GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 10:17 PM, ant <shimbo at uklinux.net> wrote:
> I don't know whether this thread is going backwards, forwards or
> sideways. But a lot of useful information is creeping out of the
> woodwork.
>
> I like the points about backwards compatibility. Presumably that
> reason alone is enough to keep Tkinter in the standard library for a
> long while.
> But the point has also been made that there are several things there
> that are - if not duplicates - at least alternatives.
>
> So would it be so awful to have Tkinter and GUI2 (whatever it is) in
> the stdlib, assuming that both had equivalent functionality? That
> would be the way to give people the choice.
> But it does imply that GUI2 is not too huge, to prevent excessive
> bloat (is that a tautology?).
> Other interesting comments: licencing. Can anyone give a concise
> summary of whether the 'major' GUIs have any insuperable licencing
> problems that would rule them out anyway? Programming is hard enough
> without lawyers.

PyQT is dual-licensed GPL and commercial, so it can't be included.
PyGTK is under the LGPL which could cause some problems as well (which
would rule out PyGUI- the user shouldn't have to install a 3rd party
Python module to use a standard library module). wxPython is under a
modified LGPL. While the wxWidgets license is more permissive than the
LGPL, I still don't think it can be included.