits to work with pyside exclusively precisely
because it is not much harder than supporting both pyqt4 and pyside at
the same time, and without much user interest there is no reason to
support pyside at all.

So if pyside is going to get ahead it I think it needs to have some
sort of compelling features that are lacked by PyQt4.  I think that is
the only way open-source projects are going to use it.