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People have been making the argument that QT or Wx should be the default for a while, the problem is and remains A: licensing or B: complexity of shipping "batteries included" distributions. For A, PyQT's license might surprise you: [1]. Python can not distribute this with the rest of the essentially-BSD-licensed Python distribution. For B, for instance, none of the linux distributions particularly want "Python", which is often a base requirement, to pull in either of Wx or QT, both of which are quite sizable, and require their own stack of other things to come piling in too.

It's sad, but I'm not sure how to resolve the problem, and nobody else has been either in the past 10 years.

[1]: http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/license



The solution is to stop shipping with batteries included and let people install via pip. Python could have an official opinion on what the best libraries are (might not be such a bad idea, actually), but they shouldn't bundle them unless they're very, very stable, tested and almost unchanging.

Requests might make a good addition to the standard library at some point. PyQT definitely shouldn't though.


There's a new alternative to pyqt, though its name escapes me now.


PySide (thanks lambda) appears to be LGPL; "better" than PyQT, but still not shippable in the core Python distro without changing the license of the core distro.

I think that's as "good" as a QT binding can be, too; QT itself is LPGL (or commercial license).


PySide, though PyQt still has certain advantages if you can live with the licensing (which is either GPLv3 or a £350 per developer commercial license).




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